From Algorithms to Oil: Why I Left Everything to Paint
People ask how you leave something behind — a career, a reputation, the forward motion of building things. The honest answer is that you don't leave it behind. You bring it with you, and you find out what survives contact with canvas. What survived for me was the need to work at the edge of what I understand. The tools changed; the inquiry didn't. I still build things that didn't exist before. The difference is that a painting, unlike a company, can hold silence.
What survives contact with canvas is the question. I found out in 2020, when I stopped building companies and started building paintings full-time.
The companies I founded over the years were all, in retrospect, inquiries: What happens if you move computing to the cloud? What happens if the car that picks you up belongs to its driver? What happens if diamonds are grown in a laboratory rather than extracted from the earth? Each one began as a question that the world had not yet answered. That is, I now understand, the same posture I bring to the studio. The tools changed. The inquiry didn't.
Growing up in New Delhi, my father was one of India's significant art critics. He moved through the company of Souza, Husain, Swaminathan — painters whose work I absorbed before I had language for what I was absorbing. I understood, from childhood, that painting was a serious form of thought. Not decoration. Not illustration. Thought.
But I also understood that I was built for action in the world — for making things, for the vertigo of building something from nothing. Art waited. I am not sorry it waited. I arrived at painting with capacities I would not have had at twenty-five: patience, the ability to hold complexity without collapsing it, an understanding of what it means for something to endure.
What I didn't expect was how completely the studio would become the right room for all of it.
My practice is called Abstract Inquiry. My signature technique is Organic Movement — replacing the brush with thread, trading precision for presence. The works are large. The questions are open. I make paintings that do not have points, but have pull — that invite sustained looking rather than quick decoding.
More than 200 works now exist. They are collected across the United States, Europe, and Asia. I tell you this not as a credential but as a fact about their life after the studio: they have moved into homes and offices and become part of the daily texture of the people who live with them. That is all I wanted from them.
The founding years taught me that the best things you build are the ones that work differently for different people — that carry enough depth to mean something new at each encounter. A company that does that is rare. A painting that does that is the only goal.
