Shubh Aarambh
Before the first real post, a thank you. To the gods I grew up with, to my parents, to everyone who stayed, and to everyone who doubted me.
In Sanatan Dharm, you do not start anything without remembering Shri Ganesh ji first. Not a business, not a journey, not a house, not a page. You bow, you ask, and then you begin.
I want to do that properly. But two people come before the writing, before the work, and honestly before everything else I could put on this page, so they go first.
Mummy and Papa
My father is an electrician and he owns an electronics shop. My mother is the reason I have a computer at all.
In 9th grade I asked her for one. She said yes if I behaved myself for a month, and then she said yes to an internet connection too. That is the best deal I have ever negotiated and I have negotiated a few since. Everything I do for a living today came out of that one machine in a middle-class house in Ujjain.
They did not understand what I was doing. For years nobody in my family could explain my work to a relative. They let me do it anyway. In a small town, letting your son skip the safe road is not a small thing, and I know now what it cost them to stay quiet about it.
Papa, Mummy, thank you. I have never been able to say this out loud, so I am writing it down instead.
Shri Ganesha
Shri Ganesh ji, the remover of obstacles. Every beginning is yours first. I have started many things and finished fewer, and the ones that worked were never the ones I forced. Please keep clearing the road, and please keep me sensible about which road I am on.
Mahakal, and a city that does the remembering for you
I am from Ujjain.
None of this was something I had to go looking for. Mahakaleshwar is in my city. Kaal Bhairav is in my city. I grew up with the bhasma aarti happening before dawn a few kilometres from my house, whether I was awake for it or not, whether I deserved it or not.
Mahakal, thank you for being the constant. Ujjain measures time from you. When my own sense of time went strange, which it did for years, the city kept its own.
Kaal Bhairav Bhagwan, for protection, and for keeping the fear in proportion. I have been in that queue on days when I had nothing to ask for, and just stood there.
Hanuman ji, Shiv ji, Khatu Shyam ji
Hanuman ji, for strength on the days I do not have any of my own, and for the reminder that devotion is not separate from doing the work.
Shiv ji, for teaching that destruction is not the opposite of creation. Some things in my life had to end badly before anything could begin well. I did not understand that while it was happening.
Khatu Shyam ji at Ringas. Haare ka sahara. The one who is there for the person who has already lost, who has nothing left to offer and comes anyway. I have been that person. More than once, and not so long ago.
Maharaj ji
And Neem Karoli Baba Maharaj ji.
Maharaj ji, I do not have the words for this one. Love everyone, feed everyone, remember God. I read that years ago and I am still trying to become a person who can actually do all three.
Whatever I have reached, I am not confused about who got me here. The credit is theirs. The mistakes are mine.
Nine years, and I still do not know what I am doing
It has been about nine years since I properly started. I never planned any of it. There was no route and there was no plan B. One thing led to the next, and I followed.
I am a first-generation entrepreneur. Nobody at my dinner table had done this before, so there was no one to ask. Every single thing has been a first time: the first client, the first hire, the first time I got something badly wrong and had to tell somebody. No backing. No safety net. If it went, it went.
It is frightening, and I would rather say so than pretend. There is a particular kind of fear that comes from having nobody above you to escalate to.
The other half is just as true. I get to learn everything. Most people never get that, and on the good days it does not feel like fear at all. It feels like being handed the whole syllabus and told to work it out.
This domain has been waiting since 2016
I bought neerajjivnani.com in 2016.
I told myself I would do something with it one day. That day kept moving. It renewed quietly every year while I built things for other people.
I am starting it now. Not because the timing is right, because it is not and it never was going to be. Just because waiting for the right time is how a domain sits empty for nine years.
To everyone who stayed
To the people who watched the whole thing and did not leave when it was not going well: I saw it. I was not always in a state to say so, but I saw it.
To my team, past and present, who put their own years into things that had my name on them. To the friends who kept asking how it was going even when the honest answer was "not great". To the clients who trusted a very young person with something that mattered to them.
And to you, reading this. Maybe today, maybe years from now when this page is old. Thank you for being here. A page nobody reads is just a file on a server. You are what turns it into something.
And to the ones who doubted me
Thank you as well, and I mean this without any edge to it.
Some of you were right. That is worth saying. A few of the things I was told would not work did not work, and I would have found that out slower and more expensively without you.
And some of the doubt gave me something I could not have manufactured on my own: a reason to keep going on the days when I could not find one inside myself. I do not know if that is healthy. I only know it happened.
What comes next
So this is the beginning.
What comes next will be about distribution, search, AI and the work I actually do. That can wait one more page. The thank you comes first, said properly and put on the record, the way it is supposed to be done.
Shri Ganesha.