Earlier this year, during a small stint at UNESCO MGIEP, I got a chance to lead Games for Learning team at the institute. The team only had one full time and one part-time member when I joined.

The first thing that we needed to do was to find more people who would be excited to work in Games for Learning.

Mahima at that moment was working in the Difference Learning team, and I thought she could be a good fit because of her understanding of the target audience. After a few rounds of discussion, she hopped in.

Next was Anurati. She was creating illustrations and comic strips for the Rethinking Learning team at the moment of time. Pedagogy didn’t come naturally to her, but she was quite creative to think outside of the box.

Vignesh joined next. I know him from Imagine Cup days but never got a chance to work with him closely. This felt like a natural fit.

Once the team was set, we...

A few weeks ago, I shared that now I have been in the software industry for more than ten years. In these ten years, I have created three companies and dozens of products - some of them successful and some of them not so much.

After working at a safe job in UNESCO MGIEP for a year, I resigned a month ago to do a new thing.

What I am doing right now is a culmination of what I have learnt and what I have done over the past decade.

This new product uses all the code I have written over the past decade, but also includes all the learnings of design and business I have acquired over three companies.

(A sneak peek at what’s coming up!👇)

This is as much scary as much as it is exciting. How do you do something that’s a cocktail of what you have learnt over ten years and still not fuck it up by making it overwhelming?

Every night, I have a feeling that it will work and every day, I have a...

Remember Adobe, and it’s Creative Suite?

Anyone in the industry would have said to you that it’s impossible to break into that industry, almost a few years ago. Today Sketch and Figma has completely captured the Adobe Illustrator market and then Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher are eating out the market of Photoshop, Lightroom and Design.

Procreate on the other hand is the best illustration tool on the iPad.

An important point to note here is that these are practically new companies with no alignment to the design industry a few years ago.

But if you build good shit, people will use it - the general rule of business.

I have been now creating software for more than ten years. On July 17, 2009, I submitted the first code and documentation to the project called Brihaspati 2 by IIT Kanpur.

Brihaspati 2 was an e-learning system used by various universities of India, including IITs and IGNOU. I contributed to the code for Whiteboard where instructors can make drawings, freehand or pre-defined components while chatting with students, at a time when there was no socket.io.

I also contributed to its documentation for installation on a Fedora/Red Hat server. This was submitted to the Yahoo! Group of Brihaspati 2.

For three months in the summer vacation of 2009, I sat for more than 20 hours per day in front of my laptop to code this. It was at a time when there were no Broadband or 3G, so I asked my father to look out for Chip/Digit magazines that give a free CD of Fedora, Red Hat or Ubuntu.

What a time...

The New York Times published an opinion piece titled: Power? No, Thanks, I’m Good. The freedom to say what I think and command my own time is enough for me.

The idea of this article is to say that power is overrated if one has the freedom to do their own shit.

Read the article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/opinion/power-is-overrated.html

This article got shared on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20022534

I really liked this comment on the thread:

In order to understand why power is coveted, we need to understand human motivation. The best theory I’ve read on human motivation comes from Drive. As described by scientific research, once you go beyond our primal need for food, safety and companionship, there are 3 primary factors that motivate us. Mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

Mastery is the ability to master and perfect a craft you care about. This...

It’s time to change the news. No seriously, what we are consuming right now is not good for our mental health, our society, our democracy, our nature and our fundamental human rights.

Over the last few years, so many new news services have emerged in the scene, but they are still presenting us the news from the lens of politics or political party.

In India, I respect the kind of news shared by The Wire, Scroll.in and Alt News. They are doing some serious independent journalism. There is no doubt that independent journalism is the way forward. News can’t depend on advertisers, or else it will just serve the people with power and money. For this users will have to pay - either through a subscription service like Apple News+ or donate individually like how we are doing right now with Alt News.

So if advertisement and political affiliation is not the problem, then what is the bigger...

76 hours 40 mins is the amount of time I spent last week just coding. The time is being tracked by software called WakaTime. On the leaderboard right now, I am placed at third. Apart from coding, I have spent several more hours thinking and designing. I don’t remember sleeping for more than 2 hours any day last week. I am super happy about what I have done, but my body feels extremely stressed out. On Friday night, I slept like a baby, no clue about where I am and what happened.

There are two aspects to this story:

1. Your satisfaction - If you feel good about it, if you want to identify your limits, and then push further, please do such an activity, as it makes you a better person. If you can focus for more extended hours, work on such a timeline for yourself, and can be disciplined about it, that’s a beautiful thing. For a couple of days in the week, I was noting down the time when...

One year ago, today around the same time, Manjiri passed away (at least that’s what people told me). A fucking construction brick thrashed her head while she was on her way home from school. I knowingly didn’t go to see her one last time. I stayed in Delhi. I thought it would be comfortable that way. I have lost so many near and dear ones in my life, that I thought how sad it could be? I have already seen the depth of this emotion previously. But I was wrong. Life outplayed me this time. I was just not only sad and depressed; I was just all over the place. One moment, I was crying, another moment I was cracking a joke to relief from stress. Next day, I started working. On the same day, I threw all my debit cards, money, jacket and phone and took a train to nowhere (that train was eventually going to Dibrugarh).

Every emotion, not only sadness, haphazardly happened to me and the more I...

There was a moment today when I felt I could do anything with my life and in my life. Problems cannot stay in my life, too long, as I am willing to solve them.

For the last six years, even when I have not done right, I am doing what I feel like and no one is stopping me from doing it. I have restarted and rebooted all aspects of my life again in less than a year. This has come because of a reason. There has to be a reason for it.
This universe is conspiring for me. And I need to keep doing what I am doing right now. Work has taken me to places, and it will do so in the future as well.

I will never be able to get back what I have lost, but there are higher chances that I get something that I never thought of. There are some exciting things in my plate - one of which started today with a new team. I love this team. No one knows what we’re doing, makes me feel home. It reminds me of my...