In 1995, I convinced a few classmates to pool in for a DIY electronics kit that promised 101 projects. Everyone backed out after a week, and I ended up buying it myself. My first science project was a fire alarm for a house, made with wires, a buzzer, and a lot of imagination. It was crude, but it worked. That tiny spark taught me that curiosity, mixed with persistence, could make things come alive.
By 1997, I was assembling PCs. The sound of a system booting up for the first time was pure adrenaline. I learned what static discharge feels like and how patience is sometimes the only real tool you have. Those were the days of jumper settings, DOS prompts, and drivers that came on floppy disks.
Around 2002, I discovered mini-ITX and pico-ITX boards. Small boards with big possibilities. That opened the door to the world of embedded computing. At the same time, I was deep into Flash and ActionScript, trying to make interfaces that felt alive. It struck me that code and circuitry were two sides of the same impulse: the need to make something respond.
In 2003 and 2004, I started tinkering with Broadcom and Intel embedded boards. These were the same chips powering routers and thin clients. Around that time, the One Laptop Per Child movement made embedded systems feel like the next frontier. I tried to boot a Flash interface directly as a startup UI and discovered that one has to pay royalties for that privilege. That small frustration nudged me toward the open web. I began spending late nights with HTML, JavaScript, and a strange little language called Processing that Casey Reas and his team were working on.
Between 2005 and 2007, I fell headfirst into the world of sensors and microcontrollers. Tom Igoe’s book Making Things Talk became my manual. Arduino had just arrived, and getting one shipped to India felt like an expedition. I freelanced to pay customs duty. My desk was a mess of boards, wires, and half-finished prototypes.
Then came the Chumby. It was a soft, Wi-Fi-connected device designed by Andrew “bunnie” Huang that showed snippets from the internet. Importing it was a saga. I paid two months of salary to the Ballard Estate (Mumbai) customs office, and when it finally arrived, it was broken. I fixed it anyway. That device pulled me into the world of ambient computing, where objects quietly interacted with data. Around the same time, I was exploring Slim Devices, Sony Dash, and other early connected products. It felt like the future was whispering through these small screens.
I also got distracted by radio-controlled cars and planes, trying to make them smarter and faster. At one point, I started sketching a CubeSat concept and even pitched a few investors on launching a small satellite into low Earth orbit. They didn’t take me seriously, but that didn’t matter. The act of trying taught me what it meant to dream through hardware.
In 2008 and 2009, I decided to start a hardware company in India and spent nearly two years in Shenzhen. That city is a masterclass in speed and iteration. Factories, parts, and ideas everywhere. We built a custom smartphone and Android launcher for a major Indian telecom company. For a while, we wanted to build our own operating system, but time and money had their own plans.
Later, I returned to my old obsession with mini-ITX boards. The home theater PC scene was taking off, and I fell in love with XBMC. We built a custom OTT box for another telecom company and managed to ship it. That was my first real exit and the moment I understood how curiosity could turn into something sustainable.
By 2012, I had moved to the United States and was back to building prototypes. I made a Fitbit for grandmothers before the idea of “elder tech” became a trend. I designed a dashcam to help prevent insurance scams. Ambarella sensors were everywhere back then, powering GoPros and every major camera module. The hardware worked fine, but the market wasn’t ready. I learned how timing can matter as much as technology.
In 2015, I joined Jio, which was then redefining how India connected. I worked across hardware categories: smartphones, feature phones, smart TVs, and even AR glasses. It was a period of learning how large-scale systems are built and how hardware design can drive accessibility.
Two years later, I joined Ola. There I worked on the connected car ecosystem and helped build a three-wheeler EV from scratch. It brought together design, hardware, software, and manufacturing into one narrative.
Today, my shelves are filled with devkits, sensors, and reference boards from every stage of this journey. They remind me where each phase began and what it led to. These days, I find myself exploring the intersection of hardware and biology — the place where circuits meet cells. The tools have changed, but the feeling from that first fire alarm kit in 1995 has not. I still want to see what happens when curiosity and atoms meet halfway.