The long way around

When I was seventeen, I cleared the entrance exam for the National Institute of Fashion Technology. It wasn’t a casual experiment. I cared deeply about visual weight, the grain of paper, texture, and how human beings interact with physical objects.

In a lower-middle-class Indian household, however, you do not study textile design or fine art when survival is still an active equation. You study engineering. You take the path with the solid concrete floor, so that if you fall, nobody back home goes hungry.

I filed the admission letter away in a drawer and went to engineering school. I told myself it was a temporary postponement.

I studied petroleum engineering in Pune. I never stopped noticing the things everyone else seemed to walk past: the weight of a menu card in a café, the kerning of a street sign, the acoustic silence inside a well-proportioned room. At nine years old I refused to write with just any ballpoint pen. It had to feel balanced in the fingers.

For the next several years I immersed myself in high-leverage systems. I started in data analytics at an energy company in Bangalore, moved to Hyderabad, and started a generative AI function inside an investment firm. I learned how much of a company’s operations can be automated through elegant software. I discovered that engineering isn’t the opposite of art. It is art under strict physical constraints.

Yet one Saturday at 10:47 AM, in my apartment, I looked at my desk. Dual monitors, terminal windows, Slack notifications. Everything was optimized for throughput and nothing was tactile. The real question arrived while I was making coffee slowly: is this growth? At the end of this year, will the person doing all this living recognize himself in the life?

I am not a pure engineer, and I am not a detached gallery artist. I am someone living the specific tension of modern ambition in India: carrying enterprise technical leverage by day, obsessing over paper weight and texture by night, and refusing to live an uncurated life.

That is why this site exists. It is a ledger of the friction between the engineer who designs high-leverage software and the human being who refuses to live a careless life.