General Manager & Factory Head, ITC Limited · Nadiad, Gujarat
Most of what I've done has started empty. A greenfield site, a team that hadn't met yet, a process nobody had written down. Building from nothing is less about patience than about deciding what the place will feel like before anything else. The culture is the first deliverable. I've learned to be slow at the start and fast in the middle. To stay long enough to see a team grow into something capable, then long enough to watch it run without me.
A turnaround is a different kind of challenge. The factory is running, but not at what it should be. The work is to understand that gap honestly and close it on multiple fronts at once — efficiency, immediate fixes, customer focus, long-term thinking, team building. No single lever does it. It takes structured problem solving, patience, and the willingness to hold the short term and the long term in your head at the same time.
A leader's real job is to remove friction — including yourself, when necessary. One of the more humbling things I've learned is that some of the best outcomes happened when I got out of the way. People doing their job well don't need a crutch. They need clear authority, real accountability, and a leader who knows when to scaffold and when to step back. Getting that judgment right is, I think, what the leadership journey is actually about.
Side projects, prototypes, and weekends that got out of hand.
/01
2023
Built in the summer of 2023, before ChatGPT made this sort of thing obvious. A voice-controlled animatronic head with a vocal visualizer — wired together from curiosity and parts ordered on a whim.
/02
2024
Every flight I've taken, logged and mapped. I fly a lot and wanted to actually know how much.
/03
2024
A discrete-event model of a real production floor — lines, queues, breakdowns. Built to understand what happens when you change one variable and everything else shifts.
A twelve-degree-of-freedom walking robot, properly designed and under active development. Work in progress — the interesting kind.
Short films from places that stayed with me.
Several books running in parallel, as usual. A Brief History of Black Holes, Kitne Ghazi Aae Kitne Ghazi Gae, Know Your Body, and a reread of Atomic Habits and The Psychology of Money — the last two because some books are worth returning to when you're in a different place.
The bigger ongoing thread is AI — not the hype, but the application layer. Building utilities that actually make work and life easier, understanding what these tools can genuinely do in operations and manufacturing contexts where adoption is still years behind. Most of the industry is catching up slowly. I'd rather be ahead of that curve and know it from first principles, not from a consultant's deck.
Also slowly learning video editing and motion graphics — the craft side, not just assembly.
The quadruped robot is being restarted properly. Thinking about bringing a 3D printer into the mix — partly to fast-track the robot, partly because once you have one, the applications multiply. The long arc: manual controls first, then autonomous navigation, then onboard AI. Multi-year project. I'm at peace with that.
Software utilities come first for now. Once those are stable, attention shifts back to hardware.
Mostly Indian, mostly melodic, spanning decades without much regard for era. The mood varies — sometimes something slow and searching, sometimes something that has no business being as loud as it is. A wide library that keeps growing.
Not much OTT lately. The evenings that used to go to series now go to projects. No complaints.
Running — fitting it in wherever the day allows. Working on it.
Trained at IIT Roorkee in mechanical engineering. Since then, manufacturing leadership — building operations from scratch, turning around units that needed it, staying long enough to see teams become genuinely good at what they do. Currently General Manager and Factory Head at ITC Limited, running a large packaging and printing factory in Nadiad, Gujarat. The work is complex, the ownership is total.
Outside work: photographer, drone pilot, occasional video editor, runner, and a compulsive deep-diver — equally happy going ten levels deep into one subject or sprawling wide across many. How things work, why systems behave the way they do, what's at the bottom of any interesting question. Married to a doctor. Happiest when something is being built — code, teams, or a frame held still long enough for the light to do something interesting.
Scotland · 2024