Our Life In Miles

Boy Wonder

For as long as I can remember, I was an extremely hyperactive and curious boy. Raised in a small town in Gujarat (Bhavnagar), I would spend my free time mostly outdoors; playing with friends, climbing trees (and sometimes buildings) and tinkering with books and games.

My mother was a botanist turned freelance writer, and my father was a chemist, with a passion for sketching and nature photography. Thus, my upbringing slowly nurtured interests in Mother Nature and fiction writing. I was good at academics and was in the school basketball team (mainly for my speed, since I am pretty short), so I was pretty much up to my neck in passions and interests. However, one particular interest developed right around my 10th boards, the germ for which had been laid in a childhood trip to Sikkim – music.

Brick In The Wall

The standard rite of passage for every person in their last 2 years of school is to put their nose into their books, grit their teeth through the existential crisis of the transition to adulthood, and forget all childish dreams of interesting lives and careers. Engineering (or medicine) was the way to go if you wanted to have any sort of privileges or luxuries later in life – and ironically, any sort of exposure to new cultures, lifestyles and professions. And so, I buried my nose in my books and aimed to get into any of the reputed IITs or BITS Pilani. 

I still remember sitting on a swing in my backyard at my grandma’s home in Vadodara, thinking about what would happen to my dream of being a musician / writer. I decided to shelve those thoughts and ensure I wouldn’t be struggling to make ends meet first.

BITS and Pieces

I got into BITS Pilani, in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. As soon as I got the admission letter, I built up my very own castle in the air – I would become a sound engineer, get my own studio, slowly start recording songs myself, release albums and become a famous musician. With that fantasy, I threw myself into my courses and vowed to not let myself get distracted.

It was, therefore, very unwise of me have joined the Music Club, Ragamalika (the classical music and dance club), English Press Club, Cactus Flower (the annual college magazine), the Quizzing Club and the Stage Controls department. By the third year, I had founded my own A Cappella club, and had become the Editor of Cactus Flower. I was not doing well in my courses at all, and just gathering a few skills here and there – a bit of singing, playing the piano and the flute, writing, quizzing, cycling around the outskirts of Pilani… an unfocused, random ball of energy, bouncing around from place to place, passion to passion, without a plan. I needed to get away, someplace calm, someplace I could collect my thoughts, and figure it all out. That’s when I had my first trip to the mountains.

The Climb

Kinnaur Kailash, my first ever expedition. I found something I had felt missing almost all throughout college – peace, and purpose. The mountains even brought all my other arts and passions together; they inspired songs and lyrical poetry, they made my heart beat faster as I climbed them, they brought to life the metaphor I had been looking for – climbing upwards towards a giant, fulfilling goal.

As I made my way to Bangalore to begin my corporate journey, I realized this was something I would never be able to give up. The mountains would forever be a part of my life. As I gave it more rational thought, I realized something more – I was good at climbing. I was strong, I was fast, I could carry a lot of weight, I was even able to go up to 4600 meters above sea level in my very first trek without facing altitude sickness. Had I finally found a talent?

Rat Race

I took up an entry-level software engineering job at JP Morgan, based in Bengaluru, right out of college placements. It would keep me comfortable, until I figured out my actual path. The location was great – I would explore opportunities in music; live gigs, recording parts, composing, lyrics and so on. I had also compiled a substantial number of poems; there was no harm in publishing them – what if that ended up working out? I realized I was back to bouncing around, but this time, at least I would get some real results.

With my job at JP Morgan, I realized that software engineering definitely wasn’t for me, and neither was the strict MNC corporate grind. I started putting more of my focus into music, as I had joined a band, and we were making decent money – not enough to live off of completely, but enough to show some promise as a career.

I also started a small venture of my own, called Muse, with a co-founder, Nandini, my singer friend from BITS Pilani. Initially it started with guiding and entertaining people on group treks to the Western Ghats of Karnataka (my comfort zone), and later spread out into various workshops and house concerts. It was going well as a side hustle, without too much concern for profit; but both of us were pretty nervous about making it a full-fledged business. Truth be told, we were having too much fun with it, and monetizing it would definitely take away the carefree communal experience it gave us.

Alas, as other band members settled down, moved away or simply lost interest, I realized how unpredictable and tedious a career in music was – we were always hustling to get shows, and even a small change could completely crumble our momentum. Even my book made barely any money, and again I realized that it would take years to build a following as an author and start seeing some returns. Even the prospect of making Muse profitable seemed too tedious and operation-heavy, which would take years and lot of capital to build up into a profitable venture. I would have to find a well-paying, stable job that I also enjoyed doing, and left me with enough time to actually live.

Partner In Grind

In 2018, I met Vrushali. Here I saw an accomplished, focused woman, having seen her goals through to the end – International table tennis player, co-founder of her own, very promising start-up; and what was more, still a hunger to learn more, explore more, create more. Respect and friendship came before love…and now I think that is how it really should be. 

Vrushali gave me a much needed perspective on myself. I was spreading myself too thin, trying to hold on to everything that gave me the slightest of joy, and everything society told me I needed to achieve, without really taking a definite risk and going all in and finding out myself, who the person I wanted to become really was. We moved in together, and one fine morning, I looked at her and decided – I was going to quit my job.

A Simple Play

I realized pretty soon that I had put zero thought into this. I definitely didn’t want to get into coding, but my degree and my work experience only qualified me for technical jobs. To my pleasant surprise, I got two kickass offers within two weeks of job hunting – a creative script writer for Filter Copy (a skit-making YouTube Channel) or a content writer for PlaySimple Games, a company that made mobile word games. The latter was definitely the best of both worlds.

It was a literal and metaphorical game-changer. I was in a much healthier work environment, creating word puzzles and writing features for games – what could be more creative while still being technical and logical? The work timings were much more flexible, as was the leave system, and not many people made work their entire life. This could finally be the balance I was looking for.

Never Tri, Never Know

With a much more stable and balanced life, I and Vrushali explored the entire gamut of travel and adventure. Snowboarding, mountaineering, via ferrata, scuba diving, free diving, triathlons, open water swimming – we did it all! And you know what they say, throw enough stuff at the wall, eventually something sticks. Some passions became life-long leisure activities, like scuba diving and adventure travelling, and a new opportunity emerged that combined sports, adventure, nature and fitness; triathlons. I now had my mountain in sight – the Ironman Triathlon; 3.8 kms of swimming in open water, followed by 180 kms of cycling, and finally a full marathon – 42.2 kms of running.

With this goal in mind, I also shifted to a remote job, working as a Content lead for Playvalve, a gaming studio based in Spain. Finally, I now had all of my time under my control, able to balance training, traveling and work without fatigue and compromise in any of three. If the shift from JP Morgan to PlaySimple was monumental, this was doubly so.

There have been various milestones in this journey to this behemoth project – an Olympic triathlon, 3 Half-Ironman triathlons, summits of Mount Kilimanjaro, Friendship Peak, Kang Yatse 2 and Dzo Jongo, and a 4-person English Channel relay. As you’re reading this, we’re writing blogs for each of these landmark events in our lives. We’ve also vowed not to put our lives on hold, and have travelled extensively for mountains, oceans, forests and food, to places like Malaysia, Turkey, Maldives, Philippines, Spain, Italy, Thailand, Tanzania, England and many more are still to come!

I would be lying if I said I was a much more focused and singular-goal oriented person now; if anything, I made doing everything to the fullest my goal, just one at a time instead of all together. Maybe some people are made to be a master at one; maybe I find it more fulfilling to be a master of none.