Notes · Origin

How I got here

The kid in a 1990s computer lab, the two games that marked me, and the one idea I have been circling ever since.

People assume this started with an engineering degree, or with IIT. Those came later, and they matter less than the timeline suggests. The honest beginning is a nine-year-old in a school computer lab in 1990s India, years before any of this had a name.

My school did something unusual for the time and the place: it sat me in front of LOGO and BASIC in the third grade. I took to it the way some children take to a sport. When the bell went, I was the one still in the lab, trying to make something work and not quite ready to leave it.

I was also one of the few children around me with a computer at home. It was my grandfather's, and in early-nineties India that was a real head start, one I have never pretended I earned. The important detail is that it was connected to nothing. No internet, no tutorials, no forum to paste an error into. Just a machine, a manual, and whatever you were stubborn enough to make it do. You learned by reading and failing, slowly, on your own. I spent those years two ways: playing games, and building them.

Then came competitive programming, and most of what I understand about building under pressure started there, with a clock running and a problem that did not care how I felt about it. It teaches you to strip an idea down to the part that actually has to work.

Two games marked me more than any lesson. One was Pac-Man, for reasons I still cannot fully defend. The other was Conway's Game of Life: four tiny rules that, left alone, grow patterns nobody drew. It held me completely. One of my high-school projects was building the Game of Life myself, on a fixed canvas, watching shapes I had not designed walk across a grid I had.

That is the whole thing, really. The idea that a few simple rules, chosen by a few people, quietly grow the world everyone else has to live in is the thesis of my work now. It is why I care less about how powerful a model is and more about who wrote the rules underneath it, and whether anyone can see them. The glider in my logo is from that game. The living grid behind my homepage is that game. I did not arrive at this from a degree. I grew up inside it.

I tend to see where a technology is going a little before the room does. Not because I am cleverer, but because I have spent my attention, since I was a child at that keyboard, on the rules underneath things rather than the surface. That is the habit. Head down, one direction, on the part that actually decides the outcome.