It started at a
dinner table in Ambala.
In 1994, at a dinner table in Ambala, Haryana, something changed. My younger brother Salil — who was 12, usually bubbly and full of life — sat unusually quiet. He wouldn't look up. He wouldn't eat. Something had broken inside him, and none of us could see it clearly enough to help.
What I didn't know then was that Salil had been enduring severe bullying at school for months. The relentless torment went unnoticed by his teachers, his friends, and even our family. By the time we understood the depth of what he was going through, Salil was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia.
“The pain of those missed early signs — of watching someone you love suffer because no system existed to catch it — that pain never left me. It became the engine behind everything I've built.”
Growing up in India, I saw firsthand how the healthcare system failed people like Salil. Brief appointments with doctors. No guidance between visits. No tools for the people closest to him to understand what was happening. My family was left scrambling for help in a system that didn't know how to give it.
That experience became a splinter in my mind — one that stayed with me through an engineering degree at NIT, an MBA at Wharton, and 17 years in the corporate world. And when I finally had the skills, the resources, and the conviction, I walked away from everything comfortable to make sure no other family would have to feel that same helplessness.
In 2015, I founded TrustCircle. It's the platform I wished had existed for Salil — an AI-powered, preventive system that gives young people a safe space to express what they're feeling and gives the adults around them the tools to intervene early, before a quiet dinner becomes a crisis that changes a life.
“Every child deserves to be seen — not just when they're breaking, but in the quiet moments before.”
On early intervention
