u/Lost_Extension_4252

Since I’ve started enjoying Reddit and spending more time here than on almost every other social media app, I thought I might as well introduce myself properly.

Grab some coffee. Maybe a chair too.
This is going to be long.

But considering my life has somehow included school beatings, teenage heartbreak, dropping out of engineering, randomly becoming a designer, building a supermarket, working at Amazon, my father nearly dying, a kidney transplant during COVID, a major car accident, losing more than ₹22 lakh of borrowed money in trading, getting buried under loans, getting laid off, and eventually becoming a CTO…

I promise I’ll try not to make it boring.

Chapter 1: The kid who couldn’t stop thinking
I grew up in Ranchi.
I was always that curious kid who would secretly be drawing or building something in class while everyone else was studying.
Unfortunately, this also meant I probably held some unofficial record for being beaten by teachers.
It was practically part of my timetable.
The funny thing was that I was usually among the top three students in class despite putting very little effort into studying.
Teachers would tell me:
“We see potential in you. That’s why we’re strict with you.”
Their definition of “strict” was… ambitious.
And then my parents made the situation even better by hiring one of the most terrifying maths teachers in our school as my home tutor.
You know that moment when someone enters a classroom and says:
“XYZ Ma’am is calling you.”
And everyone immediately knows somebody is about to have a very bad afternoon?
That was basically my daily life.
When she came home, my mother would give her a complete incident report of everything I had done wrong.
Then came the stick.
Sometimes literally until the stick broke.
Then she’d ask whether I’d completed my homework.
I almost never had.
Not because I couldn’t understand it. Whenever I sat down to study, my brain would wander into some drawing, invention, creative idea, or ridiculous “what if?”
So I’d get another round.
We’d study for a while.
Then, before leaving, she’d say the most terrifying words imaginable:
“Meet me at school tomorrow.”
The next day she’d call me during class and punish me in front of everyone until I cried.
Then I’d get maybe one peaceful day.
And the cycle would begin again.
That continued until around Class 5. After that, teachers changed, home tutoring stopped, and life became considerably less violent.
I stayed in the same school for about 13 years.
From Classes 6 to 9, life was surprisingly uneventful.
School. Home. Maths. Physics.
No crushes. No drama.
I loved maths so much that I’d sometimes finish an entire maths textbook during summer vacation.
And then Class 10 happened.

Chapter 2: The six months that completely derailed me
A girl moved into the rented portion of our house.
Initially, I wasn’t particularly attracted to her.
But she kept finding opportunities to talk to me.
Then we started texting.
Then texting all night.
Then meeting quietly and talking after everyone else had gone to sleep.
Suddenly I was sleeping in school.
I stopped practising maths and physics.
Concepts that had once felt effortless started disappearing from my head.
And I didn’t care because, for the first time, I was experiencing that ridiculous Bollywood version of teenage love where your brain apparently resigns from its job.
Strangely, I’ve never felt quite that way about anyone again.
Even the night before my physics exam, there I was talking to her as though I had discovered some secret cheat code for life.
Spoiler: I hadn’t.
After my Class 10 exams, my parents converted the rented portion of our house into a shop and helped her find another place to live nearby.

She would walk past our house every day on her way to college, and I’d stand on the roof whenever I could just to see her.
She’d tell me I was her most special person. That she liked me. That I mattered.

Six months was enough.
I was completely gone.
Despite everything that happened later, for years I called those the golden six months of my life.

I scored around 60% in Class 10.
About two months after the exams, she told me her phone had been stolen and that she wouldn’t be able to talk much until she got another one.
That was basically the beginning of the end.
Slowly, she disappeared.

And I became teenage Devdas.
By the middle of Class 11, I barely understood what my maths and physics teachers were teaching anymore.
I somehow passed 11th.

Then 12th.
Meanwhile, I kept waiting for her attention, watching for her when she returned from college, buying things I thought she’d like, trying to create reasons for us to talk.

Eventually, even those tiny interactions disappeared.
I scored 59.8% in Class 12.

I decided to repeat the year and improve my marks.
I went to Delhi with my cousin to prepare.
There was just one tiny problem.
Neither of us studied.
He could discover a reason to roam around Delhi on any given day, and I was always happy to accompany him. Internally, I was still carrying the same heartbreak anyway.
Result?
Previous score: 59.8%.
“Improved” score: 56%.
Outstanding performance.

Chapter 3: Engineering, despite repeatedly saying I’d never do engineering

I returned home and started looking at colleges.
My family wanted engineering because half the family seemed to be engineers.
The irony was that I’d been saying since Class 8:
“I will NEVER go to engineering college.”
I was interested in mass communication, but nobody took that idea seriously.
Then a friend from Ranchi called me and started selling me the dream of an engineering college.
Great campus.
Great placements.
Great future.

At that point, I desperately wanted to leave Ranchi anyway. Everything around me reminded me of the girl and how badly I’d messed up my studies.
So I agreed.

My parents were delighted.
Much later, I realised my friend had apparently been motivated by referral money for bringing students into a fairly mediocre engineering college.
Beautiful.
I joined anyway and decided this was my fresh start.
Except the girl kept reappearing.
Every six months or so, she’d suddenly message me on Facebook.
We’d talk for a month or two.
I’d start feeling everything again.
Then she’d disappear.
Eventually I discovered she’d fallen for another guy in college who cheated on her.
Whenever she was broken and alone, she’d come back to me.
And whenever she felt better, she’d disappear again.
I was basically emotional customer support with no closing hours.
College itself started surprisingly well.
People liked me. I became Mr. Fresher. Suddenly I was getting all the attention teenage me would probably have killed for.
And somehow it felt pointless.
In first year, I even got a backlog in Engineering Drawing, a subject I had been absurdly confident about.
Why?
Lack of practice.
And yes, naturally, I was talking to her again during the exams.
By second year, I discovered she had an almost fixed schedule for talking to me while spending her nights talking to someone else.
After five or six years of this emotional loop, that finally cracked something inside me.
At the same time, the illusion of engineering college was collapsing.
Placements weren’t magically going to save me.
The college wanted its fees.
If I wanted a future, I’d have to build it myself.
Then life introduced a much bigger problem.
My father was diagnosed with serious kidney disease.
He had to stop working.
Suddenly our financial situation became terrifying.
Every time I asked him for college fees or living expenses, I felt horrible.
I knew he’d somehow arrange it.
Maybe sell a ring.
Maybe borrow money.
Maybe sacrifice something I’d never even know about.
By third year, my backlogs had multiplied.
At one point I locked myself away in a distant hostel for nearly two months, barely meeting anyone, crying and wondering what exactly I was doing with my life.
And somewhere inside that mess, one thought changed everything:
“If everyone here is learning how to build things… who decides what those things should look like?”
That question introduced me to design.
I researched design careers obsessively.
I’d always been good at drawing and sketching.
For the first time in years, something actually felt natural.
So I called my father.
Terrified.
“I can’t continue engineering. This is pointless. I’m wasting time and money.”
His first reaction was exactly what you’d expect:
“What about all the money already spent?”
Then he disconnected.
I sat there feeling absolutely horrible.
A little later, my phone rang.
It was him.
“What do you want to do?”
“Design.”
“How?”
I explained that I’d have to prepare for entrance examinations for design colleges.
He listened.
Then said:
“Pack your bags today. Take the train home tomorrow.”
That moment has stayed with me.

Chapter 4: The train I couldn’t finish
I packed everything.
For the first time in my life, I boarded a train from Bhopal to Ranchi without a reservation.
It’s roughly a 24-hour journey.
After about 12 hours of standing around without getting a seat, anxiety started eating me alive.
But the real problem wasn’t the train.
I was terrified of going home.
I had dropped out.
I had failed at the thing everyone expected me to do.
So somewhere around Allahabad, I simply got off.
I spent two days wandering around Allahabad gathering the courage to face my family.
Eventually, I boarded another train and reached Ranchi.
The extended family commentary began immediately.
Everyone had an opinion.
Everyone except my father.
He simply supported me.
He told me that if I wanted to prepare for design entrances, I could stay in Ranchi and do it properly.
I joined a design coaching institute.
Within a week I realised it wasn’t going to work.
Some days the teachers didn’t even show up.
Then a friend who was in his final year at NIFT invited me to Kolkata for a couple of days.
He showed me the coaching institutes where he’d prepared.
And Kolkata fascinated me.
It felt like a city where being obsessed with art wasn’t considered strange.
I went home and told my parents:
“I need to prepare in Kolkata.”
They agreed.
So off I went again.
Within about a month of serious practice, my drawing improved dramatically. I started producing realistic artwork and, for perhaps the first time, I could see an actual path emerging.
I also met a girl there.
She was preparing for postgraduate entrance exams.
We started talking.
For two or three months, I completely forgot about the Class 10 girl.
Progress!
Then I discovered this girl was still deeply attached to an ex she described as abusive.
Whenever she disappeared for a week, it usually meant they were talking again.
Eventually I told her that I couldn’t keep participating in that triangle.
That chapter ended.
I focused on preparation.
If I summarise what i learned in those 7 months in Kolkata then it was just one thing “ patience “ , you can’t make art without patience!

Entrance exams happened around February/March.
Then came months of waiting for results.
I couldn’t sit around doing nothing.
So I made a résumé on Canva, uploaded it to Naukri, and waited.
A small company in Hyderabad called me for a video-editing job.
There was one slight issue.
I didn’t actually know video editing.
So naturally, I boarded the train to Hyderabad and spent the journey watching video-editing tutorials.
At the interview, they showed me what their 12-person team was doing and asked:
“Can you do this?”
I said:
“Yeah. Give me three days to understand it.”
They hired me.
Within a week, I was one of their best performers.
Salary: ₹13,000 per month.
When my first salary arrived, I wanted to send it to my mother.
Then Hyderabad introduced me to the concept of living expenses.
I celebrated at a famous biryani place and, by the end of the month, had to ask home for ₹5,000 just to survive.
That was in 2017.
It was also the last time I took money from home for my own survival.

Chapter 5: The college I cracked but never joined
Three months later, the company repeatedly asked me to move to its Bhubaneswar headquarters.
They offered accommodation, food, and ₹15,000 per month.
I agreed.
Life continued.
I met another girl there. We became close. I used to talk lot about sri krishna because i watched whole mahabharata series recently and got heavily influenced, Somewhere along the way, she became deeply interested in ISKCON and eventually became a full-time devotee. And over time i lost my spirituality.

Then my entrance results arrived.
I had cracked NIFT with an AIR around 1000.
NID had actually been my first preference, but I missed it by roughly 100 ranks, and because of the age criteria at the time, I believed that was essentially my final shot.
I was devastated.
I could still get NIFT options including Bengaluru, Delhi and Kolkata.
But I had stupid stereotypes about NIFT in my head back then and kept resisting the idea of joining.
Then we received worse news.
My father’s health had deteriorated significantly.
Doctors were warning us that his time could be limited.
Suddenly paying a huge college admission fee while my father was suffering felt absurd.
I started thinking:
“What if instead of spending four years in college learning the basics, I spend those four years actually working?”
Maybe I’d have four years of real corporate experience.
Maybe I’d earn enough to help my family.
Maybe I’d end up ahead.
So I didn’t join NIFT.
That single decision created the career path I’m still on today.
Whether it was the correct decision, I still don’t know.
But it got me somewhere.

Chapter 6: The supermarket experiment
Around this time, the Class 10 girl appeared again.
She found out I had a job.
And asked me for money.
Which she never returned.
Of course.
Despite everything, I still had this ridiculous soft corner for her. A year could pass, then I’d hear her voice and suddenly forget everything she’d done.
We’d talk for a couple of months.
Then she’d disappear.
Again.
Meanwhile, because doctors had advised my father not to travel much, our family decided to create a business he could manage from home.
We converted the ground floor into a grocery supermarket.
I physically helped demolish the room I’d grown up in to create space for it.
We didn’t have enough money to casually hire people for everything.
Watching pieces of my childhood room disappear was strangely painful.
But the store opened.
And initially?
It was a hit.
During the first month, daily sales were roughly ₹60,000-70,000.
People travelled surprisingly long distances to shop there.
For a moment, it looked like we’d built something genuinely successful.
I left my job to help grow it.
Then family disputes started.
Money creates strange chemistry between relatives.
My father’s health deteriorated further.
Then a larger competitor opened about 100 metres away, selling products at almost wholesale prices.
Our revenue nearly halved.
I tried everything.
I started building an app.
Listing the enormous product catalogue became a bottleneck and I never finished it.
We launched home delivery.
I personally delivered groceries on a scooter and sometimes in our family car.
I tried offline marketing.
Offers.
Flyers.
Whatever I could think of.
But the competitor had years of experience, deeper pockets and huge inventory.
We were struggling just to keep shelves full.
Products started expiring.
Then another supermarket opened roughly 50 metres away.
Sales collapsed.
Without sales, we couldn’t maintain inventory.
Without inventory, customers came once, couldn’t find what they needed, and never returned.
The whole thing unravelled within roughly a year.
One day, I printed flyers advertising “UP TO 40% OFF.”
My grandfather saw “40% OFF”, apparently missed the “up to” part, and exploded.
He said something roughly equivalent to:
“First go earn ₹50-70 lakh. Then give discounts like this. We don’t have money to burn.”
That sentence hit me harder than it probably should have.
I went into my new “room”, which was essentially an old washroom we’d converted because we’d rearranged most of the house for the store, opened my laptop and started applying for jobs everywhere.

Chapter 7: Hyderabad, again
A design agency in Hyderabad liked my portfolio.
They offered me ₹27,000 per month.
Two days after the argument at home, I told my parents I was leaving.
The agency had a young team and worked with some major Hyderabad brands, including Karachi Bakery and real-estate companies.
I stayed for about a year.
Around the tenth month, guess who returned?
Yes.
Class 10 girl.
This time she had finished engineering but couldn’t find a job and was depressed.
So naturally, after everything, I decided to help.
I spoke to my company.
They agreed to offer her a one-month paid internship, with the possibility of hiring her afterward.
She moved from Bengaluru to Hyderabad and stayed in a hostel near mine.
For a few days, everything became magical again.
Promises.
Plans.
“We’ll go here.”
“We’ll do this together.”
And apparently my brain had learned absolutely nothing in the previous decade.
I fell for it again.
Sixteen days later, she said she couldn’t continue because she was struggling with the coding challenges the company gave her.
About twenty days after arriving, she left for Bengaluru.
I dropped her at the bus station.
Afterward, work felt empty.
I’d arrive, work silently and leave.
Eventually I completed a year at the agency.
The CEO offered me a ₹3,000 raise.
₹27,000 to ₹30,000.
I was furious.
I’d independently completed projects for which clients were paying the company ₹1.5 lakh, while I received chocolates and a ₹3,000 increment.
So I opened LinkedIn.
Updated my portfolio.
Within days, another Hyderabad company offered me around ₹35,000, my own workstation and a better role.
I joined.
Everything was fine for a few months.
Then a new HR person arrived.
And she became obsessed with attendance.
10:30 meant 10:30.
Not 10:35.
Not 10:36.
If I was late, I’d get called into her cabin for a conversation about “improvement.”
I told her:
“I’ve always worked around a flexible window. If you absolutely need me here at exactly 10:30, give me ten days to change my routine. If I still can’t do it, then we can discuss it.”
She agreed.
And then continued questioning me every single time I was five minutes late.
The CEO loved my work.
But the micromanagement was driving me insane.
One day I decided I’d finally speak to him.
I went upstairs.
He was busy.
I went down to the basement and ran into someone from another floor smoking a joint.
He told me how relaxed his workplace was.
He offered it.
For reasons that remain a mystery to responsible adulthood, I took a few drags.
I became unbelievably high.
Naturally, THAT was when HR called.
“Come to the CEO’s office.”
Perfect timing.
I walked into the meeting and told the CEO everything.
He said my work was impressive, but because HR had complained so much, I needed to spend the next month proving I could do “more than what was expected.”
Then came the masterpiece:
Work the next month without salary.
Do extra work.
Then the withheld salary would be released later.
I said no.
I told him:
“I’m already giving you 100%. You’re asking for 200%. Are you giving us 100%? I’ve been asking you for months to replace this six-year-old Mac because it’s painfully slow. How exactly am I supposed to produce twice the work on it?”
That did not go over particularly well.
HR shouted:
“You can’t talk to your CEO like this!”
By then I’d mentally checked out.
The CEO said:
“You’re terminated.”
I said:
“Okay.”
I went to my cubicle and started packing.
HR followed me and suddenly changed tone.
“We can fix this. Don’t overthink.”
I handed over my ID card, grabbed my bag and left.
Colleagues tried stopping me.
One older colleague was genuinely emotional.
I explained what happened and walked away.
Somewhere on the journey home, the high wore off.
And reality arrived.
I had no job.
I was helping support my siblings.
It was the 31st of the month.
The company refused to release my salary and instead claimed I owed them money.
I went home, angrily burned the company T-shirt I’d previously worn proudly, and started looking for work.

Chapter 8: Two jobs and one phone call
I found two small jobs whose combined income roughly matched my previous salary.
One was with a guy trying to build his own agency.
The other was part-time work for a dairy company with more than 100 stores.
My schedule became:
10 AM-6 PM: Job one.
Rush across town.
6:30 PM-10:30 PM: Job two.
Repeat.
After about a month, I received a call from Ranchi.
My father’s condition had become serious.
I left Hyderabad, leaving many of my belongings behind.
I quit the dairy job and convinced the small agency owner to let me work remotely.
Then I reached Ranchi.
My father was admitted to a hospital.
After several days, his condition wasn’t improving.
At one point, he overheard medical staff discussing keeping him admitted for a few more days in the context of increasing the bill.
He panicked.
He demanded to come home.
Eventually we brought him back.
That night became one of the darkest moments of my life.
He couldn’t breathe properly.
Everything around me felt strangely dark.
For the first time, I genuinely thought:
“I’m watching my father die, and I can’t do anything.”
A cousin and I started searching Ranchi for an oxygen cylinder.
Hospital after hospital.
Contact after contact.
Eventually we found one and brought it home.
I connected oxygen to my father while he lay in bed.
I’d never imagined seeing him like that.
Overnight, we decided we couldn’t continue this way.
We were taking him to PGI Lucknow.

Chapter 9: Kidney failure, lockdown and losing my grandmother
Doctors in Lucknow started dialysis.
Then they told us the reality.
There were basically two paths:
Continue dialysis multiple times every week, with all the physical toll that came with it.
Or kidney transplant.
Which immediately raised another question:
Whose kidney?
About ten days passed.
Regular dialysis stabilised him somewhat.
And then one evening, Narendra Modi appeared on national television.
From midnight, India was going into lockdown.
Suddenly we were stranded in Lucknow with a seriously ill father who required dialysis.
Hospital operations changed.
We had to find expensive private alternatives.
For another couple of weeks, we somehow survived there while I continued working remotely.
Eventually my father became desperate to return home.
We found an ambulance.
My parents, siblings and I somehow squeezed inside and travelled back to Ranchi.
When we reached home, my grandmother saw the dialysis catheter around my father’s neck.
It affected her deeply.
She called me over and told me stories about her entire life. How she’d built everything brick by brick.
The next day, she died.
Because we’d just returned during COVID, people assumed we’d brought the virus home and that she’d died from it.
Very few people came to the funeral.
But we barely had time to process any of that.
My father still needed dialysis.
And hospitals weren’t accepting patients normally.
While most of the world was locked inside their homes, I was travelling from hospital to hospital with my father, trying to find anyone who would treat him.
At one hospital, they repeatedly attempted to create vascular access in his arm and struggled to locate a suitable vessel.
After that experience, we decided we weren’t going back there.
Eventually, we found another hospital willing to provide dialysis.
Coincidentally, it had the same name as my grandmother.
That became our routine.
Every alternate day:
Take Dad to dialysis.
Wait.
Bring him home.
Work.
Repeat.

Chapter 10: An email from Amazon
A couple of months into this, the company I was working remotely for started refusing to pay my full salary.
Then one day, an email appeared.
The subject contained something like:
“5 Star Candidate - Amazon Interview”
Amazon had given me an assignment.
Three banners and a website design.
I didn’t even expect to get selected.
I was dealing with my father’s treatment, dialysis and everything happening around us.
I couldn’t finish the assignment completely.
I submitted two banners and roughly half the website.
I assumed that was the end of it.
A week later, I was selected for the interview round.
Then another round.
And somehow…
I got into Amazon India as a graphic designer.
My take-home salary was roughly ₹55,000.
Suddenly I was designing homepage banners and fashion-category creatives and working with brands like Nike and Puma.
Brands I’d never imagined I’d touch professionally.
The beginning was difficult, but the team was incredible.
My managers saw potential in me and actively protected me from getting trapped in repetitive work.
People received credit for what they actually contributed.
Teamwork felt real.
It was the first time I understood what a genuinely strong corporate team could feel like.
And the strangest part?
Sometimes I’d be sitting in a car outside the hospital, working on my laptop while my father underwent dialysis inside.
Amazon on the laptop.
Dialysis in the building.
That was life.

Chapter 11: The transplant
After roughly a year, dialysis was visibly destroying my father’s body.
He had lost significant weight.
His overall health wasn’t improving.
Then he started struggling for oxygen again.
We decided enough was enough.
We would get the transplant done.
One of my father’s sisters initially volunteered to donate a kidney but later backed out.
Then my mother stepped forward.
“I’m here.”
We went to Chandigarh.
Within weeks, my father received one of my mother’s kidneys.
We somehow arranged the money.
Loans.
Help from my mother’s side of the family.
Whatever we could find.
I continued working from the hospital.
Dad was eventually discharged.
We stayed in Chandigarh for months for recovery.
Then the second COVID wave arrived.
This one was horrifying.
People around the country were dying in numbers that were difficult to comprehend.
With a recent transplant patient on immunosuppressants, we became obsessive about precautions.
Eventually we returned to Ranchi.
Dad was improving.
Mom recovered surprisingly quickly after the donation.
But during the first year, medications, tests and medical follow-ups could cost us around ₹90,000 per month.
I still don’t completely understand how we managed it.
I had a US client on the side and would take freelance work whenever money became tight.
I charged him far less than I probably should have.
But the work appeared whenever I desperately needed it.
Somewhere during those years, I developed this strange belief:
“I’ll always have what I need.”
Not necessarily what I want.
But somehow, when everything is collapsing, something appears.

Chapter 12: Amazon to Scaler
After around two years at Amazon, the managers I loved working with told me they were leaving.
I half-jokingly said:
“What am I going to do here without you guys? I’ll leave too.”
They referred me to Scaler.
COVID had created a massive boom in online upskilling.
I joined at roughly ₹90,000 per month and moved to Bengaluru.
For about a year and a half, things looked good professionally.
But another monster was quietly growing.
Debt.
We had borrowed heavily for my father’s treatment and transplant.
I desperately wanted to repay everything as quickly as possible.
So I started looking for side-income opportunities.
That’s how I discovered forex trading.
Initially, it was fantastic.
I was sometimes making ₹50,000-60,000 per month.
It felt like I’d discovered a superpower.
I’d sit at KFC, spend ₹1,000 on food and think:
“I’ve already made ₹2,000 while sitting here.”
That mindset was dangerous.
Because trading isn’t just about knowing charts.
It tests how much control you have over greed, fear and yourself.
And eventually I discovered that I didn’t have nearly as much control as I thought.

Chapter 13: The crash
Around Diwali, I went home.
The day after Diwali, my brother and I were driving to my maternal grandparents’ place.
He was driving because I rarely drive when he’s around.
At a sharp 90-degree turn, the tyres lost grip.
We were doing around 60 km/h.
A truck was coming from the other side at perhaps 30 km/h.
Head-on collision.
The car was totalled.
Both of us were wearing seat belts.
My brother got minor injuries when his glasses broke and scratched his forehead.
I somehow came out basically uninjured.
I remember the impact almost frame by frame.
Everything slowed down.
The windshield breaking.
My open laptop flying through the air.
The laptop closing mid-air and somehow falling back near my hands.
My phone flying out of the car.
Everything.
My uncle sent a driver and another car to get us.
We stayed with family for two days and returned.
Physically, I was fine.
Mentally, something had changed.
I kept thinking:
“It was my idea to go that day.”
I irrationally started taking responsibility for the accident.
When I returned to Bengaluru, that guilt mixed with my existing financial stress.
Now I wanted to compensate for the car.
Repay medical loans.
Fix everything.
And I thought trading could do it.
Instead, trading became the thing that nearly destroyed me.

Chapter 14: ₹22 lakh
My salary roughly looked like this:
40% sent home.
30% living expenses.
30% loan EMIs.
Then loan companies started constantly offering me more credit.
Initially, I refused.
Eventually I started accepting.
I’d borrow money, trade with it, make some profit, close the loan within a month or two.
It was insanely risky.
But while it worked, it felt clever.
There was one obvious problem.
If I failed once, the entire structure would collapse.
Then I failed once.
I lost money belonging to one lender.
So I borrowed from another lender to repay the first.
Then I traded some of that money hoping to recover the loss.
Lost again.
Borrowed more.
Lost more.
The cycle accelerated.
Within roughly three months, I had lost more than ₹18 lakh of borrowed money.
My EMIs eventually exceeded 80% of my salary.
I discovered some loans where I’d effectively been paying enormous amounts of interest while barely reducing the principal.
That made me angry.
So what did my financially enlightened brain decide?
Take another loan to close those loans.
At that time, every loan company seemed to know I had a decent salary.
My phone constantly rang:
“Sir, pre-approved loan.”
“Sir, instant disbursement.”
“Sir, special offer.”
Eventually, I had more than ten active loan accounts.
Then lenders finally stopped approving me.
And for the first time in roughly five years of working, I started missing EMIs.
That’s when you discover a very different side of the lending industry.
100+ missed calls.
Threats.
Abuse.
Some shady loan apps accessing contacts and calling random people from my phonebook.
Your phone stops feeling like a phone.
It becomes a grenade that rings every few minutes.
I understood why people in that situation become suicidal.
There were moments when I felt frighteningly close to that darkness too.
Thinking about my parents and everything we’d survived kept pulling me back.

Chapter 15: Then I lost my job
About a year and a half later, the tech and ed-tech world started bleeding.
AI, especially tools like ChatGPT, was rapidly changing the economics of businesses built around traditional upskilling. Scaler also went through layoffs.
Eventually, I was laid off.
Now imagine this:
Huge debt.
Missed EMIs.
Phone ringing constantly.
No job.
Family responsibilities.
And nobody in my family knew the complete scale of what I’d done.
I returned to Ranchi completely broken.
For months, I barely functioned.
I’d sleep most of the day.
For the first time in my six-year career, I was applying for jobs and getting almost nothing.
Eventually I stopped applying altogether.
Six months passed.
Then one day I decided:
“Enough. I’ll accept whatever reasonable company gives me a chance. I just need to start moving again.”
Something bizarre happened.
Within about a week, six companies wanted to interview me.
Meesho.
Dainik Bhaskar.
ALLEN.
And several other companies.
I cleared five out of six.
I chose ALLEN and returned to Bengaluru.
The job was comfortable.
But internally, the debt was always sitting there.
Then Dainik Bhaskar called again.
They were willing to meet the salary I’d asked for and offered me a senior role in Bhopal.
That meant something to me.
I’d grown up reading that newspaper.
There was something strangely poetic about eventually designing for the newspaper that had been lying around my childhood home every morning.
So I joined.
For a while, it felt like I’d completed some invisible circle. As i got two NIFT passouts working under me there, helping me visualise my ideas.
Eventually, though, office politics started wearing me down.
Micromanagement.
Credit for work going elsewhere.
Corporate friction.
The usual tiny cuts that eventually become a wound.
Then one night, frustrated and slightly drunk, I called the US client I’d been working with on and off for years.
I basically asked:
“Why don’t we just do this properly? Full-time?”
To my surprise, he agreed.
He matched my roughly ₹1.5 lakh monthly take-home salary and offered me the CTO role.
So I left.
And that brings me to now
I’m back in Ranchi.
I work when and how I want.
There are no leave applications.
No asking permission to spend time with my parents.
No attendance drama.
No endless emails written purely because someone needs to demonstrate that an email was written.
I work.
I build things.
And when my parents need me, I’m physically here.
That last part means more to me than any designation ever could.
The debt story isn’t magically over.
I haven’t properly serviced many of those old loans for around two years.
The calls have mostly faded away.
My credit score is destroyed.
At some point I’ll have to clean up the wreckage, negotiate what can be negotiated, and pay what I reasonably can.
I’m working toward that.
But strangely, I’m not terrified anymore.
I’ve watched my father nearly die.
I’ve watched my mother give him a kidney.
I’ve worked from hospital corridors.
I’ve abandoned engineering.
I’ve cracked design colleges and chosen not to attend them.
I’ve earned ₹13,000 a month.
I’ve worked at Amazon.
I’ve worked two jobs in the same day.
I’ve built a supermarket and watched it collapse.
I’ve been fired.
I’ve been laid off.
I’ve made money trading and then discovered how spectacularly dangerous confidence can become when mixed with leverage.
I’ve lost more borrowed money than younger me could even imagine possessing.
I’ve had periods where I genuinely didn’t know how I’d get through the next month.
And somehow…

I’m 31.
Still here.
Still curious.
Still drawing things.
Still building things.
Still constantly thinking about some ridiculous idea when I’m supposed to be doing something else.
So maybe the five-year-old getting beaten because he couldn’t stop drawing in class never really disappeared.
He just got a laptop.

I don’t know whether I’d call myself successful.
There are people my age who own houses, have beautiful families, perfect credit scores, investment portfolios and carefully planned futures.

My life looks nothing like that.

Mine looks more like somebody opened twenty browser tabs, accidentally played music from three of them, crashed Chrome twice, restored the session and somehow kept working.

There are things I deeply regret.

People I trusted far longer than I should have.
Money decisions that were objectively stupid.
Opportunities I walked away from.

Years I sometimes wonder whether I wasted.

But there are also things I wouldn’t trade.

Especially being able to look at my father today and know that somehow, against everything that happened, he’s still here.

Maybe that’s why I’ve stopped believing life is supposed to move in a straight line.
Mine certainly hasn’t.

And perhaps that’s okay.

If i can do this without any degree, and average 12th 10th marks then whats stopping you? You can be better than this, avoiding the mistakes i made.

There’s still a ridiculous amount I want to do.
Build things.
Travel.
Learn.
Fix the financial mess I created.
Take care of my parents.

And maybe finally make some of those strange ideas that distracted me in school actually useful.

If you’ve actually read this far, congratulations.
You now know more about my life than approximately 95% of the people who know me in real life.

Coffee’s probably cold by now.

Thanks for reading.

Hey everyone,
I’m thinking about starting a small café/restaurant in Ranchi focused on the 6–8 AM breakfast crowd.
Wanted to know if people actually step out for breakfast this early, and what you would genuinely like to eat: poha, dosa, paratha, eggs, sandwiches, chai, coffee, healthy bowls, or something else?
Also, which area in Ranchi do you think would work best?
Would really appreciate honest suggestions, especially from students, gym-goers, office workers, travellers, and early risers.