My Life Story...so far...
My life so far can be understood in two episodes. These episodes are divided by the moment of transformation.
Episode-1: Before the moment of transformation
Age 0-7 Years - Vague memories of being loved and feeling wonder
Age 7-26 years- Discovered and developed appetite to learn, got molded by environment to embrace scientific attitude that somehow led me to get a bachelor's degree in biochemical engineering, which helped me land a technical job in a biotech company. Though, I vaguely remember my fascination to understand stuff from a theoretical and systemic perspective from the beginning, I have vivid memories that in my college years, while I gained systematic understanding of two subjects, microbiology and biochemistry, I got completely mesmerized with complex machinery of living systems self-organization. That feeling still stays with me, and I find myself more near to our biological narrative based physical reality than any alternative versions of man-made created reality.
Age 26-33 years- Gained corporate experience, developed professional attitude, maintained my constant appetite to learn, and excelled and delivered results in areas of engineering design, project management, quality, compliance and audit management in life science manufacturing sector. Here, again, systems and process oriented thinking became my biggest strength to not only manage, but also innovate, discover new ways of solving problems.
Age 33-36 years - I decided to make extra efforts to move up in the corporate ladder in the hope of success, though I felt constantly intrigued by the thought of not knowing the true meaning of success for me. I did an MBA with specialization in Operations and Marketing management, attained professional certifications in supply chain, data science and lean six-sigma black belt. Was thinking of my next destination, when I was hit by the moment of transformation in 2017, while I was pursuing MBA.
Moment of transformation : I remember I was traveling on train and thinking about participating in a competition about addressing the global sustainability challenge. A simple thought crossed my mind: "If everyone knows about global problems, why can't we simply stop doing things that lead to global problems and do more of those things that address global problems? With technology, we can always find who doesn't cooperate and who cooperates, and apply policy based solutions to increase cooperation."
This thought stuck with me, even though I tried to get rid of it. It kept coming back to me because I couldn't break the rationality behind the simple logic that if we agree to solve the problem, we can simply work together to solve it. Little did I know that this thought will transform my life and provide me the meaning of success that I desperately needed to escape the existential midlife crisis. My engineering background with business education and deep fascination to see things from systems and process-based perspectives made me excited and glued to the thought. I couldn't see why, in the presence of cooperation to act towards global issues, the problem couldn't be solved. My mind got fixated (still is) on the thought that any systemic conception that can lead to an increase in cooperation towards global problems will ultimately lead to the solution to the global problem. Creation and application of such a system to address the global problem became the definition of success for me. I had no idea what the heck of a problem, I was trying to solve.
Episode-2: After the moment of transformation
Age 36-41 years - Started my research journey in sustainability. It took me around 2 years of independent research and 3 years of formal doctoral research after I hopped from business sustainability ("i.e. ESG, sustainability reporting) to Social and Environmental Accounting (SEA) to Political Economics, Philosophy, Justice literature to Sociology to Behavioral Sciences to Systems Thinking and Complexity Science to Self-organization centered evolution based world-view embedded in thermodynamics-information theory to ultimately discover a theory that I named "Network-Centric Scientific Theory of Existence (NSTE)". In this theory, I answered how cooperation can be sought at global scale, and I argued that implementation of the principles that NSTE reveal is the only way to address sustainability challenges. Though, only time can tell if NSTE can resist world scrutiny, but I have no hesitation (because of the choice of my research methodology inspired by Einstein's Philosophy of Science, I call it UTLIS- Univocal, theoretically holistic, logically empirical, irrefutable even in absence of information about microstates, and simple to express mathematically), to express my confidence that I have delivered the systemic conception that can form the basis to increase cooperation towards global issues of sustainability.
This important discovery has given me the boost to extend NSTE and push its development towards the application part to create non-reductionist glocal (i.e. global + local) solutions to sustainability challenges.
Little more about myself
To get an idea about my character, please check my personality profile according to the "Big Five" psychological dimensions, and my Myers-Briggs personality type lies somewhere between INTP/J. I live a simple and minimalistic life (as informed by my research). Most of my free time, when I am not sleeping, is spent in deep thinking, discussions with friends and family and reflecting about my life observations and my research work. I find it extremely difficult to think of my research work separate from my personal life. Because my research work is about life. I constantly try to understand and experience it simultaneously. Therefore, sometimes others may rate me higher on sensitivity to my environment and over-analytic, while in my brain I am just trying to experience and understand the sensorium effects of the moment in full detail. Life to me in this sense is a bit slow, and I like it this way because it helps me stay mindful of my physical reality.