Chapter Three

The Horizon Keeps Moving

By this point, the different parts of my life no longer felt like separate stories. The child who had built rockets, the student who came sixth out of six, the boy who spent years using his father’s aging laptop as a laboratory, the teenager who travelled every weekend for JEE coaching, the founder who shut down a company, the person who rebuilt his body and then pushed it too far, and the student who chose Bangalore after missing the college path he had wanted were all connected by the same habit.

When something stopped working, I looked for another way to approach the problem.

That habit is now most visible in what I am building.

Today, I am working on JEEVNI, a healthtech platform built around a simple problem: a person should not have to wait for a conventional appointment simply to speak to a doctor. The goal is to make doctor consultations available without the traditional appointment barrier and deliver the experience in under three minutes. The proof of concept already exists. The harder part now is taking something that works on a laptop and making it reliable enough to survive outside the laptop, where real users, real constraints, and real consequences begin.

That distinction matters to me because so much of my early life happened on screens. The second-hand laptop my father gave me was where I built things that had never existed before, lost things when the machine failed, rebuilt them, and slowly learned what it meant to create with limited resources. Now the challenge is different. I am no longer only trying to prove that I can make something work. I am trying to understand whether it can survive contact with the real world.

Alongside JEEVNI, I am working on another project that I deliberately keep quieter. It sits somewhere between AI, blockchain, inventory intelligence, and the physical economy. The long-term vision is an infrastructure layer that could eventually resemble a Bloomberg-style commodities terminal, alongside work around real-estate tokenization. The details are still evolving, and I expect some of the ideas to change as I understand the problems more deeply. I am less interested now in pretending that every early idea is perfect than I am in finding out which ideas survive questioning, experimentation, and actual use.

The aerospace ideas have survived in a different way.

The rockets and weather balloons were never finished products. The spider-shaped Mars rover was never more than an early concept. Aerospacizm eventually ended. Yet the underlying question remained: how do we make exploration cheaper, more accessible, and more autonomous? How do we build machines that can operate where humans cannot? How could inexpensive robotics eventually allow us to explore planetary surfaces, asteroids, and resources beyond Earth?

Those questions lead naturally into much larger territory.

If humanity is ever going to become a Type II civilization, we will eventually have to learn how to operate far beyond Earth, use resources outside our home planet, and construct the technological and economic infrastructure necessary to support a civilization that is no longer confined to one world. That requires advances in energy, robotics, computation, manufacturing, transportation, intelligence, and infrastructure. It is not one invention waiting to be discovered. It is an enormous collection of problems waiting for generations of people to work on them.

I find that scale exciting rather than intimidating.

I still have more ideas than I can realistically build. Some are immature. Some are impractical. Some will probably disappear completely as I learn more. That has become easier to accept. An idea does not deserve years of my life simply because I had it. It has to survive questioning, experimentation, failure, and the reality of building something people actually need.

That way of thinking has also changed how I look at my own past.

There are mistakes I still remember clearly. There are opportunities that disappeared. There are decisions I would make differently now. There are projects that ended before I was ready for them to end. There are times when I still think about what might have happened if I had communicated better earlier, prepared differently for JEE, validated Event Union sooner, or learned to recover before my body forced the issue.

But the interesting part of those memories is not the regret itself. It is what each one exposed.

Coming sixth out of six exposed the gap between building and communicating. Losing competitions exposed how much more there was to learn. The laptop shutting down exposed how fragile work can be when the tools are limited. Missing the Space Kids India opportunity exposed how much of a child’s world can still be controlled by circumstances outside his control. The mentor incident exposed how much criticism can hurt when it comes from someone whose opinion matters to you. Missing IIT exposed the difference between effort and outcome. Event Union exposed what happens when building runs ahead of validation. Aerospacizm exposed how quickly a project can lose direction even when the people involved care about it. My health crisis exposed the difference between discipline and sustainability.

None of those experiences arrived as neat lessons.

They were problems first.

That is probably why they stayed.

There is another memory I think about differently now: the phone call in January 2022. At the time, it felt like the end of a relationship that had mattered enormously to me. My mentor had been the person who introduced me to competitions, and then, for a moment, he had told me he was done with me. I did not know then that years later, that same relationship would become one of the more meaningful parts of the story.

A friend eventually told me something I never expected to hear. The same mentor was speaking to his students about me. He was telling them to learn from the way I had developed my communication, how I had learned to speak, and how I had eventually learned to compete and win.

I was not there when he said it. I heard about it afterward.

There was something strangely satisfying about that, but not because it felt like I had defeated him. I did not see it that way. He had introduced me to competitions when I was still a child. He challenged me when I was falling short. He was willing to help me again after one of the hardest conversations I had experienced at that age. I remain genuinely grateful for his guidance, including the parts that were difficult to hear.

Some people help you by opening a door.

Others help you by showing you why you are not yet ready to walk through it.

Philosophy has become another part of how I examine those questions. Nietzsche, Ashtavakra, Osho, and Advaita Vedanta have influenced different parts of the way I think about consciousness, identity, desire, attachment, and observation. I do not treat any of them as complete answers. What interests me is the questioning itself: what remains when ambition, recognition, failure, success, and even identity are examined closely enough?

That curiosity has made me increasingly interested in observing systems.

I watch people, organizations, incentives, technologies, markets, and my own behavior in much the same way I would examine an engineering problem. What makes the system work? What assumption is holding it together? Where does it fail? What happens when one of the assumptions changes? What can be redesigned?

The same questions keep appearing in different forms.

A competition asks whether an idea can survive evaluation. A startup asks whether a problem matters enough for people to care. A body asks whether a training system can be sustained. A scientific experiment asks whether an assumption survives evidence. A civilization asks whether its infrastructure is capable of supporting the future it wants.

The scale changes, but the curiosity does not.

I no longer see my failures as interruptions in an otherwise successful story. They are part of the structure. I won competitions and still struggled academically. I received international recognition and still had to rethink my direction. I worked toward IIT and did not get there. I entered college through a route I had never imagined and deliberately chose Bangalore because I wanted proximity to the technology and startup ecosystem I believed I needed. I built Event Union and shut it down. I built Aerospacizm and eventually let it end. I transformed my body and then pushed that transformation too far. I had to rebuild again.

Even the laptop story belongs in that structure.

For more than a decade, I worked on a machine that was never supposed to become the foundation of a serious technical journey. It was simply what we had. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it failed at the worst possible moment. Sometimes work disappeared. Then I rebuilt. I did not have the ideal hardware, the perfect institution, the ideal academic result, or a straight path into the places I wanted to reach. I had a collection of imperfect circumstances and a growing inability to leave interesting problems alone.

That may be one of the most consistent things about me.

When I look back at the boy who once stood sixth out of six schools, the most important part of the memory is no longer the result. It is the problem he accidentally discovered. He had built something he believed in, but he could not communicate it. The answer was not to abandon the thing he loved. It was to add another capability to himself.

That pattern has repeated ever since.

When building was not enough, I learned communication. When ideas were not enough, I learned to test them. When winning was not enough, I had to learn what failure looked like. When discipline became destructive, I had to learn recovery. When one route closed, I had to find another route without pretending the original disappointment had never happened.

There is still an enormous distance between where I am and where I want to go.

I want to contribute to a civilization that can do more than the one I inherited. I want to work on systems that make healthcare more accessible, physical infrastructure more intelligent, exploration more affordable, and eventually make it possible for humanity to operate beyond Earth at a scale that is difficult to imagine today. I want to contribute to the long path toward a Type II civilization and beyond, not because I believe one person can build that future alone, but because civilizations advance through accumulated work.

Someone has to build the pieces.

Maybe one of those pieces will be JEEVNI. Maybe it will be the physical-economy infrastructure I am working on now. Maybe it will eventually be an aerospace company, planetary robotics, asteroid exploration, or something I cannot yet name. I do not know the exact form of the future, and I am increasingly comfortable with that uncertainty. The direction matters more than the label.

I also know that not every ambition will survive.

Some projects I build will fail quietly. Some may fail publicly. Some may become useful in ways I cannot predict yet. Some ideas will turn out to be wrong. Some things I care about today may become irrelevant five years from now.

That uncertainty is part of the attraction.

The interesting part of building is that the final form does not exist when you begin.

For now, I am still trying to become capable of building at a larger scale. I am still learning how to communicate, how to think, how to build companies, how to understand people, how to take care of my body, and how to distinguish an exciting idea from a valuable one. I am still chasing a physical future that includes bodybuilding, Hyrox, and an Ironman. I am still thinking about healthcare, physical infrastructure, aerospace, robotics, and the possibility of a civilization that eventually moves beyond the limits of one planet.

The boy who once wanted to reach space has not disappeared.

He has simply accumulated more questions.

And perhaps that is the most honest description of where I am today. I do not have the ending figured out. I have a direction, a growing collection of unfinished problems, a history filled with things that worked and things that did not, and a willingness to keep working on them.

The sentence that describes what I am trying to do is simple: I build what is missing.

The story continues, and we are heading to the next chapter.