Bio
~ storyteller and systems thinker ~
Harvard Alum, author of ‘Heartbreak: Story of Sita. (Book One of A Throne in Exile series.)
Previously: CEO Agrocom at SINE, IIT Bombay, Mentor of startups at TiE Mumbai and committee member of Human in the Loop Data and AI.
Other Publications: Inclusive AI and Internet.
I am a 47 year old South Asian male BIPOC author from Mumbai writing fiction since 2020.
My experiences
I don’t come with answers - but I bring a track record of chasing better questions
Trying to decode inequality and design systems that serve more equitably
I’m drawn to the intersection of tech-business, social sciences and public policy
Inspired by original research, STEM policy and and an equitable Internet
Using resources I had - not to follow a playbook, but to question it
My growth came not from certainty, but from discomfort and iteration
Systems Thinker~ since 1998
For the past 10 years, I work in the online retail space serving 500 million consumers.
A couple of decades experience in writing and executing business plans, computer science and technology with deep application in Online distributed knowledge management systems.
We built India’s first database of India’s most pressing all-season Ag challenges in a personalized Q&A format. It hosted multilingual chats: farmer-farmer, farmer-expert, farmer-entrepreneur, expert-entrepreneur and expert-expert collaboration. We also built India’s first near real-time network of 25 environmental monitoring stations across 1/3rd of India’s Vineyards in Nashik enabling Insurance companies to sell policies to vineyards.
Storyteller~ Fiction Writing since 2020
In 2020, new to fiction writing, I picked up this book in the pandemic, enrolled myself into several online writing classes and I have been writing fiction since. I have experimented with thriller, romance, literary fiction, fantasy and historical fiction genres (first two are unpublished.).
Having read some ancient plays on the Ramayana, I wrote this book (woman-protagonist, a Sita-reimagined novella, you know the character from the Ramayana epic?) that came out in December 2024:
Beginning with a cohort at the Himalayan Writers Retreat (HWR), I joined a buddy group of 3 fantasy fiction writers and one women’s fiction writer. Over 4 years, I wrote 4 drafts of a novel (for myself, which I do realize is slow—though not slow for writers of their first novel.) The fifth version was produced as a 90-min audiobook. eBook was the next and Paperback was the last. I continue learning the craft and every now and then help short-story writers and debut authors understand the craft better.
I was active in the Mumbai tech startup scene (2006-2018) as a business plan judge and mentor. Deeply invested in pulling people in, in making the circle bigger, in going against the grain in an industry that has sometimes prided itself on its exclusivity. I have begun doing the same with writers, artists and online and offline book publishers and new media storytelling platforms.
My most memorable experience has been staying at the IIT Mumbai campus (A Center of Excellence in engineering and tech research where we were trained in writing analytical research papers based on data and experiment). It was my home for 20 years; a campus where frequent earthworm, parrot and leopard sightings were not uncommon. I worked on data, databases and information retrieval algorithms for sponsored projects as Senior Research Fellow, Overall Products Lead and Project Manager. The 30-person project was spun-off in 2006 to a team of 10 people whom I am grateful to have led as their CEO till 2012. Since then I look at product management, mobile apps, ecommerce and the commercial side of things.
Pursuing writing a novel—a work of art and maybe even performance—part-time is in my mind the opposite of commercial. And this keeps me going.
When I came across this book, below, I chose my first novella to write.
