The Long Way to Focus

I got into law school as the second-to-last admit. I had spent twenty days on a waitlist, refusing to give up, because my coaching teachers had promised the general cutoff would sit somewhere around 100. That year the paper turned out to be unusually easy, the cutoffs climbed, and all my careful preparation ran into an inconvenient curve. I did not walk away. I held on until the very last seat opened, and I took it.

Looking back, that is the pattern I am most proud of. I try a lot of things, I push hard, and I am willing to sit through the uncomfortable part until something finally gives. The story below has its share of detours, but the thread running through all of it is the same. Keep building, keep learning, and keep deciding what is worth your best hours.

Raipur to HNLU

I finished high school in Raipur in 2013 and spent the next year juggling a B.Com with my CLAT preparation. When I finally made it into HNLU, I came to see the place less as an institution and more as a pressure cooker of people and situations. It was the friendships, the setbacks, and the 2 a.m. plates of Maggi that shaped me, far more than anything on the syllabus ever did.

It was also where I found the thread I would keep pulling on for years. I taught myself web development and built Hostel Dhaba, a food-delivery platform for the eateries around campus. It worked well enough that a group of engineering students from next door bought it from me for 25,000 rupees. That was my first exit, at an age when most people are still asking their parents for pocket money, and it taught me something that stuck. I could imagine a product, build it, and get people to pay for it.

Alongside that, I spent hours watching travel vlogs and told myself that one day I would create that kind of work too. For the time being, I did the disciplined thing and took a job as an associate at a law firm in New Delhi.

Delhi, and a Lesson in Ownership

Adulthood arrived all at once when I moved to Delhi at 23. I traded a comfortable campus for a city that runs on traffic and adrenaline, and I built a home from scratch, sharing a small flat with Anshu, a colleague who quickly became a friend.

The job taught me plenty, but the sharper lesson came from Hostel Dhaba. The students who had bought it began calling themselves its founders, entered competitions on the strength of it, and turned that story into jobs at Deloitte. Their venture, built on my code, ended up paying them more than I was earning as a lawyer. I could have let that sit and sour. Instead I took the real lesson from it. Build things you own, protect what you make, and never underestimate work you can already do better than most. It lit a fire that has not gone out since.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I took some leave and trekked up to the highest Shiva temple in the world. Standing among the snow-capped peaks, I felt an old ambition come back to life. And then, right on cue, the pandemic arrived.

Lockdown, and Betting on Myself

I spent the first stretch of lockdown in the Delhi flat with Anshu and my childhood friend Aditya. When the pull towards home grew too strong, Aditya and I took a taxi all the way back to Raipur and pushed through a fourteen-hour ordeal at the state border to get there.

Back home, I turned restlessness into work. I pitched my own university on redesigning its website and won the project. It became the biggest freelance job I had taken on, in both scope and pay. Freelancing kept me afloat through those months and, more importantly, proved I could earn on my own terms. That was the moment I started betting seriously on myself.

Choosing Where to Spend My Best Hours

In December 2020 I moved to Dharamkot. Working remotely from the hills was the first time leaving a salaried job felt less like a fantasy and more like a plan I could actually execute. By the middle of 2021, I had saved enough to make the move on my own terms, and I did.

My first real trip was to Ladakh. It was solo, snowbound, and full of quiet monasteries, and it confirmed that my love of travel was real. It also taught me something less comfortable but useful. I loved the journeys, but the daily grind of turning them into content was not where my energy naturally went. That was worth learning early rather than late.

Running the Experiment, Then Reading the Results

Ladakh opened something up, and over the months that followed my passport finally earned its keep. The trip that still stands out is a solo run through the Spiti Valley, cold and empty and exactly what I had imagined that kind of freedom would feel like.

By April 2023 I had given travel content a genuine, multi-year run, and then I made a deliberate call. As a career it was not the right bet for me, because the thing it rewards most, relentless daily performance in front of a camera, is not where I do my best work. So I made a founder's decision. I stopped spending my sharpest hours on it and redirected that energy into building companies instead. I kept travel as something I love. I simply stopped asking it to carry my career.

Canada, a Calculated Experiment

Underneath all the travelling, a Canadian PR application had been working its way through the system. It came through in May 2024, and by that August I was on the ground in Canada. Lake Moraine and the Rockies lived up to every postcard. As a base to build from, though, the numbers did not add up, between the limited opportunities in my field and a system that was harder to work with than it looked from the outside.

So I treated it the way I try to treat every big move. Run it properly, then judge it honestly. I registered a business, opened the bank accounts, and saw the place clearly for what it was. Two months later I flew home to India, certain that my best work was going to be built here.

Mumbai, and Building for the Long Haul

Today I am in Mumbai, running a legal-marketing practice alongside a creative agency. The city is demanding, but the opportunity here is real, and this is the work I have chosen to go deep on rather than wide. The self-taught developer from HNLU has become someone who helps law firms get found and get chosen, and everything before this taught me how to build, sell, own, and finish.

That focus is also how the book happened. GEO for Law Firms is out now. I wrote it because I had something specific and useful to say about how law firms earn visibility in a search world increasingly shaped by AI, and because putting it in writing is how you commit to a field rather than dabble in it.

None of the detours were wasted. Each one taught me what to keep and what to cut, and cutting fast is not the same as giving up. What I am building now, I am building to last, and this is the thing I am all in on.