Hello netizen! As far as my name goes, it should be more than obvious by now. But if we are asking the deeper question of who I am, maybe I should put this space to good use. I am quite literally Master of None yet, but a jack of many many trades. But all that in due time.
Professionally speaking, I am an engineer. I work in the Semiconductor Industry as a Design Verification Engineer, and unlike a significant fraction of engineers, I actually love Calculus and my eyes light up if you would care to randomly throw a math problem at me. I grew up loving math, riddles, and puzzles, and you’ll probably find me staring at the puzzles on a newspaper even today. By my nature, I am an innately curious person. And I love to consume knowledge, in any form it may present itself.
Personally, I haven’t written enough to call myself a writer, but I love the art of writing. This website, in one of its first cycles of birth and death, was the brainchild of the notion that “Avid readers can become interesting writers”. I developed a love for reading, and listening to stories, even so far back as I was hardly 4 years old. I still remember trotting alongside my mother to the Government Library to get my hands on an Amar Chitra Katha publication, and read the stories in it. Soon, reading became a part and parcel of my life, with school introducing English literature and giving us the stories of Theseus, Daedalus, the past lives of Gautama, the lesser heard stories of Sri Rama, tales from the Jataka, the absolutely wild imagination of Isaac Asimov, captains of the ship stranded on lonely islands, and so on. With so much literature in the world that I kept consuming as a child, the outcome was in some ways predictable. I had stories of my own to tell, and I could tell the same story in a bunch of different ways. I explored poetry, prose, meter, dialogues, and monologues. At a point, I became fascinated with the tools one had at their disposal for writing, and expression of thought with ink (digital and physical) found its way to the external world.
I am often told, and I have often seen, that there are two kinds of people – the scientists, and the story-tellers. One sees a picture in numbers, while the other sees a story in a picture. But somehow, I live on the edge of these two worlds, and managed to make room for both numbers and words in the pound of flesh we call the heart. Maybe that gives you a glimpse of who I am, today. As to what will become of me in this lifetime, you and I are left to explore that here onwards.
-Karthik