I spent time looking for one defining moment, one clean narrative thread that captures everything about my journey. The difficult part is that different people know me for entirely different things. To some, I’m a finance professional, to others, a social entrepreneur, to others still, a tech and AI leader, but underneath all these layers and sides, the value system has always been exactly the same. And before I go on to talk about my journey, it would be unfair to frame it as something I’ve done alone. My parents’ contributions to my path are often under-recognised, and I must mention them before I proceed.
“We are each a patchwork quilt of those who have loved us, those who have believed in our futures. Those who told us we could do it when there was absolutely no proof of that.”- Taylor Swift
My career began in finance, working inside systems I didn’t design. And almost immediately, I noticed: big corporate machines aren’t nearly as organised as they look. Processes are legacy, inherited, misaligned with incentives, and quietly exhausting everyone involved. That realisation wasn’t unique to me; plenty of people were tired of the same things. What was unique was how I approached it, and how I honed this natural instinct into a skill over time.
Now, I’m not entirely sure whether it’s my neurodivergence, or my instinct to question inherited structures, or simply an efficiency-first brain that treats redundancy as a personal affront, but I am wired to see the larger picture, to find where the friction lives, and then to aggressively simplify utilising technology. Not just automate and move on, but align incentives so the solution actually sticks. High-impact, relief-inducing, scalable, built to last systems.
In order to achieve this, I taught myself Python to eliminate redundant finance reporting work nobody wanted to do but everyone kept doing. I became the default tech person in a finance team; a clear result of intrinsic motivation of optimising meeting the external need for efficiency.
This constant process-improvement mindset eventually turned my job into one that I liked and enjoyed, but then a larger, more personal misalignment that I couldn’t ignore, started to tug at me. The Indian LGBTQ+ community’s unmet and deeply human need to affirm their identities subtly, safely, and with dignity. And on the other side, corporates with genuine appetite for social impact, sitting on CSR budgets with nowhere meaningful to put them. The gap was frustrating, and obvious. The solution was The Queer Penguin, a social enterprise I built at the intersection of that unspent capital and that underserved community. It is the piece of my journey I am most proud of, and it sits at the dead centre of everything I’ve built since.
Now, as someone working at the intersection of AI architecture and mindful innovation, I want to be clear about something: I did not arrive at AI by chasing the trend; I arrived at it because the same instinct that made me automate a finance report, and the same instinct that made me build The Queer Penguin, is exactly the instinct that AI-era systems desperately need. The ability to see where a system is broken, redesign it so it actually works, and make sure it works for the people most likely to be left out – that’s what draws me to inclusive innovation.
I came to CJBS to move from improving systems within organisations to designing them from the ground up, especially at the moment that AI is beginning to reshape how everything functions. The goal is to build products and systems that are not just efficient, but intentional about who they work for.
The MBA at Cambridge Judge gave me the language to understand what I had already been doing instinctively. Electives in Managing Innovation Strategically and AI and Disruptive Technologies sharpened my thinking. The Cambridge Venture Project placed me inside an AI fintech startup and the Global Consulting Project has me working within a major firm. I chair the Tech Student Interest Group, and I am the elected EDI representative for my cohort.
All of these avenues to contribute to the student community here, both within and outside of the classroom, are just some of the ways in which the Cambridge MBA can add to your own journey. I feel renewed inspiration and gratitude every day that I set foot in the halls of Cambridge Judge Business School, and I cannot wait to see how my time here shapes my journey as a future innovation leader.