The Boy Who Kept Moving

The beginning of my writing journey with a story about myself.

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a household in Bihar in the small hours before a journey — the silence of a mother folding clothes she has already folded twice, of a father checking, for the third time, that the tickets are where he left them. Somewhere in the middle of that silence, in the year 2005, a boy was born who would spend the better part of the next two decades in motion, though he did not know it yet, and would not have believed it if you had told him.

By 2008 he was gone from the place of his birth — carried, as children are, without consultation, into the great heaving organism of Mumbai. They call it the City of Dreams, and they are not wrong to, though nobody tells you on arrival that a city which sells dreams wholesale rarely hands them out for free. It extracts a price first, usually in the currency of patience, and sometimes in the currency of money you do not yet have. The boy’s family belonged to that vast, dignified, unglamorous class of people who are not in crisis but are never quite at ease either — the lower middle class, who do not starve but who count, who do not despair but who plan, who carry in the backs of their minds a low and constant hum of we must do better than this, for the children if not for ourselves. He absorbed that hum before he had words for it. It would return to him later, transmuted into ambition.

Childhood in Mumbai was what childhood is everywhere — a roller coaster, he would call it himself, years later, with the casual understatement of someone describing a storm he survived without quite registering it as one at the time. School happened. Years happened. And then, in 2019, the entire world outside his window simply stopped.

It is strange to think of a lockdown as a gift, when for so many it was the opposite — illness, loss, the suffocating sameness of four walls repeated for months without end. But for some young minds, sealed indoors with nothing but time and a restless intelligence looking for somewhere to go, those months became something else: a kind of accidental apprenticeship. He found his way, as bright and bored teenagers do, into the unglamorous corners of the internet where curious people teach themselves things nobody assigned them — the rudiments of hacking, the architecture of how systems are built and how they break. And alongside that, almost as a separate thread, he discovered he could write, and that people would pay him, modestly, to do it. Freelance content work, picked up client by client, in an era when nobody was yet whispering the words artificial intelligence into ordinary conversation. He was, without fully knowing it, building the first quiet plank of a bridge whose far end he could not yet see.

Then came the autumn of a particular year when a chatbot was released into the world, and the world, for once, actually noticed. He watched it happen the way millions did — first with the mild curiosity of someone scrolling past a trend, and then with something sharper, more personal, that refused to let him scroll past. How does this work? How does meaning come out of nothing, language out of mathematics, sentences out of silicon? It is one thing to be impressed by a magic trick. It is another to become quietly obsessed with finding the trapdoor. He was the second kind. That obsession did not fade when the headlines moved on, the way trends usually fade. It hardened instead into a direction.

In 2023 he left Mumbai for Pune, the way young people leave the gravity of their childhood city for the looser orbit of a university town, and he chose, deliberately, to study artificial intelligence — to turn the thing that had seized his curiosity into the thing he would be professionally accountable for understanding. It is worth pausing here, because this is the part of the story that flatters no one, least of all him, and that is precisely why it matters.

His first year was not triumphant. There was no early flash of brilliance, no instant sense of having found his place. He was, by his own honest reckoning, figuring things out — dabbling in web development, in competitive programming, in cloud and cybersecurity and the early outlines of AI, with the scattershot energy of someone who suspects he is good at something but has not yet found the angle that proves it. He had, he would tell you plainly, not much confidence in anything. He was starting from zero, like every single person around him whether they admitted it or not. What saved that year from being merely a fog was the people in it — a handful of others equally lost, equally hungry, who found each other the way young people do when they recognize a fellow traveler by the particular quality of their uncertainty. Together they discovered hackathons, those frantic all-night tournaments of building things against the clock, and somewhere near the end of that first year, against modest odds, he landed his first internship.

If the first year was the fog, the second was the clearing. He spent it largely outside the classroom — which is to say, in the only places where the kind of learning he actually needed could happen. He competed. He built. He won — not once, but across a string of hackathons and events that began to compound into something resembling a reputation among his peers. He met people who would matter to him for years. And almost without noticing the exact moment it happened, he became someone with a different posture toward the world — not arrogant, but no longer apologetic. He ended that year on a high note, the way a runner finishes a race they didn’t know they had in them until the final stretch.

And then came the third year, which is the year this story turns, because growth is rarely a straight line upward, and the most honest tellings of a life admit the places where it bent.

He went into a few hackathons early on, the way he had the year before, expecting more of the same intoxicating momentum. Instead he found something that curdled it. He watched people win — not by understanding what they had built, but by leaning on AI tools to produce a result they could not explain, judged by panels that did not seem to notice or care. It is a particular kind of disillusionment, watching a thing you love start to rot from the inside, watching merit lose ground to performance. He did not rage against it publicly. He simply turned, quietly, toward something more solid.

That something was a corporate internship — less glamorous on paper, heavier in practice. There was a commute that wore him down day after day, the unglamorous fatigue of real working life that no hackathon all-nighter prepares you for. But there was also, waiting at the other end of that commute, a team worth the exhaustion — people building production-grade software for real commercial stakes, and among them, engineers who wrote every line of their own code, who trusted their own hands over any shortcut. Something in him recalibrated there, watching that kind of craftsmanship up close. Respect, he learned, is a thing you can only borrow from convenience for so long before it asks you to actually earn it.

When that internship ended, he did something almost nobody does on purpose: he gave his restlessness a body to live in. He started running. It did not love him back at first — shin splints, sore legs, the dull protest of a body unused to being asked for more — and for a while it must have seemed like one more thing that should have been easy and wasn’t. But he kept at it, the way he had kept at everything else since 2019, and it became, gradually, almost daily — not a punishment anymore, but a practice. A way of putting something difficult and physical against all the difficult and abstract things he was carrying in his head.

Which brings him here — to his final year, and to the strange, suspended posture of a person who has done a great deal and has not yet been rewarded for it in the way the world tends to reward things, with a title, a number, a stamp of arrival. He is looking outward now, beyond his own borders, toward opportunities that exist in other countries, in other currencies, in rooms he has not yet entered. He is upskilling in directions that have nothing to do with code — communication, sales, the unglamorous, very human art of making other people understand and want what you have built. He is reading. He is watching films and sport the way some people pray, processing the world through stories that are not his own so that he might better understand the one that is. He is journaling, writing for no one but himself, the way you tend a small fire so it does not go out before the larger one catches.

And underneath all of it, quiet but constant, is the hum he absorbed as a child without words for it — the wish to build enough, eventually, that his parents can rest a little easier than they have had to. Not riches. Just room to breathe.

He has not arrived anywhere yet. That is the truest sentence in this entire story. There is no triumphant final chapter to report, no funding round, no offer letter from the company that changes everything, no definitive proof that the years of hackathons and shin splints and disillusionment and 6 a.m. runs were all in service of some destination that has now, satisfyingly, been reached. He is, as I write this, still in the middle of it — still sending messages into the dark to people in companies on other continents, still training a body that once buckled under the simple demand of running, still hoping, with the specific ache of someone who has worked hard enough to know exactly how much it would mean if it paid off.

But there is a version of this story — and only time will tell if it is the true one — where this chapter is not an ending but a hinge. Where the boy from Bihar who became a teenager in Mumbai who became a hungry, self-taught young engineer in Pune looks back, years from now, at exactly this point in the narrative — uncertain, unproven, still striving — and recognizes it not as a low point to be glossed over, but as the place where everything quietly turned. The reader does not get to know yet which version this is. Neither, in truth, does he. He has simply decided to keep moving, keep building, keep running — on the not-unreasonable bet that the people who keep moving long enough are usually the ones who eventually arrive somewhere worth arriving.

The story, as it stands, is unfinished. He would not have it any other way. An unfinished story is still being written — and he is, after all, still holding the pen.