How I got here

For a few years, chess was where my free time went. I'm a FIDE-rated player (1435), I won the Darjeeling District Under-15 title in 2024–25, and I played in the West Bengal State Under-15 Chess Championship, which meant missing a Class 10 mid-term exam. I caught up afterwards and still did well in that subject.

I also played FIDE-rated international tournaments and captained my school team. Then I stepped back. The time I needed to keep improving grew much faster than the improvement itself: each extra hour mattered less than the one before. I later learned the name for that, diminishing marginal returns. It also taught me opportunity cost, because the hours chess was taking could go somewhere else.

In 2025 I founded a Leo Club, and I kept quizzing and doing Model UN.

In June 2025 my new Leo Club ran an eSports tournament to fund its charity work. Registrations stalled, someone started a rumour that it was a scam, and for a week it looked as if the whole thing would fold.

What turned it round wasn't more effort from me. It was putting our family company's name behind the event, which gave players something a stranger's promise couldn't. The tournament made a profit, and nearly all of it went on grain, flour and salt for our food drives.

The full story →   The essay: why the rumour worked →

In December 2023 I co-founded Jewel Paradise, a jewellery store that ran entirely on Instagram, with ₹2,500 of starting capital. I did the parts nobody sees: inventory, bookkeeping and the posts.

It was small, but it was the first time I kept a set of books for something real, and it made pricing, margins and stock feel like decisions rather than textbook terms.

More on the store, with photos →

Behavioural economics

Where it started for me: Freakonomics and The Psychology of Money, and seeing at Leo Xtreme how quickly a rumour can undo trust in a market.

Information and signalling

Why some promises are believed and others aren't. I wrote about it in my first essay.

Markets and valuation

Seven months of mentorship at Sri Ram Delta Equities, then researching companies and swing-trading a small portfolio of my own: reading a company's numbers to judge what it's worth.

The 2008 financial crisis

A topic I've spent time on as part of understanding how markets fail.

Social choice

Something I first met at the Ashoka Young Scholars Programme: how a group turns individual preferences into one decision.

• The Undercover EconomistTim Harford

  The opening chapter, on who really profits from a cup of coffee, changed how I look at prices: whoever controls the scarce thing captures the gain. I think about it every time two shops on the same street charge different prices for the same item.

• FreakonomicsSteven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

  Taught me to ask what a rule actually rewards, not what it's meant to reward. Most of the surprises in the book come from that one question.

• The Psychology of MoneyMorgan Housel

  Less about money than about behaviour. The idea that being reasonable beats being perfectly rational changed how I run my own small portfolio.

I play lawn tennis when I want a workout, pickleball when I want to see friends, and when I'm on my own I shoot threes on the basketball court. I still play the drums occasionally (Trinity College London Rock & Pop, Initial grade with Merit, 2018), though less than when I was younger.