Interests

A 7,500 km 'padayatra' (walkathon) from Kanyakumari to Kashmir for interfaith peace and harmony, led by Sri M (Mumtaz Ali): 11 states, 15 months, 10 million people reached. I was one of roughly 100 people who walked the full route, handling on-ground communications: handing the walk's one-pager to the public, every day, for the length of the country.

The feature documentary Walking with M chronicles the walk. It won Best Documentary at Film Fest International (Berlin FFI 2023), the Global Peace and Harmony Award at the International Film Festival The Hague (IFFH 2023) and Outstanding Achievement at the Swedish International Film Festival, with an honourable mention at the Athens Monthly Art Film Festival.

I got into home automation through data collection and AI, and built a dashboard that now tracks the city's weather, controls the house's power-hungry appliances from anywhere and logs what each one draws. The build on the bench right now is a DIY indoor air-quality monitor that will feed the same dashboard: custom Arduino firmware on an ESP32-C6 Mini, reading CO2, VOCs, temperature and humidity onto a small OLED screen.

Most of what you do online is tracked: the modern web identifies and fingerprints you, with or without consent. After a year inside the tools and techniques of digital privacy, I built the one I couldn't find: a self-contained private browser that reaches the internet only through an encrypted tunnel, resists fingerprinting, and forgets everything the moment it closes. Existing open-source projects each did a piece of that job; none did all of it. Claude wrote the code; I interrogated every choice. It's free and public on GitHub, with automated checks on every change.

Karnataka is one of India's largest data-centre hubs: 31 of the state's 32 private facilities sit in Bengaluru, always on and hungry for cooling water, yet no agency tracks what they consume. The water board doesn't monitor them as a category, the pollution board holds no consolidated account of their cooling-water permissions, and the state assembled its own consumption figure from informal conversations with operators. The Atlas closes that gap: a living, per-facility reference joining what the public record contains but nobody has assembled in one place, each facility mapped to its investment approval, its environmental clearance, its declared water source and permitted quantity, and the groundwater stress beneath it.

Vehicle theft is routine in India, and the trackers sold against it are cheap to beat: a sheet of aluminium foil can blind the GPS. I'm building one that survives those tricks. It spots a jammer before it loses its fix, and a motion sensor keeps recording the route while the signal is gone. Cut its power and a backup cell raises the alarm. It reports to a server you run, on your own SIM, so the data stays yours.