We are all just a collection of stories. Here's mine.

Born in Mumbai, India's financial and storytelling capital, though I spent my first years in the land of Eve, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where my father worked for over two decades. Two countries, one pattern: both poured their energies into religious pursuits and stayed poor; the moment each embraced capitalism (accidentally, in both cases), wealth rushed in, and I watched the transformation firsthand. I grew up a hard-core capitalist, with not much inclination towards God.

In Indian school, I made two “mistakes”: I was good at studies, and I was good at math. That led to a third, made as cluelessly as millions of Indian students make it: engineering school, where I promptly had a full-blown existential crisis. Until then I had lived by society's rules, and they were not entirely working for me. So I resorted to the only solution I found to be sensible at that point: I buried myself in books. Two autobiographies turned out to be pivotal: Richard Branson's Losing My Virginity and Mahatma Gandhi's My Experiments with Truth. They led me to my first solo adventure: Annanymous, my first start-up, founded while still on campus.

As an outlet for my own, and every student's, frustration with the education system, I founded Annanymous: a t-shirt brand, of, by and for engineers. What began as a campus venture spread across the city and then became a nationwide sensation. The National Entrepreneurship Network named me one of India's top 30 student entrepreneurs, and the media followed: a full two-page spread in the Wall Street Journal's Mint, a twenty-minute feature on NDTV, then India's leading news network, and more. As college ended, I wrapped it up by design. Another t-shirt brand was making no difference to the world, or to me.

Refusing to sit for campus placements, I was figuring out my next move when a headline found me: “Harvard grad sells chai in Bangalore.” I had once heard that early in your career, your boss matters more than the company you keep, and here was a chance to work with a Harvard graduate and a room full of Ivy League colleagues, while selling India's most consumed beverage after water. As entrepreneur in residence, I ran sales, scaled the IT systems, built the customer loyalty program, and still stood at the counter selling chai. It was at that counter that the seeds of my next move were sown: every second customer in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, turned out to be a frustrated engineer. I did some digging and found high suicide rates among the city's IT engineers. That is when I set out on my next journey.

Post-script: my first day on the job turned out to be the day Steve Jobs died. By sheer accident, my last day at Chai Point, two years hence, was his second death anniversary.

I set out on a two-year backpacking trip across India to figure out how engineering had ended up becoming the country's fifth biggest religion. At the end of the journey, I lost a camera to theft in Delhi's crowded Chandni Chowk, but found a story to tell the world, and, more importantly, the seeds of a life mission: transforming the global education system. The book was funded by a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, sold its OTT adaptation rights, and became a national bestseller.

My TEDx talk, on my personal journey and the story of my first book, went viral to become one of the most watched talks on education globally, making me a global voice for education reform.

A young student's suicidal email had turned my anger into a purpose, and the purpose demanded I understand life itself: an obsession that, over a series of strange events, eventually culminated in spending over four years in a monastery exploring one simple question. While there, I also led content strategy for the monastery's digital platforms across eight global languages, amassing over a billion monthly cumulative impressions. Who am I? The answer? That is for me to know, and you to find out. One thing I will say: those four years made me a better “actor.”

Fresh out of the monastery, with a new realization and ready to play out my role in the world, I chose the wild world of Web3 as my first pit stop. I led PR and marketing for a Singapore-based crypto start-up that was later acquired by Consensys. And I published my second book, this time a graphic novel: volume one of a two-part series titled How I Met God & Got Into Crypto.

I am building stories.fun: the human identity layer for the agentic era, a place where every person is a story that gets told properly, and where people make meaningful connections again. We are building it from Dubai, back on the Gulf, a full circle from where the story began.