Everything I have built has been built on the people I am about to introduce. They are not the supporting cast. They are the cause.
Gulmarg, Kashmir — Komal in the beanie, both sons in yellow jackets, the four of us in the snow.
Trained Computer Engineer from Amravati. She built a software programme that reads personality through handwriting — a graphologist by training and obsession. She read me in an evening. We married on the 24th of April with barely a courtship.
Today she serves as Chief People Officer of the company her husband built, and she is the closest collaborator I have in any room I walk into. The decisions about the people who make ESDS what it is — the hires, the promotions, the difficult conversations, the leadership development — pass through her hands. She is the reason ESDS has been recognised among the 15 Best Workplaces in Asia.
The wife who reads handwriting and the husband who builds patents work together, every day, on what is finally the same problem: the architecture of a system that human beings must thrive inside.
Komal & Piyush, in the garden — back-to-back, an old yoga pose.
At an event together — one of many.
Piyansh — born 15 July 2014. Tuesday’s child. I fast on water every Tuesday in honour of his birthday. He has been my reason to learn how to answer two hundred questions a day without losing patience — and many days the count is closer to four hundred. He is the son who tests every assumption you make, the way good engineers do.
Prajit — born 24 January 2016. We call him “Happy” at home, because his disposition was visible from the very first day. He came happily into this world. He is the son who reminds me that some people are born already comfortable in their skin — and that the rest of us spend a lifetime catching up to it.
I consider them my best friends. Parenthood gives me unparalleled pleasure. The mat in the morning, the questions all day, the bedtime stories at night — this is the structure of every day I am at home, and the structure I miss every day I am not.
Three lotuses, one practice.
All four of us — the family selfie.
In the snow — with one of the boys, leopard scarf.
Komal & Piyush by the stream — Gulmarg.
Homemaker. Shareholder in the company her son built. The piousness and goodness of heart in everything I have done comes from her. She has been at every milestone — including the day Devendra Fadnavis launched our Mumbai data centre in 2016, where she stood beside us in a blue saree.
If my father gave me the discipline and the example, my mother gave me the heart that the discipline serves. Both are needed. Either alone is not enough.
She is my companion at Hanuman Jayanti each year at Ramshej. She has sat outside the gates of the Vipassana International Academy at Igatpuri, waiting for me to walk out after ten days of silence. She has been the constant in a life with very few of those.
With my mother at Ramshej — Hanuman Jayanti.
A quiet moment, a phone, the two of us.
Senior officer at Canara Bank, Mumbai. The most respected man on my maternal side. The man who would not let me forget how absurd it was to be drawing Rs. 2,500 a month after a coveted Electronics degree.
His persistent question — “How do you think you’re going to survive?” — pushed me to quit my first job in four months and return to Nashik. Without that question, ESDS does not exist. Without that question, the boy who would have remained an obedient junior employee in a Mumbai purchase department might never have come back to his own city to begin a company on his own terms.
Some mentors give you answers. The best ones give you a question that will not let you sleep until you answer it yourself. Shankarlal-ji is that kind of mentor.
Shankarlal-ji — mentor, maternal uncle, the source of the question that started it all.
Thirty-three years at the Bank of Baroda, until his last breath. The most honest employee in the branch — the one the entire bank administration looked up to whenever a difficult situation arose. A great organiser. A man who once arranged a relative’s full wedding on a budget of Rs. 25,000 and made it a wedding people remember to this day.
He died of multiple organ failure in my arms, on my shoulder, after the hospital said there was nothing more to be done. He was, and remains, the reason for everything that has come since.
A family photograph from the years before he passed. Father with his trademark tilak, his Bank of Baroda ring on his right hand. A photograph I keep close.
Father & son — mid-2000s — before he passed.
The work I do today — the data centres, the patents, the Bharat Digital Infrastructure Association — began after he had already left. There is no photograph of us together from these years. The image below is an AI-rendered visualisation, created in his loving memory and clearly labelled as such. As President of BDIA and a public advocate for Data Swaraj, the honesty of that label matters to me.
An AI-rendered visualisation, created in loving memory of my father, who passed away in 2009 — before this chapter of my life began.
“Pita devo bhava.”
Father is God. — Taittiriya Upanishad
If you have read the Story, the Work, and the Movement and wondered what holds it all together — the answer is on this page. The fire is mine. The wood that keeps it burning is theirs.