Waris

As he tells it, Waris Ahluwalia was just walking down the street when fortune found him. He was in Los Angeles, wearing diamond rings of his own design, and had stepped into the high-end store Maxfield when his work caught the eye of their buyer. He was then in his late twenties. The meeting that would launch his career as a jewelry designer, and his company, House of Waris, was not the culmination of years of training in design or metalworking. This part of his story—there are many parts—smacks of that classic trope: Big shot discovers new talent and the rest is history.

How Ahluwalia went from making jewelry, to acting in films, to where he is now—working with conservationist organizations to protect elephant populations in Asia—is a winding path with an invisible compass. “...