Photos from my trips, and the short story behind each one.
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Tally so far
13 countries
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Kaza, Spiti Valley
Kaza sits about 3,800 metres up, with barely a light for miles around. On a clear night the Milky Way rises straight out of the mountains, bright enough to see with your own eyes, not just through a camera. I've never seen a sky that full of stars.
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Amsterdam at night is something else. Every tree along the canal was wrapped in lights, the old canal houses leaned over the water, and the whole street showed up again, upside down, in the canal below.
Brussels, Belgium
You haven't really had a waffle until you've had one in Brussels. Warm, crisp at the edges and loaded with toppings, eaten standing on a cobbled street with old Brussels all around.
Autoworld, Brussels
Outside Autoworld, the huge car museum in Brussels, sat a vintage Porsche painted in every colour of the rainbow. Classic curves, wild paint, and somehow it completely worked. I couldn't walk past without stopping.
Finland
Out in the snow in Finland, in the freezing dark, the sky suddenly lit up green. The northern lights rolled across the hills and kept shifting, like the whole sky was moving. I couldn't stop pointing at it, which is the photo at the top of this page.
Arctic Cathedral, Tromsø
The Arctic Cathedral is one of the most striking buildings I've ever seen: tall white triangles stacked like sheets of ice, glowing from the inside after dark. Against the snow and the black sky, it looks like it was carved out of the Arctic itself.
Tromsø, Norway
Snow falling softly over Tromsø's main street, with the shop lights glowing through it. Up here that's just a normal evening. For someone from Odisha, it felt like walking around inside a snow globe.
Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland
Lauterbrunnen is a deep green valley with sheer rock walls on both sides and waterfalls pouring off the cliffs, 72 of them in all. Snowy peaks up top, wooden chalets and meadows down below. It looks too perfect to be real, and it is real.
Swiss Alps
Swiss trains climb right up into the Alps, and the windows actually open. I spent the ride leaning out, with snow piled high beside the tracks and white mountains on every side. Cold face, huge smile.
Above Zermatt, Switzerland
Up above Zermatt the whole world turns white: glaciers, snowfields and jagged peaks as far as you can see. The air is thin, the wind is sharp, and it's completely silent. I just stood there and took it all in.
St Peter's, Vatican City
St Peter's is one of the biggest churches in the world, and standing in front of it you feel every bit of that. The evening light was turning the facade gold, St Peter's statue stood guard out front, and the square was almost empty. It was peaceful in a way I didn't expect.
Florence, Italy
From the hills above Florence, the whole city glows orange at sunset, with Brunelleschi's dome rising over the rooftops. It's still the largest brick dome ever built, and from up there it's impossible to look at anything else.
Pisa, Italy
Seeing the Leaning Tower in person is wild. It really does lean that much, and it's beautiful too, all white marble and rows of arches. Of course I did the classic pose.
Venice, Italy
Venice is an entire city built on water, and a gondola is the best way to see it. Mine glided right under the Rialto, the oldest bridge across the Grand Canal, with old palaces lining the water on both sides. Back on land, I couldn't stop smiling.
Oia, Santorini
The first time I saw the blue domes of Oia, I just stopped and stared. Brilliant white walls, domes the same deep blue as the sea behind them, and the Aegean stretching all the way to the horizon. No photo I'd ever seen came close to standing there in person.
Santorini, Greece
This was the private view from my room in Santorini. In the evening the sun sank straight into the caldera and turned the whole sky and sea gold. No crowds, no fighting for a spot, just me and the best sunset on the island.
Red Beach, Santorini
Red Beach is unlike any beach I've seen: towering red volcanic cliffs dropping straight onto dark pebbles and clear blue water. In the late light the whole cliff face glows deep red. It's a reminder that this entire island was shaped by a volcano.
Oia, Santorini
After the sun goes down, Oia turns a soft blue for a few minutes. White houses stacked down the cliff, boats sitting still in the caldera, then the lights coming on one by one. It's the calmest Santorini gets, and maybe the most beautiful.
Vianden, Luxembourg
Vianden Castle sits high above a tiny town in the hills of Luxembourg, one of the largest castles in this part of Europe. Medieval towers, slate roofs and nothing but forest around it. Walking up the path, it kept appearing between the trees, bigger every time.
Park Güell, Barcelona
Park Güell is pure Gaudí: wavy walls, gingerbread-like houses and a long winding bench covered in thousands of broken tiles. I sat on that bench with all of Barcelona spread out below me. There isn't a single straight line anywhere, and somehow it's perfect.
Paris, France
The Arc de Triomphe is enormous in person, carved from top to bottom, with twelve avenues fanning out from it like a star. My campus in Cergy was one train ride away, so Paris was my weekend plan for a whole semester. I never got tired of it.
Paris, France
At night the Eiffel Tower glows gold against the dark sky, and once an hour it bursts into thousands of sparkling lights for a few minutes. I sat on a stone wall and watched the whole show.
Mont Saint-Michel, Normandy
Mont Saint-Michel rises straight out of the flat Normandy countryside: a whole medieval village and abbey stacked on a single rock, with a spire on top. Some of the biggest tides in Europe sweep in around it, and at high tide it becomes an island. Watching it appear across the fields was one of my favourite moments in France.
Dubai, UAE
I celebrated my birthday with the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, lit up right behind me. Dubai at night is all light and glass, and I couldn't have asked for a better birthday view.
Dubai, UAE
The Museum of the Future might be the most beautiful building in Dubai: a silver ring covered in Arabic calligraphy, where the letters themselves are the windows. At night it lights up from the inside and almost looks like it's floating.
Palm Jumeirah, Dubai
Atlantis The Royal is architecture at its boldest: giant glass blocks stacked and shifted on top of each other, with terraces and pools tucked into the gaps. Lit up against the night sky, it looks unreal.
Andaman Sea, Thailand
Out on the Andaman Sea, the sun sank slowly into the water and turned everything gold: the sky, the waves, even the deck of the boat. I stood at the rail and watched every last second of it.
Phuket, Thailand
From this viewpoint in Phuket, the Andaman Sea spreads out in every shade of blue and green, with jungle-covered headlands rolling down into the water. Warm breeze, palm trees overhead, and a view I didn't want to leave.
Koh Poda, Krabi
Koh Poda is exactly what you picture when you think of Thailand: soft sand, water so clear you can see your feet, and a giant limestone tower rising straight out of the sea. I waded right out to stand in front of it.
More to come
Thirteen countries so far, and most of the map is still dark. The next trips will end up here too.
Sandeep
notes to self, made public
What two years of running production systems, and investing since 2021, have taught me about risk, markets and learning. Short notes, written down so I can be held to them.
Two years of being paged left me with one reflex. I now use it everywhere.
At Mindsprint I made changes to servers in several countries, in the cloud and on premises. A mistake there never stayed where it happened. Something changed in one place could wake up a team three time zones away.
So I built a habit, and it is still the first thing I do. Before touching anything, I ask three questions: what could break, what would it take down with it, and what would catch it? On our global virtual desktop migration, that meant building rollback pools before the first desktop pool moved, so nobody would lose access if the new setup failed.
I bring the same reflex to markets. When I look at a trading idea, my first question is not how much it could make. It is how it fails, and what I will do when it does.
Willpower didn't fix my worst trading habit. Design did.
I started investing in 2021, with no finance degree and no trading desk behind me, and treated the account as a laboratory rather than a bet. Real money taught me position sizing, options pricing and drawdown discipline in a way no simulator could, because every loss was real.
It also showed me the weakest component in the whole process: my own judgement. I stay sharp under pressure. In quiet markets, I take trades I shouldn't, and trying harder did not change that.
So I stopped trying to train the flaw away and started designing around it. I'm building a system that takes my discretion out of execution and makes every rule pass a test on historical data before any money follows it. Every trade starts with a stop-loss and a risk-reward ratio set in advance, and I try to be honest about the difference between a good decision and a lucky result.
Code got me into markets. It cannot tell me what my strategy is exposed to.
My computer science degree gave me the tools to build models. It gave me nothing to judge whether a model makes economic sense.
I can tune a strategy until its equity curve looks beautiful and still not know what risk it is carrying. A backtest shows what would have worked in the past. It cannot say why, or whether the reason will still hold. I have learned that from failed backtests and broken assumptions, more than from the ones that passed.
That gap, between a curve that looks good and an understanding of what drives it, is the one I most want to close. A model should rest on economics, not just on history: on valuation, on derivatives, and on how interest rates and central banks move prices.
Chess left me one habit worth more than any opening I learned.
I played competitive chess from 2013 to 2017 and reached a FIDE rating of 1548. I still play online.
The habit it left me with is simple. Before I fall in love with my own move, I look for my opponent's strongest answer to it. Chess also taught me to judge the position actually in front of me, not the one I hoped to reach.
I apply the same check to trades. Before I put money behind an idea, I try to find the best case against it: what does the other side of the trade see that I don't?
Visiting thirteen countries taught me less than living in one.
In 2024 I spent the last semester of my degree at CY Tech in Cergy, near Paris, as one of five students chosen from my batch. I finished my final-year project there and took courses on French institutions, French identity and cross-cultural practice.
I have travelled to thirteen countries, but living in one is different. When a trip gets unfamiliar, you go home. When you live there, you can't, so you adjust.
It taught me to ask questions early, to be comfortable as the least experienced person in the room, and to stop treating my own way of doing things as the default. I would rather be corrected early than be wrong quietly. I kept learning French after I came back, and I'm working toward B1.
The hardest skill I've had to learn wasn't a technical one.
Being careful has a side effect: I tend to explain how something works before saying why it matters. My early updates at work were full of technical detail. The people making decisions needed to know what the work meant for the business, not how a policy replicates between servers.
Learning to lead with the consequence instead of the mechanism has been harder than any certification. I still catch myself explaining before concluding. When I do, I stop, and start again with the point.
I'm a Computer Science graduate from KIIT who spent two years in datacenter operations at Mindsprint, running Windows Server, Active Directory, Azure VDI and Nutanix environments for a global enterprise. In that work one change can reach every user at once, so it trained me to think in terms of risk, testing and rollback before anything goes live.
Those same habits are what pull me toward finance. Since 2021 I've invested in Indian and US equities and traded options, completed Yale's Financial Markets course, and I'm now building an algorithmic trading system that tests each rule on historical data before any money follows it.
In August 2026 I left my role to focus on the next step: graduate study in business and finance in Europe, a direction that began with my exchange semester in Paris. I want to work where technology and capital markets meet, in quantitative strategy and FinTech.
Enterprise datacenter and cloud, end to end
Virtual desktops
Servers & identity
Virtualisation
Operations & tooling
Investing, and building systems to test ideas
Markets
Approach
Tools
Mindsprint, Chennai
I owned the virtual desktop environment for our global clients, inside a 15-engineer datacenter team running more than 2,000 Windows servers. Day to day that meant incident response, change approvals, patching and security across Windows Server, Azure, VMware and Nutanix.
Windows 10 to 11 and App Volumes writables 2.x to 4.x, across VMware Horizon and Azure
Windows 10 was reaching end of support, so the deadline was fixed, and one misjudgement could have degraded thousands of desktops across regions. I put the safety net in place before anything went live.
Mapped failure points
Listed what could break and built custom rollback VDI pools.
Piloted in batches
Moved non-critical pools first and validated them for three days.
Justified the spend
Used the pilot data to answer client leadership on the cost of the new VDI models.
Production cutover
All main production pools migrated on deadline with zero data loss.
Tickets stalled whenever their owner's shift ended. I proposed a structured handover that kept a named owner on every ticket while work carried on around the clock, and ageing tickets fell.
Ran a fully cloud-based Azure VDI environment, and built and promoted a new Domain Controller in Azure for a client's move from on-premises to the cloud, in time for cutover.
SCCM automation plus targeted manual patching for critical systems. Remediated Tenable findings, with CrowdStrike and Splunk for defence and monitoring.
Administered and secured the Windows Server estate behind core business applications, including Active Directory, Group Policy updates and SQL Server services, with PowerShell for automation.
Managed the full VM lifecycle in Nutanix Prism, from provisioning and resource allocation to Nutanix Files servers, alongside the VMware vSphere and Horizon estate.
When VDI performance dropped just ahead of key client deliverables, I took ownership of the fix. I planned the move of FSLogix profile disks to premium Azure SSD storage, prepared a rollback plan, and carried the change through end to end.
Latency resolved and client productivity restored
Azure Fundamentals
Microsoft Certified, AZ-900
ITIL 4 Foundation
IT service management
Financial Markets
Yale University
Recent milestone, August 2026
655
Total score on a 205–805 scale
English language test
8.0
Overall band score
C1
CEFR level
Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT), Bhubaneswar
CY Tech, CY Cergy Paris Université, France
Final semester of my degree, as one of five students selected from my batch.
Passed with 14.75 / 20 across 30 ECTS
FIDE-rated player
1548
FIDE standard rating, from competitive play between 2013 and 2017. I still play online.
View FIDE profileLiving in Paris for a semester was different from visiting, because you can't go home when things feel unfamiliar. It taught me to adjust quickly and not treat my way of doing things as the default.
Read the travel journalI've been in the markets since 2021, across Indian and US equities, ETFs, REITs, thematic smallcases and options. What started as investing has turned into a fascination with how markets actually work: pricing, risk, and testing ideas against data rather than gut feel.
Spiti Valley, July 2023, at the height of the monsoon. Landslides were closing roads across the Himalayas, and one came down while I was on it. With rocks still falling, I drove straight through the active slide and made it out the other side. It was a genuine life-or-death call.