Namaste!.My name is Prateek and I was born in Mumbai, India. My father had moved to Mumbai in the early seventies in search of livelihood from our native place Varanasi. My family lived in a “chawl” in a tough part of Mumbai called Mulund. We were not exactly a rich family but I never felt poor because of the sacrifices my parents made for me and my three siblings. My father worked at several firms in different capacities across the major metropolitan cities in India which gave me a unique perspective on the different cultures and customs of India as I grew up recieving my formative education at different schools across Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai. We would however frequently visit our village near Varanasi during the school holidays to stay with our cousins in the village. Reflections of those days still fill my soul with the warmth of the idyllic moments spent with my cousins chasing butterflies in the mustard fields and building scarecrows.My life took a major turn in the year 2000 when I lost my father while I was completing my engineering studies in Chennai. After engineering, lured by the dream of the “Big Apple” and the big bucks in the y2K era, I joined an IT company hoping to eventually hitch a ride to the US somehow. Later though the dot com bubble burst led to the closure of the firm and the end of my green card dreams.

I then worked at several firms over the next seven years in the area of patent research, management consulting and even dabbled in enterpreneurship with three start-up adventures, two of them shelved.

I am now onto another adventure and am working on another start-up in stealth mode about which I will talk about later. I have shifted base to Varanasi now with my wife and am staying with other members of the family as I work on my new start-up.