Engineers are changemakers. Whether we know it or not we have changed the world in ways that even we could not have imagined. I arrived at IIT Bombay a naïve teenager with what I thought I knew engineering was all about. I excelled at mathematics and science; my father was a leading engineer and involved in many exciting projects and I had heard that IIT Bombay was the place to be. I had no idea that engineering would provide me with the tools and capacity to change the world.
I grew up in Bombay, and as all true Bombayites, always had aspirations to get into Bollywood – that glamorous movie business! I actually even performed in a movie, a small 5-minute dance on a patriotic song, as a child actor. The movie, alas, was a flop the minute it screened, but the song would come on Chhaya Geet every 15thAugust and I would pretty much be the laugh of my friends on the 16th. This movie incidentally is nowhere online – not even on YouTube! It hit me hard that my dashing looks were probably not going to be my ticket.