This is my gift,
my cursecurse..

As a kid, it was toys, RC cars, and anything with a motor inside, and I built something new with it. Most kids do that. But what really got me was this feeling of understanding something by breaking it, even when it was working perfectly fine. I wanted to see what was possible if I did it my own way instead. That became a pattern in my life, not just with toys.

I started coding when I was 10 or 11 years old. Around then I got hooked on the idea of machines that think, and robots specifically.

At 14 I had built what I proudly called a robot. It had a head, two arms, and could wave back and say hello using a simple prediction model. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.

(still the coolest thing, honestly)

Around that time I also figured out I did not want to keep asking my parents for money, so I started freelancing with the tech skills I had. I still remember calling a local resort in my town offering to build them a website, and they hung up on me the moment they realised I was a kid. Eventually I got past that and started getting international and Indian clients through freelancing.

I kept working on my robot alongside all this. When GPT's first model, text-davinci, came out, I emailed them and got 15 dollars in API credits to try it. I wanted to put that inside my robot so it could do more than just wave, so it could actually do physical tasks and make a person feel something, like a WOW or just happiness.

I built a 17 DOF humanoid robot that could see and understand a person, talk with them, and do physical interactions. That project got me the Best Industrial Award from Bharat Electronics India, first place at the Indian Science Fair, and the Youngest Innovator Award from the Government, all while I was still going through my 10th board exams.

My parents were not happy that I was not focusing on school, but I managed to convince them it was okay. I kept freelancing and taking on projects, and right after my exams I got a job offer from a company. It was a pretty good offer, and it let me work whenever I wanted, which is one of the nice things about tech. So I joined them while still in 11th and 12th grade.

I barely went to class. Instead I was getting invited to tech events and programs outside my hometown, and each time I went, I realised there was a whole world outside that made everything I knew feel small.

That is the pattern again. I cannot stay in something once it starts feeling like a flow with nothing left to break. After 12th grade I told my parents I was not going to college. It took a lot of convincing, and I had mentors talk to them on my behalf. They eventually accepted it, partly because I already had a job that paid well.

I moved out of my hometown on my own to Kochi, the tech hub of my state. There I found TinkerHub, one of the best maker communities in India. It will always have a special place in me. They helped me with projects, introduced me to people who thought like me, and helped me grow.

But eventually the same feeling came back. I got comfortable. Nothing new was happening. I felt like I had hit a limit and there was nothing left to break there.

Soo yeah, I paused it and moved again.. and this time with nothing. Quit my job, moved completely to a different state with nothing lined up. New place, new people, new culture.

I moved to Bangalore.