Chapter The Shire

Chapter 1 of 4

Walk on to follow the road. Click a lantern stone to read its moment.

  • Curiosity, 0 of 30
  • Craft, 0 of 30
  • Gold, 0 of 24
  • Fellowship, 0 of 12

My story

An illustrated road from the Shire to Gondor and the road ahead. It has four chapters of my life, and each chapter holds three moments. Text in [brackets] is placeholder copy.

The Shire

Chapter 1 of 4, until 2001

Hobbit holes in green mounds, gardens by the round doors and a mill on the Water.

Hatchling

My early childhood was in Delhi. I fondly remember playing with my cousins, climbing fences, and spending many lazy afternoons running around, playing endless cricket games, watching cartoons and playing with my many dozen GI Joes.

Fledgling

We moved to Chennai when I was in sixth grade, and I went to school at Chinmaya Vidyalaya. I carried my insecurities through the first few years there, struggling to score well in my exams. That changed when my math teacher, Mr. Ravi, showed up. I still remember a 15-mark test on tangents that I aced without knowing it. He asked me to stay back after class and said, "You know what, you can do a lot more. You're just lazy!" Way to light a fire, sir! My first programs were a tic-tac-toe game and a visual analog clock, in C++. I kept learning to program from Mr. Sivakumar, my computer science teacher. Everything I have today goes back to the two of them.

Champion

At school I learned to make friends, to stand up for myself, and then to stand up for my friends. In high school I was elected School Pupil Leader.

Rivendell

Chapter 2 of 4, 2001 to 2012

Elven halls with tall arches in a valley of waterfalls.

Wanderer

I studied information technology in college. I spent a lot of my time at quizzes, symposia and conferences in other colleges. I also met the love of my life.

Upstart

The summer after college, two friends and I built a fingerprint attendance system around a single sensor and sold it to a sugar factory in rural Andhra Pradesh. We had no company and no references, so we sold it through a friend's uncle's software company, then spent a month on site installing it. It was my first taste of building something and selling it.

Apprentice

In my first jobs I wrote software that touched millions of lives. I learned the nuances of building code that holds up in production, and I learned to work hard and prove my worth. I got married in 2009.

Gondor

Chapter 3 of 4, 2012 to 2022

Minas Tirith on its white terraced rings, and the Harlond quays on the river.

Threshold

2012 was an eventful year. Our daughter was born, and we moved from Chennai to Bangalore for my first job at Amazon. There I built the marketing platforms that send email and push notifications to Amazon customers.

Messenger

In 2015 I spent a year at Twitter India, then came back to Amazon. I kept building marketing systems for millions of Amazon customers, including a model that predicts what each customer is likely to do next. Our son was born in 2016.

Trial by fire

In 2019 we moved to Seattle, and I led product for the forecasts hundreds of Amazon retail teams plan against. Then COVID hit, and it was a trial by fire. I ran the forecasting for Prime Day and Black Friday through the supply chain shocks of 2020 and 2021.

The road ahead

Chapter 4 of 4, 2022 to today

Evening on the road, a fire by the wayside and a tower still going up.

Sunseeker

In 2022 I moved into Amazon Health to help start its online store for health services. We lived in Seattle until the summer of 2023, then moved to Austin for the sunshine. Here I launched a service that helps people use their employer and insurer benefits to join free health programs.

Artificer

Since 2024 I have been building generative AI and agentic systems in health care. They answer people's health questions and take actions for them.

The Road goes ever on and on

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Hidden paths

I am still building with generative AI and agentic systems. If you are building in the same space, or just want to talk, write to me.

Find me