The shorter version
I'm a Software Engineer at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and content creator in Bangalore, India, with a passion for human experience design. I thrive on developing innovative product ideas that create a positive impact and telling stories about the culture, places, and people of India.
Now, the complete story
I was born on a sunny morning in July of 2001 in Bangalore. I grew up listening to stories from my grandparents about the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, or how my father had to cross a few valleys to attend school.
Growing up, I got the label of being the talkative one, the one telling stories.
In 2015, I completed my schooling in Sudarshan Vidya Mandir. My second home.
Made great friends and participated in every annual day dance performance. It was during school that my first poem was published in the TOI School Edition.
This gave me the confidence to start writing blogs on WordPress and there is no looking back!
I was a class leader during the 9th and 10th. I definitely picked up a thing or two about people ( or teens ) management over the two years.
In 10th grade, thanks to my parent's bribe of a new camera, I quickly went from someone scoring 80s in exams to securing the second rank in my batch.
Studied 11th and 12th grade at Christ Junior College. My world opened up. I was a part of the college choir and learnt so much about people from different communities in class and around. There was some event happening almost once every week, and it was so much fun.
Since I loved studying ( I am a nerd ), I was able to do quite well in academics too.
In 2019, I started my BTech in Computer Science and Engineering at PES University.
In my first year, I won second place in a product innovation competition, which set the stage for the rest of my engineering journey.
Took part in the Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which introduced me to the world of building businesses around products. We built PlannAR, a real-time event design application, which failed, but in hindsight was a great lesson in product management.
The course Human Computer Interaction brought out my passion for Human-Centric Design and Development. In my final year, I took up the Teaching Assistant role in the same subject.
I co-founded Plexus, an alumni networking club in the CSE department.
Since I was in the "COVID" batch, I spent the time at home creating content and learning skills for web development and tools in UX design.
In 2022, I travelled alone in a flight for the first time during my summer internship at GrowthPal Technologies for a week-long on-site sync up with the engineering team. Left inspired to contribute to the growing technologies and start-ups in India, and hoped to find great Misal Pavs in Bangalore.
In 2023, I joined Hewlett-Packard Enterprise as a Software Engineer in the storage group. Designed and developed internal tools, met great engineers, learnt to work across time zones, found my voice in meetings, learnt how to send well-composed emails, how to collaborate, empathise, how to use Jira, Confluence, and learnt how much storytelling matters even in tech.
Made great friends and travelled to 8 states in India and understood what unity in diversity truly means.
In 2024, I won the WTF for Content Creators Kit by Nikhil Kamath thanks to my Instagram video on "What is it about Bangalore that makes it so special?"
This instilled faith in me to continue doing what I do, telling great stories while finding a way to make an impact in tech.