I was born in India to a family that was neither poor nor wealthy, in a city that was neither remarkable nor forgettable. I went to school like everyone else, studied what was assigned, and spent most of my teenage years in pleasant, unremarkable mediocrity. I wasn't the kid who built robots or aced olympiads. I was the kid who daydreamed during class and then panicked before exams.
Through twelfth grade, by any honest measure — average. Average grades. Average ambition. Average expectations for what came next.
It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.
I read The Alchemist for the first time in a single afternoon in my first year of college. I don't think I fully understood it. But something in it reached me — this idea that the treasure isn't the destination, it's the fact that you believed there was one worth chasing. That belief, it turned out, was enough to start moving.
I got into a private engineering college. Not the top-ranked one. Not the one I'd told people I was aiming for. The kind of admission that arrives feeling like a consolation prize, wrapped in an envelope you open alone.
I remember sitting in the orientation hall on the first day, looking around at my classmates, and feeling — not defeat, exactly, but something sharper. A quiet refusal. I didn't know yet what I was refusing. But I knew the story I'd been living wasn't the one I wanted to keep telling.
So I started reading. Everything. Startup memoirs, philosophy, history, economics — whatever I could get my hands on. I carried books the way some people carry anxiety: constantly, everywhere, always one page away from something that might change how I thought. Phil Knight's Shoe Dog made relentlessness feel human. Zero to One made me paranoid about thinking originally. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, read on a twelve-hour train ride that felt like twelve minutes. Harari's Sapiens, which made me feel both very small and very alive. The Stoics, who kept asking: what is this actually for?
The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.
That sentence lives rent-free in my head to this day.
What followed was the most focused period of my life. I built projects. I got involved in everything I could. I started staying up later than everyone around me — not out of discipline, but out of a genuine, almost embarrassing excitement about what was possible. I became the kind of person who has opinions about distributed databases that nobody asked for, and who sends links at 11pm with the subject line "you have to read this."
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
I had been voting, quietly, for a long time. Then came an admission letter from McGill University in Montréal — the #1 ranked university in Canada. A Master's in Computer Science. I read it three times in a row standing at the kitchen counter. It was the first concrete evidence that the story I was telling myself about who I could become might actually be true.
Here's something people don't expect: I like people more than I like computers.
I am genuinely, sometimes embarrassingly, excited about other human beings — what they're building, what they're afraid of, what they're thinking about at 2am. At university, I built a student community of 10,000+ people, ran the Google Developer Student Clubs, and started spending more time in rooms full of people than in rooms full of servers.
Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths, by telling and hearing stories about things that only exist in the imagination. This is why Homo sapiens rules the world.
In Montréal, I helped organize a tech week alongside Elantech — wrangling speakers, building schedules, talking to everyone who'd stay long enough to talk. There is a particular energy in a room full of people who are excited about building things. It's hard to describe and impossible to manufacture. I keep chasing it — every conference, every meetup, every coffee that's even slightly interesting. Communities aren't built by algorithms. They're built by people who show up and make others feel like it's worth showing up too.
I am not only a software engineer. I want to be clear about this.
I am a reader. My bedside table is a leaning tower of books — startup memoirs next to Stoic philosophy next to behavioral economics next to history. I read slowly and argue in the margins. I lend books recklessly and rarely get them back, which I've decided is a feature of the system, not a bug.
I am a writer. I write on LinkedIn — not just about technology, but about what it means to build things, about the ideas that won't leave me alone, about the gap between how we talk about careers and how careers actually feel. 28,000 people follow along. I'm still a little surprised by this. I write because thinking out loud is, for me, the only way to think at all.
I am a musician. I make music — real music, on Spotify — not as a hobby or a side project, but as another language for saying things that code can't say and words don't quite reach.
I am a filmmaker. I travel with a camera and a quiet obsession with light — how it falls through a train window at dusk, how it makes a stranger's face look like a painting, how the same street in Montréal looks completely different at 7am in January versus 7pm in July.
The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.
I believe travel is one of the few things that genuinely changes how you think — not in a clichéd Instagram way, but in the specific, uncomfortable way where you come home and realize your assumptions were much smaller than the world. I've navigated cities where I didn't speak the language and had to read faces. I've had conversations that mattered in airports I'll never return to. Each trip is a small rewriting of who I thought I was.
Underneath all of it — the code, the content, the community, the camera — is something simpler: I am curious about almost everything, and I have not yet found a way to be cured of it.
Those who have a 'why' to live can bear almost any 'how.'
My why is this: I want to spend my life building things that are useful, thinking about things that are true, and sharing both with as many people as will listen. I write when something won't leave my head. I build when I can see a thing that should exist but doesn't. I travel when I need to remember how big the world is. I make music when words run out.
The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
I've been fortunate to find, early, that the most interesting life is the one you build deliberately — not by following a script, but by staying honest about what actually lights you up and being stubborn enough to pursue it even when the script disagrees.
From average student in India to McGill. From a private college orientation hall to hosting tech weeks in Montréal. None of it was a straight line. All of it was chosen, step by step, one vote at a time.
When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
I still believe this. Not as magic, but as a description of what happens when you're clear enough about what you want that you start to notice every door that leads toward it.
If you're reading this and something in it resonates — reach out. I respond to every message. The inbox is always open.