Chapter One

The Architecture of Becoming

In November 2019, during my eighth-standard year, I learned what it felt like to come last. Six schools had gathered for an inter-school science model competition, and I had arrived with a model I was genuinely proud of. I understood what I had built. I knew why it worked. I believed the idea itself was good enough to stand beside the others. Then I had to present it. My English was weak, my communication was worse, and the thoughts that seemed completely organized inside my head became tangled when I tried to turn them into sentences. I could see the idea clearly, but I could not make other people see it. When the results were announced, I had placed sixth out of six schools. There was no consolation in the number. It was simply the bottom. I went home carrying the uncomfortable realization that building something and being able to communicate it were two entirely different abilities, and I was good at one while being painfully weak at the other.

Space had already occupied a strange amount of my imagination by then. I wanted to become an aerospace engineer, a space entrepreneur, a theoretical physicist, or somehow find my way into the world of NASA. I did not have the knowledge to understand how difficult those paths would be, but I had enough curiosity to keep looking toward them. Coming last did not make me want to leave that world behind. It made the problem more specific. I had discovered a weakness, and I wanted to work on it. That evening, somewhere between disappointment and stubbornness, I decided that speaking was a skill too. I would have to build it in the same way I built everything else: badly at first, repeatedly, and with enough persistence that eventually it stopped feeling impossible.

I came from a modest family, and I learned early to work with what was available. My parents were not against my interests; they were practical. They believed marks mattered because marks opened doors to better colleges and careers, and for the world they were preparing me to enter, that was a reasonable belief. When I won something outside academics, they were happy, but there was rarely a huge celebration around it. Life moved on. At times, I wanted more recognition. I wanted the achievement to feel bigger because it felt big to me. Instead, I kept experiencing the slightly quieter version of success: do your work, acknowledge the result, and continue. Much later, I realized that this had made me less dependent on applause than I might otherwise have become.

My obsession with technology had been growing alongside my interest in space. I had watched technology change around me from one generation to another, from the phones I saw as a child to touch-screen devices and the constant appearance of something newer than what had seemed revolutionary only a few years earlier. I was fascinated by all of it. I wanted to know what these things could do, how they worked, and more importantly, what I could make with them. My father saw that enthusiasm and gave me his second-hand laptop to use. It was already old when it came into my hands, but to me it was not an old machine. It was my laboratory. For more than ten years, that laptop became the place where I built, tested, wrote, experimented, designed presentations, and tried to turn ideas in my head into things that existed outside my imagination.

Almost everything I built before 2022 passed through that machine. It carried me through years when I did not have access to sophisticated equipment or a proper laboratory, and I became accustomed to creating within constraints because there was no other choice. But the machine was old, and eventually its age stopped being an inconvenience and became a genuine problem. There were times when it would suddenly shut down while I was working, and once that happened, the presentation or program I had spent hours building could simply be gone. There was no achievement waiting to compensate for the loss. There was only the empty space where the work had been, followed by the decision of whether to start again. I had to rebuild things I had already built. Sometimes that was frustrating enough to make me wonder why I was putting so much effort into something that could disappear in an instant. But there was also something useful about having no guarantee that the work would survive. I slowly became more careful, more patient, and more comfortable with rebuilding. The first laptop I could finally call my own came only in 2022. By then, I had already spent years learning how to create without having the kind of tools people often assume are necessary before the work can begin.

So I started teaching myself. Whatever caught my attention became a reason to search, read, watch, experiment, dismantle, rebuild, and try again. My interest in space eventually took me to Space Kids India, a space startup in Chennai. I began talking to people there even though my English was broken enough that communication itself became an obstacle. I kept calling anyway. Eventually, the CTO called me and invited me to come to Chennai. For a child sitting far away and trying to find a path into the space industry, that invitation felt enormous. But I was still young, and my family circumstances meant that I could not make the trip. The opportunity disappeared almost as quickly as it had arrived. There was nothing I could do to force it back into existence. I simply had to continue from where I was.

Then 2020 arrived, and the world suddenly became smaller. Schools closed, people stayed inside, and almost everything that had previously structured daily life disappeared. I filled the empty space with experiments. In late April, I built an automatic doorbell that rang when someone waved a hand in front of it. It was a simple project, but it worked, and somehow it travelled beyond my room. People in my city began talking about the schoolboy who had built an automatic doorbell during lockdown. For the first time, something I had made had acquired a life outside my own hands. The project was not extraordinary, but the experience was. Until then, building had mostly been a private activity. Suddenly there were people on the other side of the thing I had made.

My curiosity quickly moved toward aerospace. I became fascinated by amateur rocketry before I had formally studied the chemistry behind it. I experimented with rocket-fuel concepts and model rockets because I wanted to understand how something assembled by a teenager could eventually leave the ground. My knowledge was incomplete, and my experiments were crude. During one model rocket nozzle test, I made a mistake and burned my finger. It was not a serious injury, but it broke the clean distance between theory and reality. Engineering looked different once the physical consequences of an error had touched my own skin. Machines did not care how enthusiastic I was. An idea could fail regardless of how much I believed in it.

Around the same period, I became interested in weather balloons and decided that if I wanted to work seriously on aerospace, I should try to create a place at school where other students could experiment too. I went to the principal with the idea of an aerospace club involving weather balloons, amateur rockets, and other projects. The proposal was rejected because the budget and practical requirements were too high for the school to justify. I was disappointed, but there was no villain in the story. The school had constraints, and I had ambitions that required resources I did not have. For a child who was already used to building on an aging second-hand laptop and making do with whatever equipment was accessible, the answer was not to wait for someone else to solve the problem. It was to go back to whatever I could actually do.

One of the ideas occupying my mind was an eight-legged, spider-shaped rover that could move across uneven terrain on Mars or other planetary surfaces. I knew almost nothing about the engineering required to make such a machine reliable. I did not have the laboratory, the tools, or the technical depth to turn the idea into a working planetary rover. But I had the idea, and at that age an idea was often enough to keep me occupied for days.

A school mentor eventually pushed me toward hackathons and introduced me to a world that was very different from the classroom. Competitions gave me a place to test what I could build, but they also kept exposing the weakness I had discovered in eighth standard. I could often build something better than I could explain it. I lost many competitions. Sometimes I reached the final stages and still came away without a prize. Sometimes the fact that I was younger worked against me. Sometimes the problem was simply that someone else had built and presented better. Rejection became repetitive enough that it stopped feeling like an unusual event and started feeling like part of the process.

So I changed how I prepared. Instead of writing speeches word for word and trying to memorize them, I began understanding the subject deeply enough that I could organize the logic in my head and then speak from that understanding. At first, this was uncomfortable. When you have relied on a script, removing the script exposes every weakness that was hiding underneath it. But gradually something changed. I was no longer trying to remember sentences. I was trying to communicate an idea.

In 2021, I won second prize at a district-level technology fair. It mattered because I had spent years trying to move away from the version of myself that had come last. But even then, nothing felt permanently solved. A prize could show progress, but it could not guarantee the next one. I still had to prepare for the next competition, the next presentation, the next rejection.

Then came January 2022. I had reached the final stage of a hackathon, and from my perspective as a child, I was satisfied with how far I had come. I had not built everything I should have, and my speech was still not strong enough. My mentor knew that. He called me and, in an angry tone, told me that he would not help me anymore, that I could not do anything, and that he was done with me. Then he hung up.

I broke down after the call, trying to cry without making a sound, holding my voice and tears inside because I did not know what else to do. My mother noticed that something was wrong and asked me what had happened. I told her everything. She called my mentor herself and apologized from my side. The situation changed, but not because the criticism disappeared. He agreed to help me again, but the condition remained: I had to improve. There was no shortcut around the work. I told him I would.

That period was difficult precisely because I cared so much. If the competition had meant nothing to me, the words would have passed more easily. Instead, the possibility of losing the person who had introduced me to that world felt like another door closing. I had already experienced opportunities disappearing because I was too young or because my circumstances did not allow me to take them. I did not want another one to disappear because I had failed to become better at something I knew I needed to improve.

I kept entering competitions. I kept losing some and winning others. Slowly, communication stopped feeling like an obstacle that had been placed in front of me and started becoming another part of the toolkit I was building.

Later in 2022, while I was in tenth standard, I entered the first Smart India Hackathon Junior and won. It became my first major national-level victory. The contrast with the competition three years earlier was difficult to miss. The same person who had once stood sixth out of six because he could not explain his own project was now standing on a national stage with a winning one. I did not suddenly become a different person. The difference was that I had spent years working on one weakness without knowing exactly when the work would finally become visible.

Then eleventh standard began, and the balance between the two lives I had been building became harder to maintain. I was selected for The Junior Academy by the New York Academy of Sciences, which became my first major international achievement. At the same time, my academics began slipping. I was spending enormous amounts of time on projects, competitions, experiments, and ideas that rarely appeared on a report card. Eventually, I had to give a retest. There was no simple answer to the problem. My extracurricular work was moving forward, but the academic system continued measuring me by a different standard, and I had not yet learned how to satisfy both at the same time.

That tension would follow me into the next two years, when ambition met something far less forgiving than a competition: the system that would decide where I actually went.