Brother + Career
As my parents rushed my brother Rhitik to the Emergency Room, second grade me didn’t realize this would become the norm. Rhitik had been diagnosed with a critical eating disorder and had to have a Nasogastric Intubation surgery. For the next nine years, my parents would often spend nights with my brother and I would spend most weeks with relatives or alone in the house.
Without my parents, I had very little sense of order, but a young curious mind and an empty house is a situation to be filled with marvelous possibilities. I began to explore, tinker, and experiment by trial and error. I tried to build an origami-inspired pedal-powered vehicle to visit my brother, but soon realized paper as the main structure isn’t quite stable. Being alone also allowed me to daydream uninterrupted, constantly imagining scenes of myself as Spiderman, fighting crime in Atlanta, or of the robots I would build to aid my brother’s feeding issues.
Over the years, my inventions became more elaborate and I was no longer dreaming or making things out of paper, but using computers to innovate in the field of biotechnology, which led to a love of entrepreneurism. My friends and I entered the International TYE Startup Competition, pitching a placental stem cell treatment for burn victims in the developing world. Seeing that my ideas were viable to CEOs of billion-dollar biomedical companies gave me the drive to continue my innovative pursuits. I didn’t limit myself to biotech, but created prototypes for a VR-driven fashion website and a compiling algorithm to catalog new scientific phenomena.
But in sophomore year, I was derailed. My enterprises didn’t sit well with my practical dad, the child of a poor family whose only route of escape was through engineering: a safe path with good pay. He dismissed my entrepreneurship as silly antics with no chance of stability. So, I switched my World and US History AP classes for Chem and Calculus (like Asian kids are supposed to do) and joined Science Olympiad, where I wasn’t happy. This restrictive way of life, where I was now a fearful kid trying to be better than everyone else, was a stark contrast from the way I had grown up….an explorer.
As I slogged through the worst year of my life, I lost interest in many things and I ended the year with a tragic GPA and a body bordering on obesity and at risk for diabetes, prohibiting me from keeping up my varsity swim practice. I was now so deep into what I’d never really cared about that the joys of carte blanche seemed unattainable. On top of all that, my brother had also recently been diagnosed with autism.
So I decided I had to propel myself from my state of lethargy back to a sea of discovery. I took a weight-training class and, inspired by my brother, started my first LLC, Nimbus Lifestyle, an E-commerce business that donates and advocates for special needs education and PTSD awareness for veterans. In addition to raising awareness for learning disabilities, I started tinkering again with computer science, researching AI and Big Data solutions to solving global problems like disease-tracking. I then built a website, projectecodata.com, in the hopes of helping NGOs better track potential ebola-type outbreaks so they can quarantine those areas in advance. This new-found sense helped re-establish a sense of confidence in me and along the way has earned my family’s support and respect.
Inventing and creating businesses to share those inventions is what has allowed me to escape socially constructed silos and excavate my own capabilities. I am, and always will be, an explorer.