I was asked five questions today. They sounded simple: What did I dream of becoming as a child? Who shaped me? What frightens me about tomorrow? What do I regret? And what does success mean to me?

I thought I knew myself well enough. Yet answering them aloud made me revisit a lifetime.

The boy who wanted to be a magician

When I was little, I would say, “मुझे बड़ा होके जादूगर बनना है.” I imagined a magician waving his hand and producing a laddu out of thin air. What could be more wonderful than making something appear simply because you wished it into existence? I even asked the gods for that power.

Growing older taught me that stage magic was an illusion. But the fascination did not disappear; it changed its form. Gadget Boy, Dexter and their inventions made me dream of becoming a scientist. In the third, fourth and fifth standards, I proudly announced that I would build robots. I even promised my best friends that I would give them one.

Perhaps that boy never really left. Today I work with automation, and I still find joy in imagining that a complicated thing can be made possible.

The people, characters and worlds that made me

There was no single person who shaped me. There were stories, cartoons, athletes, films and the questions they left behind.

Batman was especially important. I remember coming home and watching the animated series around dinner time, fascinated not only by his gadgets but by his determination to do the right thing. Gadget Boy and Dexter gave me inventions; Batman gave those inventions a moral dimension.

Then there were Rafael Nadal, Sachin Tendulkar, Brock Lesnar, Shawn Michaels and Rob Van Dam. I admired their skill, but I became equally curious about who they were away from the arena. Their humanity mattered to me. Cinema brought its own influences: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Titanic, and countless stories that fed my desire to write.

By ninth and tenth standard, I was looking beyond Earth. Space, existence, aliens, the universe, philosophy: I questioned everything. Even after I began working, I kept writing those questions, including on my old blog, The Perpendicular Universe. I wanted to know why the universe was the way it was—and why the magic I imagined as a child did not seem to exist.

The future I actually want

My greatest fear is not missing a deadline or failing to become famous. It is the uncertainty surrounding my health and my parents’ health. I have fought through difficult things, and I worry about what lies ahead for all three of us.

What I want is wonderfully ordinary: for us to be together, healthy, laughing, and enjoying life for a very long time. I want to help my parents and share the small everyday pleasures with them. I also want to witness the extraordinary technological changes ahead, especially in AI, and experiment with them myself.

If we have that time and health together, so much else becomes secondary.

Regrets, or simply a life lived?

I began at the bottom and made my way upward. I have known struggle, love, heartbreak, hope and disappointment. There are things I might have done differently. Some relationships did not last; love did not become the lasting partnership I once hoped for. I sometimes wonder whether I could have approached my health differently, though I cannot know that different choices would have changed what happened.

Still, I resist calling my life a collection of regrets. I am grateful that I experienced love at all, more than once. The emotions stayed with me, and they found their way into my writing. I do not have to be grateful for illness or heartbreak to recognize what I learned while living through them.

I cannot rewrite what happened. I can keep living, feeling and learning.

What success means to me now

I increasingly think of success as a label we humans use to compare lives that were never meant to follow identical timelines. Money, status, recognition, productivity, legacy—none of these can fully measure a life.

For years I searched for a purpose. Now I wonder whether I was making it more complicated than it needed to be. Perhaps I am here to live: to experience curiosity and uncertainty, joy and despair, mistakes and discoveries. Not every lesson has to make me perfect. Not every project has to become an achievement.

I want to be kinder to myself, including when I look in the mirror and notice the ways my face and smile have changed. I do not want to spend the life I have criticizing myself for not looking or living exactly as I once imagined.

None of this means I have stopped being ambitious. I still want to write, learn, build, publish, and explore. I want to keep my websites alive and document the things that matter to me. Perhaps nobody will read a particular post. I still want it to exist, because the act of making and recording it matters to me.

There is a video I have meant to upload for days. The festival it was meant for has passed. Earlier, I might have treated that as failure. Now I can let the deadline go without letting go of the desire to create.

I am still the boy who wanted to summon a laddu from nothing, the student who promised robots to his friends, the teenager who questioned the stars, and the adult who wants to capture his thoughts before they vanish.

Maybe I no longer need to prove that I have succeeded.

Maybe I just want to be here long enough to experience more of this beautiful, strange life—with the people I love.