๐ Namaste!
โจ How it started
My grandmother gifted me a DK Knowledge Encyclopedia on my 10th birthday. I don't think she knew what she was setting off. Every page was pure bliss, and that book turned curiosity from a habit into a compulsion. That same year I signed up for a WWF wildlife quiz, not because I knew anything about wildlife, but because I quietly wanted to be the kid in school who did things. By my first major quiz, the QPL, I realized it was never about the fame. It was about the hunger to learn.
๐ป The Lenovo G580
Before coding, computers meant GTA Vice City, Angry Birds Star Wars, and hours on MS Paint. The machine was my dad's old 2012 Lenovo G580. During COVID, I tried modding Minecraft and accidentally ran a Trojan. It attacked svchost.exe, consumed all 4GB of RAM, and corrupted family photos. I couldn't sleep that night. I didn't tell my parents. My instinct was to fix it myself. Weeks of tutorials, three recovery programs, and a dying HDD later, I recovered what I could, added an SSD, upgraded the RAM, and moved to Windows 10. All on my own.
That laptop has seen many lives since: different versions of Windows going all the way back to XP, Ubuntu, Chrome OS, Kali Linux, macOS Ventura, and a custom Debian build I was putting together. Each one taught me something new.
๐ฏ The thrill
Walking into a competition as the only school student in a room full of college teams feels surreal. Defeating someone by a thin margin is a feeling I live for. I'm a free bird by nature, and mixing leadership with patience and a genuine sense of fun turned out to be the only thing that gets a team aligned.
โ๏ธ Beyond the usual
I read Wikipedia every day just to discover something new. I watch Fern, Neo, and Mustard documentaries. I read true crime, dystopia, and real-life histories like Killing Pablo, Permanent Record, and American Prometheus. I used to draw a lot too, starting with oil pastels, then sketch pens, and eventually settling into black pen stencils and monochrome work.
At home there's Dexter, my Lhasa Apso. Lately I have been deep in elevated digital privacy, degooglification, and tracker blocking across all my devices. I recently finished school as Headboy of Krishna Public School, and right now I am preparing for a Computer Science degree, which feels less like a career plan and more like the next chapter of a story that started with a virus and a lot of late nights on forums.