Who am I?My day job was as a management executive, with the Tata Group and Infosys in India and the United States. I currently work with social entrepreneurs and mission driven organisations that make a difference in India.
My most recent full-time job was to run Stanford University's Seed program in South Asia, as Regional Director. I'm also the co-founder of, and advisor to the Menterra Social Impact Fund. I also co-founded a social enterprise, Haqdarshak. My father was a retired senior Air Force officer (Bio here), which made me a keen student of military history and geopolitics, and resulted in The Anza Deception, my first book, in 2012. I followed that up with a second, The Sympathy Wave, in 2013. I host a podcast, "The Blue Skies Podcast" which features conversations with military aviators. I have an Indian and US commercial pilot's license and instructor rating, and briefly owned my own aircraft, when I lived in California. I have also dabbled with amateur photography, skiing, sailing and hiking. I briefly learned to play the piano, play squash and golf, row, run the occasional half marathon, and trek the Himalayas once or twice a year. I'm always ready to try new experiences, to test the boundaries and learn more about myself. I grew up on Air Force bases around India, before going to Hindu College in Delhi University and then the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. I live in Chennai, India, with my wife, two boys, and an energetic golden retriever, Dexter. |
What makes me write?I like to think of myself as a thought provoker at large. Too many people are stuck in a complacent rut, obsessed with their self-created day-to-day crises, rarely thinking honestly about the world around them. Too comfortable in their simplifying assumptions and lazy hypotheses, most of which are often, at best, borrowed from the last articulate person they heard on the subject.
How do you shake people out of that complacency, and get them to think? Get them to look at the world around honestly? Get them to draw their own conclusions? Make them see things as they are, not as they appear through another person's jaundiced eyes? I see fiction as a means to do just that. Draw people in, get them into the shoes of a protagonist, put them in places they have never been before. Force them to see things in ways they've never looked at things before. For if they've been shaken out of their complacency, if they've been provoked to think, I feel like I've done my bit. |
