Home·Who
A character sheet

If this site were a person

He would not quite be me. He would be the version of me who sits down after everyone has left, notices something small, and starts thinking about what it means.

A watercolour of a greying, bearded man in a rolled-sleeve cotton shirt at a wooden table with a laptop, an open handwritten notebook, a glass of chai and a phone showing children; through the window behind him, green foliage; around him float painted fragments of code, faces, question marks, a temple gopuram, a Jyotisha chart and Kerala backwaters. He is not looking at the laptop — his gaze is off to the side, outside the frame.
Everything he built is in the frame. What he is actually looking at is not.
“I build things to understand things.”
the one line · everything else on this page is downstream of it

Engineer, observer, storyteller

Mid-forties, though you would not immediately place him. Greying. Cotton shirt, sleeves rolled without ceremony. Sandals rather than shoes. A laptop nearby and frequently forgotten, because a conversation became more interesting.

Give him a broken system and he asks why was it designed this way? Give him AI and he starts playing with it immediately. Give him a person and he asks what happened to make them who they are? Give him an ordinary morning — his mother laying out a pookalam before anyone else is awake — and there is suddenly a story hiding inside it.

He is never fifty–fifty. Where the marker sits is who he is.

A personality is not a list of traits; it is a set of pulls that never resolve.

TechnologistHumanist

He loves the technology, but it is not what he is interested in. He is interested in what it does to people.

BuilderWanderer

He likes making things — products, experiments, websites, systems — but there is a strong let us see where this road goes in him too.

ModernRooted

Dead centre, and the rarest thing about him. AI, software and organisations coexist comfortably with Amma, Kerala, family, Jyotiṣa, Auroville and Indic ways of seeing.

LeaderStudent

There is experience here, but nothing is delivered from a podium. It is closer to: “I noticed something. Come look at this.”

SeriousMischievous

He will contemplate identity and humanity, and five minutes later turn a friend into a ridiculous cartoon. Mistype a URL on this site and it offers you a game.

PublicIntimate

He writes publicly, but the interesting material was never content. It is memory, relationships, observations — things he does not want to lose.

Before anything ships here, one question: would he do this?

He would

  • Name the actual person — Rani, Amma, Venky, the in-laws
  • Show his working, including where it might be wrong
  • Credit the source louder than himself
  • Keep the Indian word and gloss it, rather than reach for the nearest English one
  • Let the reader win sometimes
  • Leave a sentence unfinished when it is about hope
  • Say plainly how the thing was made

He never would

  • Shout, pop up, or chase you as you leave
  • Lecture — or end on a conclusion where a question would do
  • Publish someone else’s photograph as if it were his
  • Use a stock image of a person
  • Say “leverage”, “unlock”, “thought leader”
  • Pretend he made it alone
  • Let a page be tidy at the cost of being true

One is a guide. The other walks beside you.

livinginauroville.in
“Come, I’ll show you this place.”
Looks outward. Answers questions.
sreebalakrishnan.in
“Wait. Did you notice that?”
Looks inward, then outward again.

One is a guide; the other is a notebook that somehow became a person. Which is why this site will never reorganise itself into a services page, and why every attempt to make it “clearer” would make it worse.

The defining characteristic, if I had to name one: insatiably curious, but increasingly interested in meaning rather than answers.

See also — how these pages get built · what he is doing now · everything, shelved

spoken by Sree, shaped into pages with ❤️