I was born in Bihar, and schooling took me across Bihar, Odisha, and Tamil Nadu before an engineering degree in Electronics & Instrumentation. I started my career at Bank of America, then stepped away for three years to prepare for the UPSC civil services exam — wrote the Mains three times, never quite crossed the line. Rejoined what's now PS afterward, and it's been my professional base for seven-plus years since.
Career took me through Hyderabad, Gurgaon, Delhi, Noida, and eventually to a fully remote setup. Alongside the day job, I'm founder and CTO of Valensiq AI Healthtech, building AI-powered cancer risk screening tools out of India and the UK — more on that on the Build page.
The other constant is travel — solo, mostly off the obvious route. Fifteen countries so far, from Zambia to Uzbekistan. The trip I still think about most isn't the biggest one — it's Beijing in the winter of 2016, where a friend I'd made years earlier through a university exchange programme picked me up at the airport, fed me at table after table, and drove me around a city I'd never have found my way through alone. I'm vegetarian, I run (marathons when the route allows it), and I document most of it on the Travel pages — partly for myself, partly because the "what did this actually cost and how did it actually go" version of travel writing barely exists.
2026 so far has been almost entirely travel — Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan for an extended Central Asia stretch, plus a domestic run through Ujjain, Mumbai, Ellora, Trimbakeshwar, and Grishneshwar, and a Lakshadweep cruise with Cordelia.
This site is where the two halves — builder and wanderer — actually meet. If you're here for one and not the other, the Journal and Stories pages are the closest thing to a bridge between them; the Guidance section is where I try to turn some of what I've been through — UPSC prep, the career pivot, starting Valensiq from nothing — into something more useful than a story.
What I'm actually chasing
Not "getting better at coding" in the abstract — specifically, getting to the point where I can build the parts of Valensiq myself instead of describing them to someone else and hoping the gap doesn't show. That, plus enough financial independence that travel stops being something I schedule around a day job and starts being something I just... do. Neither is close to done. Both are the actual plan, not a placeholder for one.