Chapter Two

The Weight of Gravity

Between March 2022 and March 2024, during eleventh and twelfth standard, I joined JEE coaching because I wanted IIT. Every Saturday and Sunday, I travelled roughly 120 kilometres round trip to Meerut. The journey became part of the routine: travel, classes, preparation, revision, repeat. I wanted the laboratories, the people, the research opportunities, and the environment I associated with IIT. I worked seriously for it. There were long stretches when the future seemed to have narrowed into one objective, and I believed that if I put enough effort into the process, the destination would eventually follow.

It did not.

At the beginning of twelfth standard, I won a state-level competition in Dehradun. Around late August 2023, shortly after Chandrayaan-3 successfully landed on the Moon, I was selected with a friend to meet the Deputy Director of ISRO and learn about the mission directly from him. For someone who had spent years imagining rockets, spacecraft, and planetary exploration, the opportunity felt almost perfectly aligned with the world I had been trying to reach.

There was just one complication. One or two days before the meeting, I was diagnosed with jaundice. I was put on a strict diet and was receiving injections twice a day for a stomach infection. I woke up early and went to the meeting anyway. I was still a student who wanted to be close to the things he admired, and even feeling physically weak, I did not want illness to be the reason I missed an opportunity I had spent years imagining.

Then twelfth standard ended, and the part of the story I had been trying hardest to control suddenly became something I could not control at all.

I had not got enough to even get into a tier 2 college, and I had zero college acceptances.

That sentence is difficult to compress into a motivational story because it did not feel motivational at the time. I had spent years collecting experiences that looked impressive from the outside, yet when the conventional admission process arrived, those achievements did not translate into the outcome I had imagined. The problem was no longer whether I had built something interesting or won a competition. The question was where I was actually going to study, and suddenly I did not have an answer.

Eventually, I had to choose a college, and I chose a tier 3 college in Bangalore. The college itself was not the destination I had once imagined, but Bangalore was a deliberate choice. I wanted to be in a city where technology, startups, engineers, founders, and opportunities were concentrated around me. If I could not enter the environment I had originally wanted through the front door, I could at least place myself in a city where I could keep building toward it. I did not choose Bangalore because the disappointment had disappeared. I chose it because I still had ambitions that existed beyond the admission result.

Within months, I was back to building.

In November 2024, I participated in a hackathon involving more than 1,500 people and finished in the top ten. Somewhere in that experience, I met the person who would become my cofounder in Event Union. We started the company together soon afterward. In a relatively short period, we built a community of around 500 people from different parts of the world and signed an MOU with STAR Inc. in Surat to organize events in Bangalore and eventually across India.

For a while, the project had the kind of momentum that can make an unfinished company feel more mature than it really is. There were people to talk to, communities forming, events to think about, and plans for what could come next. It was easy to mistake activity for proof.

Six months later, in April 2025, we shut it down.

There was no dramatic collapse. There was simply not enough product-market fit. Competition was heavy, the market was shifting toward branded events, and we had not validated the problem deeply enough before building around it. This was a different kind of failure from losing a competition. A judge could tell you that you had lost. A score could tell you where you stood. A business could continue looking alive while quietly telling you that customers were not giving you a reason to keep it alive. Eventually, the market made that answer clear.

Event Union ended, and I had to accept that effort alone does not create demand.

Earlier, around November 2020 during the COVID lockdown, I had co-founded Aerospacizm with high-school students from different parts of India. The project had grown out of the fascination that had started with rockets, weather balloons, and the Mars rover years earlier. During the lockdown era, while remote work and remote learning had pushed collaboration onto screens, Aerospacizm took shape as a remote aerospace group. We worked on aerospace research and experimentation, including advanced water rockets called DHRAVAM, and collected data on vibration, pressure, apogee, and other parameters. We tried to approach the subject seriously rather than treating it only as a hobby.

Eventually, exams and the absence of a clear long-term direction brought Aerospacizm to an end.

It was strange to watch something you had spent years imagining eventually become something you no longer had the time or structure to continue. There was no single day when the entire thing dramatically disappeared. Projects sometimes end much more quietly than they begin. The people involved move toward exams, college, jobs, new ambitions, and different responsibilities until the original structure no longer has enough momentum to survive. I experienced that with Aerospacizm, and later with Event Union. Different reasons, different stages of life, but the same underlying reality: building something is often easier than deciding when it is time to stop building it.

Then something unexpected happened.

While I was still in my first year of college, I received a call asking me to give a guest lecture on startups and fundraising to MBA students at Harsha Institute of Management and Studies. A few years earlier, I had struggled to explain a science model to judges and could barely get the words out properly. Now I was being asked to stand in front of MBA students and talk about startups and fundraising. The transformation had taken long enough that it was almost easy to forget how unnatural speaking in front of people had once felt.

In October 2025, I received the “Big Brainer” award from my college for my extracurricular work. The achievement mattered, but by this point I had become more careful about what I allowed an award to mean. I had already experienced enough wins and losses to know that recognition could arrive long after the struggle and disappear long before the work was finished.

There was another part of my life moving in the opposite direction.

In September 2014, when I was younger, I had been involved in a serious accident that broke both bones of my left leg. I spent roughly three and a half months on bed rest, followed by another six months before I could properly walk, run, and cycle again. Recovery had changed my relationship with movement, but over the years that followed, I gradually became heavier. While competitions, JEE preparation, projects, and ambitions occupied most of my attention, my physical condition was changing in the background.

By 2023, I had reached 108 kilograms.

After twelfth standard, my parents eventually allowed me to join a gym again. I started training and immediately discovered how much strength I had to build. I remember struggling with an incline dumbbell chest press using 10-kilogram dumbbells. For someone who wanted to become stronger, it was a surprisingly humbling place to begin. There was no cinematic transformation waiting on the other side of the first workout. There was simply a weight I could barely handle and the realization that I would have to repeat the process many times.

I kept training and eventually reached around 95 kilograms. Then I moved to Bangalore, and for roughly six months the gym disappeared from my routine.

Around Holi in 2025, I saw myself again and realized how much weight I had regained. Some difficult conversations at home, including comments from my father about my weight, became the spark that pushed me back into training. The next day, I started again.

This time I became extremely consistent. I trained in the morning and evening, tracked my food, increased my movement, and became increasingly serious about understanding what I was putting into my body. At my most aggressive point, I was doing around an hour of cardio in the morning and up to two hours of weight training in the evening. I was trying to improve everything at once: strength, conditioning, diet, body composition, discipline.

The weight started coming down.

Eventually, I had lost around thirty kilograms and reached roughly 78 kilograms. For the first time, I could see my abs. People noticed the transformation and began complimenting me. After years of being overweight, there was something deeply satisfying about seeing a physical result that I had built through repetition. Unlike an exam result or a competition, nobody could award it to me. It had to happen in my body.

But I made the same mistake in a different form.

I wanted more.

I began sleeping around four hours a night while continuing heavy training. The routine became something I tried to survive rather than something my body could sustainably support. I had become so attached to the identity of being disciplined that rest started to feel like weakness. The more exhausted I became, the more I treated fatigue as something to overcome.

Eventually, my body made the decision for me.

I developed severe vertigo and nausea and could barely walk. My blood pressure reached around 180/90. Training stopped. The routine I had constructed around my body collapsed almost overnight. I gained around ten kilograms.

For a while, the frustration was almost physical. After putting so much effort into losing weight, watching the number move backward felt like watching months of work being erased. I was back in the uncomfortable position I had experienced so many times before in other parts of life: something I had built was no longer behaving the way I wanted.

This time, the solution was not to work harder.

It was to work differently.

I started paying attention to sleep, recovery, nutrition, and sustainability instead of treating every day as a test of how much punishment I could tolerate. I began aiming for a sleep schedule around 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., morning cardio, evening weight training, and gradually increasing daily movement toward 15,000 steps. I incorporated roughly an hour of incline walking at around 4 km/h and supplements such as magnesium, omega-3, creatine, and a multivitamin into my routine. I also became increasingly interested in longevity and approaches such as Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint, while understanding that my own routine had to remain practical enough to live with.

The goal had changed. I was no longer trying merely to become lighter. I wanted a body that could support the rest of my ambitions rather than become another system I eventually broke through excess.

And I am not finished with it.

Over the next five to ten years, I want to push that part of my life much further. I want to prepare for national-level bodybuilding competitions, Hyrox, and eventually an Ironman. The point is not simply to collect titles or endurance achievements. I want to see how far physical capability can be developed when it is approached with patience rather than desperation, and with recovery treated as part of the training instead of an obstacle to it.

That distinction matters because almost every major part of my life has eventually forced me to confront the same problem: intensity can start something, but sustainability is what allows it to survive.