Heyoo!

As I finally find time to focus on things that I like, hobbies, and just life in general, I have also found time to revisit this area of the web. Today falls in 03-2024 and this is a brand-new introduction to my current state of existence ^_^

I have tried so many things! Shifted from being a beatboxer to a research assistant to working at a startup to starting up on my own and finally, to another exciting and very interesting place in life. Living in the slow touristy coastal state of Goa, India, I am now working with two different NGOs, both of which are working on very cool wildlife conservation problems!

Coastal Impact is the organisation that I work with as a freelance conservation scuba diver. We dive around Grande Island, Goa and work on coral restoration. Check out more about our work in this short doc by DD India or via our new substack channel that I am building hehe. I also work on their AI/python stuff because why not ;)

Technology for Wildlife is where I am working on computer vision and data science-related use cases. My work is much more on the desk than on the field and I honestly quite like that (think higher impact and scale). We use drones, satellite imagery, machine learning, and loads of ecological knowledge to work on a variety of extremely novel problems. Super exciting work with the most passionate stakeholders!!!

Life has taken more than a few turns and probably the biggest one happened when I was trying to build my own tech product. This is the first half of 2023 where I worked my arse off to build an AI-guided online product photography app meant to automatically blend pictures of products into suitable backgrounds and canvases. Skipping the details, I realised soon that this is something I don’t want to spend the next couple of years on, took a decent amount of super helpful therapy, and took time off to introspect. This led me to understanding where my core interest was, take the LFA course by Terra.do, and start volunteering. Couple of months down, I accepted offers at the above NGOs and shifted to Goa (definitely not in that order haha).

Now, I really enjoy the work that I do, stay by myself in my 1bhk, run a decent long run once a week, play badminton at a local court, find time to read the articles I want to or solve some random math problems if I want to, have learnt how to cook to a certain level, and enjoy the Goan nature around me. At the same time though, I do feel lonely at times, often struggle to socialise, definitely struggle most of the time to balance productivity with chilling out for the sake of chilling out, fail at getting groceries in at the right time, and still tend to take on much more work that I can effectively work on (haha this seems to be a proper problem haha). So life is somewhat the same, but better, moving onto a better place for sure. It will take time, it will be slow, but the direction of the optimisation seems favorable and I am really enjoying pushing myself. I mean what else would I do if not constantly keep pushing myself to be better :)