What fuels
the thinking.

Music

Daily ritual

Passionate listener. The listening is the real skill.

Music is the one thing I consume daily without ever wanting to produce it. It's a complete experience. I don't need to hold the instrument to feel it fully. From Carnatic classical to ambient electronic. The mood dictates the genre. Twenty One Pilots is the artist I return to most. Deliberate, layered, structurally unusual. Music that rewards attention.

Audio Engineering

Obsession in progress

The architecture of sound.

Beyond just listening. I want to understand what is actually happening: frequency, timbre, signal flow, the physics of how a mix sits in a room versus headphones. The same question I keep asking in hardware, just in a different domain: what is going on at the layer you cannot see? Compression, reverb, stereo imaging are engineering decisions dressed as aesthetics. That overlap is what pulls me in.

Watches

Obsession

Mechanical precision made visible.

A watch is the most honest form of engineering: everything is exposed, everything serves a function, and there is nowhere to hide bad craft. I think about hardware the same way. If it needs to be hidden, something is probably wrong.

Bikes

Kinetic thinking

Controlled chaos at speed.

Motorcycles demand the same full-system thinking as hardware design: you are managing dynamics, thermodynamics, attention, and risk at the same time, and you cannot defer any of them. There is no passive mode on a bike, and I think that is actually the point. My sister was the first person I knew who rode. She never asked whether it was appropriate. I noticed that.

Steins;Gate

Favourite anime

Time, consequence, and the cost of knowing.

The only anime I keep coming back to, and not for nostalgia. It asks a real question: if you could change the past, what would you actually sacrifice? I think about that more than I expected to. Each iteration of the loop reveals something the previous one missed, which is also how debugging works.

Fantasy world-building

Creative practice

Coherent systems, invented from scratch.

A well-built fantasy world is a systems design exercise. Consistent physics, cultural logic, economic constraints, power structures. All of it has to cohere. I think about this the same way I think about architecture.

Games

Strategic thinking

Immersive worlds. Real systems underneath.

The games I go back to are the ones with genuine internal logic: economies, factions, decisions that compound. I play them the way I approach any complex system: tracking resources, making choices with incomplete information, staying committed long enough to see what breaks. The world-building is the entry point. The system architecture underneath it is what actually holds my attention. You learn resource allocation faster when the stakes feel real, even when they are not.

Martial Arts

Black belt

Discipline before technique.

I earned a black belt. Before the belt, at ten years old, I competed internationally in table soccer, went to Nepal, and came back with a bronze medal. Different sport, same lesson. Ten years of karate gave me something engineering school did not prove: the body can be trained to do hard things before the mind is ready to believe it. I do not train formally anymore. But the lesson generalises. You show up when you do not want to. You do the work before you feel ready. Karate taught me that. Engineering confirmed it.

Training

Hyrox hybrid

Push, pull, run. Five days a week.

The structure is deliberate: push days, pull days, running, and Hyrox-style hybrid sessions. Five days a week, built on the same logic as hardware design: commit to a system, trust it, and do not let how you feel on a given morning determine whether the work gets done. Running is still where I think. Training is where I test whether the consistency I actually believe in holds under real discomfort. Both are non-negotiable.

Cricket

RCB, since 2008

Nineteen years. One team. No conditions.

I was hooked on RCB before I could explain why. The team has a particular energy that is either felt or it is not. Virat Kohli has been the constant throughout: what he does on a cricket pitch is a demonstration of will under pressure, the kind that makes you reconsider what is possible when you refuse to accept a situation as fixed. Every season the same rallying cry: ee sala cup namde. This year the cup is ours. It became a meme because of how many times it did not happen. When it did, the meme stopped being funny. Nineteen years of genuine faith is not a transaction. It is just what some teams mean to people.

Brazil

Seleção

Five stars. Born into the faith.

Brazil won their last World Cup in 2002, the year I was born. Five-time champions, and I carry that connection as something more than coincidence. I cried in 2014 when Germany scored seven in that semifinal. That result is still not something I have made peace with.

Manchester United

Red Devils

Still waiting for what Sir Alex built.

I have supported Manchester United since the early 2010s. The rebuilding has been long. Ronaldo shaped how I think about longevity and obsession in sport, the same way Michael Phelps did in swimming: both refused to accept an ordinary ceiling. I am still waiting for someone to bring that to Old Trafford again.

Rugby

Someday

A sport I have not started yet.

I have never played rugby. I want to. There is something about the All Blacks specifically that I keep returning to: collective precision combined with individual physicality, and a culture around how the team holds itself. The haka is not theatrics. It is a statement about what a group of people can build when they take it seriously together. I do not know when I will actually pick it up. But it is on the list, and I mean it.