I'm interested in economics, anthropology, philosophy, and mathematics, and mostly in the questions that sit where they overlap. I am also interested in exploring the question: how can young people, and above all those in underresourced contexts, gain access to the knowledge and agency that shape their futures?
The most public answer arrived before I had even finished school, when I stood beneath the domes of Rashtrapati Bhavan to be felicitated by the President of India, Shri Droupadi Murmu, for my work on Artificial Intelligence, one of seventeen students chosen from across the country under the Government of India's SOAR initiative, and among the youngest people in the hall. What follows is an account of the ways I have tried to answer it.
My answer began with money, and with the fact that so few young people are ever taught how it works. While still in school, I founded the India Chapter of the Edunomix Institute, a United States 501(c)(3) nonprofit devoted to financial literacy, establishing the organisation's first presence in South Asia. Under my direction the chapter ran nationwide essay competitions reaching across nineteen states and fifty-four schools, held spring and summer camps in personal finance, and taught economic literacy to displaced Ukrainian students as they rebuilt their lives far from home.
I ran finance as Chief Financial Officer of TaxCity, a government-recognised card game that teaches tax filing in a fun manner. It reached over 79,000+ students across 27 countries and raised over $120k+ in grants. We have since wound it down since even with the grants, giving away thousands of kits for free across India stopped being financially sustainable. We donated what was left to a few government schools we had visited, to help them build a better financial-literacy curriculum. I am really proud of what this initiative achieved!
I am also really interested in studying public policy and social change from the inside. My research on the socio-economic dimensions of Artificial Intelligence, conducted under Professor Surbhi Goel of the University of Pennsylvania, matured into a peer-reviewed paper published internationally in IJRASET. I presented the work at the NYC STEM Research Conference in 2025, where I was the only high-school student presenting research!
During my gap year after high school, I am learning how to integrate software in my research in financial misinformation. Under the mentorship of Professor Hemant Kakkar at the Indian School of Business, I am now studying how financial misinformation spreads across Indian social media. Because the fake content available across the internet is multilingual and code-mixed, with Hindi and English interleaved in a single sentence (what we call "Hinglish"), my analysis runs on natural-language models built for Indian languages, MuRIL and XLM-RoBERTa, rather than the English-only systems most tools rely on. Paired with validated psychological instruments, the BFI-2-XS personality inventory and the Fear of Missing Out scale, I am trying to answer a sharper question: not merely which posts are false, but which people are most likely to pass them on.
In June 2025, I served as a Policy Intern at the Ministry of Education, Government of India, contributing to internal analysis of the Samagra Shiksha Scheme under the Office of Mr. Rahul Pachori, Director. The posting placed me inside the room where India's education system is measured and revised, studying the financial architecture and budget flows of the country's flagship schooling programme under the National Education Policy 2020. I learnt a lot during this time period!
I also love exploring mathematics, specifically the domain of pure mathematics and number theory. I was admitted to the Lodha Genius Programme at Ashoka University, a fully funded residential programme with an acceptance rate near three percent, built for the most mathematically gifted school students in the country. There I completed university-level coursework in pure mathematics, number theory, group theory, linear algebra, and geometry, and attended the programme's Great Ideas Seminars alongside Nobel laureates, among them Sir Paul Nurse and Professor Brian Schmidt. It was one of the most rewarding summers of my life, and I built a lot of memories there, along with making tons of intelligent friends!
I have since continued into original research. During the first half of my gap year, as part of a residential mathematics apprenticeship under Professor Shanta Laishram, Head of the Statistics and Mathematics Unit at the Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi, I worked in advanced number theory in Ashoka University, with a research stipend of 10,000 INR.
The published AI paper is the most cited of my writings, though far from the only one. My essay "How Economics Runs the World" appeared in Arbitrage, the finance and investment journal of IIM Rohtak, where our article was the only high-school written article in the issue (I wrote it with a friend!). I have conducted research on tail risk and black-swan events at the Indian School of Business and Finance under Professor Kritika Soni, studied the effect of the National Education Policy 2020 on graduate employability, and was selected into the Junior Academy of the New York Academy of Sciences. Across finance, governance, and mathematics, I have written a lot of articles, papers, and will hopefully ever continue to do so!
Ideas, to my mind, are only as useful as their reach. I host the Decoded Podcast, where we interview economists and technologists and translate their ideas and breakthroughs for the general public. We have won over three Spotify for Creators awards, and it has passed three hundred listening hours on the platform. My writing and commentary have drawn an audience of more than eight thousand on LinkedIn, and my achievements in the Lodha Genius Programme was profiled by both the Lodha Group and the Lodha Foundation before a combined audience of over half a million.
I have tried to spend some time close to the people who build at scale as well. At Y Combinator's inaugural Startup School India I was among two thousand engineers chosen nationwide, pitched my financial-literacy work directly to YC partner Jared Friedman, received an AI compute grant of more than $25,000, and met the founding teams of Zepto, Razorpay, Groww, and Meesho. Earlier I had been selected, from a global pool of thirty-two thousand applicants, into the s3 cohort of buildspace, a programme built around shipping solutions to real world problems.
The felicitation at Rashtrapati Bhavan is my proudest achievement. I also ranked forty-fourth of more than sixty-seven thousand students in Delhi's state science examination, inside the top 0.06 percent. I have been admitted to LaunchX at MIT and The Knowledge Society; placed in the top one percent of an Oxford essay competition; earned a place on the national merit list of the Indian Olympiad Qualifier in Mathematics; was selected, at roughly a ten percent acceptance rate, into the Junior Academy of the New York Academy of Sciences, where I research under a Columbia University postdoctoral scientist; and completed the National Space Innovation Challenge run by the Atal Innovation Mission with ISRO. Here is the full record!
My commitments reach past the study and the ministry. For five years I have volunteered with Familial Forestry, the reforestation movement recognised by the United Nations Land for Life Award, and I am working to open a chapter at my school. I captained my school to consecutive district football championships and served as President of the Student Council at Delhi Public School, R.K. Puram.
