As a child I wanted to become a soldier. I grew up watching and listening stories of heroes who exemplified extra-ordinary courage. It incurred in me a special feeling about my country and its people. I just dreamed becoming a hero. Someone on whom people can rely, someone who comforts, someone who rescues and someone who sacrifices.

Although I couldnt join the Indian armed forces, the insatiable thirst of doing something for the people and for the country did not fade away. Reading the newspaper became, over time, a natural extension of this. Not for headlines alone, but for the connective tissue — how a local story opens into a national question, how a policy traces back to a philosophy, how the lives of ordinary people in this country hold more complexity than most analyses give them credit for. I read to stay close to the world, and to the people in it. This is when I realized the importance of engineering and how it solves issues of the people and society. I got determined to use it to develop products/apps/systems that help people.

Cooking, too, fits somewhere in all of this. The process is calm, deliberate — ingredients, timing, instinct, patience. It asks the same thing every other pursuit has asked of me: observe first, then act. I don’t think of myself as someone defined by a single discipline or skill. What holds it all together is something simpler — a way of paying attention. To systems, to stories, to people, to this country. And then, slowly, building something from what I’ve understood.