"I was hacked as a businessman. I became a cybersecurity expert so that you never have to go through what I did."
My Journey
From a Farmer's Field to a Ransomware Night
Engineer. Entrepreneur. Cybersecurity educator. Three decades distilled into the moments that actually mattered.
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1995 — Early Career, IndiaFresh out of engineering at Tata Motors, I was sent to a small village to help farmers automate their tools. I thought I'd been sidelined.
Then one afternoon, a farmer looked at his crops and said quietly: "You've doubled my yield."
That smile became the compass for everything that followed. -
Late 1990s — Silicon Valley, USAAn MBA from Ivey Business School took me to the heart of the tech boom — Siebel Systems, the fastest-growing software company in the world. BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, Porsche, VW, Audi, Ducati — and Tata Motors, who still run that same software in their dealerships today. I was thriving. But something was missing.
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2006–2015 — Building in India's Underserved MarketsI left Silicon Valley and spent the next decade building in places that needed it most — bringing electricity to hundreds of thousands of homes, then rural broadband to 300,000 users. Each project had its challenges. But the look on someone's face when the lights came on never got old.
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2018 — The Night Everything ChangedA Russian ransomware group locked down our entire internet network. 300,000 users lost connectivity overnight. We had believed the same things most businesses believe — "our IT person handles all of that," "we haven't been attacked yet so we must be fine," "even if it happens we can restore from backup."
We paid the ransom. I made a vow: this will never happen to us — or to anyone we care about — again. -
Today — Teaching What I Learned the Hard WayAfter the attack, I sold the internet business and went deep into cybersecurity — not as a student, but as someone who had lived through the worst of it. Together with two co-founders, we built NxgSecure to protect businesses from what had happened to us.
Then I realised the same vulnerabilities exist on every person's phone, inbox, and laptop — and nobody was teaching this in plain language.
That's what I'm doing now. Through YouTube, through guides, through simple checklists anyone can follow. Because the farmer's smile that guided my career was never about scale. It was about that one moment of genuine help — and the peace it brings.