Chapter 01 · Where the wiring came from
School kept telling me what I wasn’t. So I went looking for what I was.
Before the résumé made any sense, there was a Marwari kid, a courier bag, and a modem that changed everything.
Both my parents built their own things. My father is a real-estate builder with a PhD in chemicals; my mother is a criminal lawyer who practises at the Bombay High Court. In a family that academically strong, it was almost funny that their son wasn’t. School was a daily reminder of the gap. So during vacations I started interning with my father for ₹100 — couriering cheques to banks, typing lease documents, making quotations in Word. It was my way of getting some independence from constantly being told I wasn’t good at things.
What I got instead was a front-row seat to how a Marwari business actually runs — and the discovery that I enjoyed work in a way I never enjoyed class. That’s the first thing worth noticing about me: I didn’t rebel against effort. I rebelled against effort that felt pointless.
Then the internet arrived — a chunky modem, blinking lights, a reward for passing the 10th. To everyone else in the house it was a utility. To me it was a portal. Casual browsing turned into hours on tech blogs and design forums. The day I found Photoshop felt like stumbling on a superpower. I wasn’t good at it, and it didn’t matter; I kept going until pixels moved the way I wanted. For the first time I felt in control in a way school never allowed.
Design became my way of making sense of the world — the first language I was actually fluent in.Early Years
Around the same time I started a blog — messy, full of typos, entirely mine — about the marketing campaigns I saw around me: the good, the confusing, the wildly ambitious. I didn’t realise I was teaching myself how brands communicate. I was just curious. Even my failures felt like small steps forward.
That’s the wiring the rest of this story runs on: an outsider’s suspicion of inherited verdicts, a bias toward making things over memorising them, and a habit of studying brands in the wild before anyone was paying me to. What it set up was simple — the moment I noticed that the shops around me were invisible for want of a brand, I already had the tools, and the nerve, to do something about it.
How he thinks
- His origin instinct isn’t ‘I question authority’ — it’s narrower: he distrusts verdicts that measure one thing and call it the whole.
- He learns by making, not memorising — which is why design, not a classroom, became his first fluency.
- He was studying how brands communicate for fun, years before it was a job. The curiosity predates the career.