Starting up: 01
Aman and I became friends in my early Delhi years- 2014/15, I’d say. We had a volatile friendship (seems like I had a volatile everything in my early twenties) but we also had some mad fun times together. There was a trio of us and we went to parties, listened to great music, picniced, cracked jokes, co-wrote bad poetry and thought we were the sassiest people in town. We moved to Bombay around the same time. I’ve never realised how much I’ve taken his presence for granted until he told me he's getting married and moving to Singapore for work at the end of this year. Big Moves, as they say. So, naturally, I spoke with him about life, start-ups, drugs, love, writing, fitness and friendship. I’ll be putting it up in 3 parts. This is the first part. You can read the second part here.
Aman, you have to speak slower since I’m recording this.
Cool
Louder, too. You’ve become really soft-spoken, I must say.
It’s the money.
Wow. Okay, tell me about your failed start-up.
It wasn’t a failed start-up when I first started it. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was like, 22-23 and fed up with my job. It was very boring. And then, everyone in India at that point was trying to open a start-up. So, I was like yeah cool, I want to do this. I had a friend from school who was also trying to, you know, do something. I didn’t have an idea of my own. He had a food delivery idea. Everyone was doing it back then. Food-tech was the future. Basically, bitcoin right now. There was a lot of unsubstantiated optimism. We started it, it did okay. Then, we raised money and that was like, a big mistake.
Why?
We weren’t prepared for it. We weren’t MBA people. We didn’t know how a company works. Everything was on the fly. If you have this, everything goes approach, everything burns down really fast. We ran out of money. It was bad for a long time before we shut it. Like, if you’re in a bad relationship, you just don’t end it. It’s basically a long tale of bad days after bad days. It was this slow decline like how Rome declined. So, my mental psyche also deteriorated. You work on something for two years and come to the realisation that this is like, a pure failure. I didn’t learn a lot and I didn’t earn a lot. Purely, bad decisions and I let them play out also. I didn’t cut my losses early. I didn’t capitalise on it. My co-founder did his MBA and worked with Zomato. Long-term, I didn’t see myself selling fucking food, right? I’m a computer science engineer from a good college and all my life, I’ve been told I’m smart and I’ve done well. I wanted to be technically challenged, be creative and find something I’m good at and be paid for it.
And then, I was trying those visual coding things, if you remember.
Tell me about the time your laptop got stolen outside my absurd house with no windows in Vasant Kunj.
If I think of my mindset at that point, I was just very lost. It felt very Kafka-esque. I was just getting fucked. It was a harrowing experience, obviously. But, in the grander scheme of things, it was just like, life. I was getting fat. I didn’t know I was fat, though. I kept getting fat. One of the major symptoms of depression is you don’t realise you’re fat. Throughout my life, I wasn’t fat. I didn’t know that if you ate too much, you would get fat. I found out the hard way. It’s not like our society shames you for being fat unless you’re fucking obese. I think I’d reached that point where my friends started calling me fat. I had a big identity crisis. Firstly, I was jobless. Secondly, I was fat. A lot of thoughts I remember having are totally a depressed person’s thoughts. Like, I'm not good for anything, what’s the point of anything. Fucking sleeping till 2 pm. I had a substance abuse problem. I kept doing it because everyone else was doing it. I was attracting negative people. I feel like if you go with the flow, you’ll probably end up in a nook because it’s not out of your own choice.
So, you’re saying we became friends because we both had a negative mindset?|
I mean, you weren’t like a bed of roses to know. I think I hadn’t met anybody as sharp as you. Not in terms of intelligence but just like, prickly. You could get off-balanced very easily. I felt like you did that with me more than with other people, right? Because, I wasn’t sure of myself back then. Now, if somebody does that to me now, I’d instantly shut them down. During that time, I was just trying to be loved.
Wow, I feel like shit now.
I mean, it’s okay. If a person is unloved, a lot of things fall apart in their psyche. It’s very important for everyone to feel loved. To even begin to approach the best version of themselves. If you’re unloved, you’ll always act out and take shit from other people.
Do you think we were just friends cuz we were intrinsically unloved?
No, I think we had fun hanging out. That was the main thing. Shooting shit was fun. Apparently, we had a lot of free time.
(laughs)
Ya, we were always hanging out. Tuesday morning, afternoon. You were still busy. (name redacted) was always free, right? Gardening in the morning, chilling with her paintings at night. It was lucky. But, I decided I mull over my entire personality. How do you transform a particular situation? It was a really strong force telling you that you’re useless. 2-3 before this, I wasn’t depressed, I was on top of the world. My disposition was good, I was earning money. I was always lost in terms of career but I did not foresee how hard it was going to be to come back to do what I want to do. I worked in a bank then I did a food delivery startup. Any company would expect you to have relevant experience. It’s not easy. After 6 months of trying and no money, living with my parents and fat, it all got too much.
How did you get out of it?
Honestly, exercise and meditation. That really centered a lot of things. There was always like, a thing to do everyday. The routine helped a lot. I made a promise to myself that I’ll do this everyday. I started feeling normal again. Like, I’m pretty sure if I work hard enough, I can crack most reasonable problems that anybody is getting paid to do. I realised I have good problem solving skills, I’m analytical. It was only about working hard enough and working for the right opportunities. It wasn’t about doing art here and writing there. Long-term, I didn’t see myself being an artist. I find my flow with hands-on technical problem solving. Like, when you write, you’re in the middle of inspiration.
Which was right now, that I put aside for an interview to make up for my shitty behaviour from mid 2010s.
It’s all cool. If I was dead by now, you’d be responsible but I’m not, so.
How did leaving Delhi change you?
I feel like everyone in Delhi has big dark circles because nobody’s sleeping well. I feel like there’s something wickedly wrong with the city. People I meet there aren’t motivated, like, they have family businesses. People just like, chill all the time. Once I came to Bombay, I didn’t know a lot of people here so it was easier to focus. Bombay also lets you be. There’s no distractions because I wasn’t part of any social clique. It also gave me a lot of financial security. I think Delhi’s more talk about work but in Bombay, actual transactions happen. People need to get their shit done. It’s not like they pontificate about this project or that. It’s a city of doers. It will kick you out if you can’t pay rent.
How did you manage to quit smoking?
One day I woke up and I started coughing and there was blood in my cough.
Oh my god.
I was like, God, let this not be cancer or tuberculosis. And, luckily, it wasn’t. It was just a nosebleed. But, I decided to quit anyway. I mean, when I smoked, I smelt like shit, kept coughing, my lips were blue, my teeth were bad. I’m a very obsessive-compulsive sort of person so if I like something, I go all in. I don’t know how to restrain myself. That’s why I never keep sugar or snacks in my house. I know it’s a dark road. You can’t stop it and you hate yourself afterwards. And that’s how it was with cigarettes. For every mood, occasion, all punctuations in life.
Do you miss writing? Do you plan on getting back to it?
Obviously, there’s love for writing but I also understand, if I start writing again, it’s not like I’ll write the best novel. Like anything, you have to do it everyday to get better. I don’t think I can do that right now.
Can you talk about our poetry rap project or is that too sensational?
Right now, if I look at it, it was pretty lame. It’s not some literary masterpiece. But, it was cool at that point. It was an outlet.
I had fun. It was impromptu.
Yeah, we used to think we were great writers.
To be fair, we didn’t. It was called ‘Bad Poetry.’
Yeah, we thought we were like Hemingway hanging out with his buddies at the bar.
We were Rupi Kaur before Rupi Kaur.
So, that’s not a good thing.
Can we talk about the time you almost slept with my cousin? Or, is that too controversial?
What? What cousin? I don’t remember this.
That was a really quick answer. You didn’t even jog your memory.
Ya until 2017, there’s like a lot of memory gaps. If you told me, you did this. I’d be like yeah, I probably did it but I don’t remember.
To be continued.
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Image source: Aman and I in Perch, Khan Market, New Delhi, circa 2015 (or 2016)