About Me

Hello.

Thank you for stopping by to learn a little bit about me. 

I am a writer, educator, and occasional actor. That is one way of describing who I am. After all, most of us tie our identity to the work that we do. I could also say that I am a left leaning, environmentally conscious, feminist, if I were to describe who I am based on my beliefs. 

It really hasn’t been easy to succinctly say who I am or what I do these days. So I have resorted to saying that “I am no longer profitably employed, but I spend my time profitably.“

In my past life, I was an Enterprise Software Executive. That was for a good quarter of a century. I stepped away from tech for good in 2015, and experimented with a variety of things with the time I had. I explored writing, went on long walks and hikes, did some theater, volunteered with nonprofit organizations, read without boundaries, and drove through the 48 contiguous states with my faithful companion, Apollo as my navigator. 

I realize now that writing is what I am passionate about. I wonder how my life would have turned out had I taken on the job offer I got as a journalist in 1989. I did not have the guts to take it up then. And so, it turned out that I had to wade through more than a quarter of a century of my life as a software engineer before I could get back to what I have always wanted to do — be a writer.

My first break came with Fair Observer, a crowdsourced multimedia journal in 2015. FO published an article I had written about regulated profit-oriented monopolies. Since then, they have published nearly 50 articles of mine on a variety of social, political and economic issues. 

Around the pandemic timeframe, I wanted to go back to my roots, and write in Tamil. Not only was I able to, I was also fortunate to find a publisher who liked my writing. Today, I work closely with Sandhya Pathippagam, a smallish publisher based in Chennai, India. Since 2021, I have published five books with them, with a couple more in the works.

I used to be an avid hiker, albeit have slowed down some of late. I am fortunate to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where there are hundreds of breathtaking hiking locations. Whether it is trails by the rugged Pacific coastline, or the calmer San  Francisco Bay, or the majestic Santa Cruz mountains, or the rolling East Bay foothills, you have plenty of options to choose from and have a wonderful outing. If my faithful hiking companion of more than a decade could speak, he would vociferously agree, having hiked every single dog friendly trail in the 50 mile radius of my home in Saratoga.

I am also an educator at the Stanford School of Medicine as part of the standardized patient program. It is a cool program that provides clinical skills training for Stanford SOM students. And I have learned a lot of things about my own physiology in the process.  

I occasionally dabble in the local theater scene, and have acted in more than a handful of South Asian dramas. 

This section would be incomplete without a mention of my family… my wife, Jaya, and our grownup children, Sanjana and Kav. Jaya and I have been married for 38 years now. Jaya’s feminist beliefs have not only influenced me, but have also shaped the core beliefs of Sanjana and Kav. Why else would we have chosen the feminine last name “Lakshmi,” drawn from the names of our mothers, for Sanjana and Kav?