Origin Story

I was never really good at arts. I could frame how I wanted things to look in my mind but penning them down was always a challenge for me and I gave up on pursuing anything creative.

This didn’t bother me much since I was just an 18 year old exploring what life has in store for me.

When I moved to the mountains (Shimla) for my college, I remember going down with my friends to the valley floor one early Sunday morning in the winters. The idea wasn’t a photowalk or anything but a bunch of college teenagers doing something different on a Sunday morning.

Coincidentally, I had my mother’s Nikon Coolpix L12 so I decided to carry it with me on the hike. I didn’t know what framing, lights, aperture meant but at the time I just wanted to see if I could capture things like throwing a rock or the waterflowing.

Throwing a rock in the river Soft water flow

I went back to my college room and started playing with colours and frames. I am not super proud of the edits I made but I put them up on Facebook nonetheless.

College silhouette Window Clouds

The response I got from my friends and family was overwhelming. Everyone loved the things I was doing with a camera. That gave me some encouragement since I never thought I was really good at something creative.

I then went on to a second-hand Canon 400D with a Sigma 17-70mm lens (which I absolutely adored) which gave me a lot of playing field with wide angle and zoom shots. Plus I loved pushing the limits of a DSLR and trying out really long night exposures while sitting on my college terrace.

Milky way Humayun Tomb wide angle Reverse lightning

The saw the first signs of recognition when I went for a photography competition at St Bedes Shimla and submitted the images I clicked on the fest to National Geographic as well. I won the prize and at the same time got published in the Travel India Section of National Geographic.

Monkplay Nat Geo moment

The validation that I got from the people near me, the feeling of being good at something and the excitement of experimentation once you go behind the viewfinder - the combination made me fall in love with photography.

But since all good things don’t last, I started getting burned out with the societal expectations on my images and my relationship with my hobby became toxic. Every picture that I clicked was met by

  • How many likes did I get?
  • This is my favorite picture, why aren’t people liking it as much as I thought?
  • How do I get 10k+ followers?

As soon as these metrics came, the love for the hobby turned into gamification of the hobby. And over the years, multiple platforms such as flickr, 500px, tumblr, instagram, behance - all came and went and now my work is spread across 100 places.

So now, after almost 17 years since I clicked my first picture, I decided to compile all of the work I’ve done into a single place, under my name. No more metrics, no more likes and no more gamification. Just something that I’d curate and maintain as time goes along.

If you like my work, please don’t hesitate to reach out and I’d love to connect and have a chat.