Sometimes the most profound life changes begin with the simplest mistakes. For Tushar, that moment came during his graduate school applications, when a geographical assumption would alter the entire trajectory of his life.
And I feel like even though in my, like, funny story when I applied to grad school, when I took the GRE, you have to pick which university, like, you have to pick four universities to send your score for free. And I was, like, applying to I was like, I’m applying to, like, the good CS schools in America, and I picked California in the drop down, and I assumed all of them are in California. So I accidentally actually picked Carnegie Mellon, Silicon Valley campus. And then when I was telling my cousin about it, he’s like, hey. That does not exist. Like, there’s there’s no Carnegie Mellon on the West Coast. It’s a Pittsburgh based, Pennsylvania based Pennsylvania based university. And then I got home. I looked up the Internet. They had just started a new campus, like, few years back, and I was like, oh, interesting. There is a campus. And so and I guess long story short, that’s how I ended up coming to the Bay Area. Like, one mistake one honest mistake I made Wow. That was the only university I actually got accepted into, so, when I applied for grad school.
This honest error - assuming all good computer science schools were in California - led him to accidentally apply to Carnegie Mellon’s Silicon Valley campus, a place he didn’t even know existed until his cousin corrected him.
Arriving in Mountain View brought an unexpected revelation that would reshape his entire perspective on success and achievement.
I guess, like, being in Mountain View kind of made me realize that, okay, this is, you almost I guess in India or when you’re working in tech, you’re like, okay, Google is like a dream job. When you come to Mountain View, everybody works at Google. Yeah. So it kind of, feels like how you feel like at Infosys or Accenture in Pune is how you feel, like, at Google in Mountain View. Obviously, like, the technology and what they are doing is, like, there’s a lot of difference in how they are approaching technology. But you almost, like, don’t no longer put a person who works at Google on a pedestal. Right? I think moving to the Bay Area was a great, like, way to get people off a pedestal because I always you always have this, oh, wow. Like, Stanford is, like, this amazing university or Berkeley is this amazing university or Google is this amazing company or, like, Facebook is this like, everything that you assumed, like, it just, like, okay. Facebook is an amazing company, but I have five friends working there. Google is amazing company. I know, like, eight people working there. It’s almost like normalizes the fact that, okay, this is not it’s pretty normal if you work if you live here and work here, you probably work at one of these because they are the largest employers Yeah. In tech.
The tech giants he had idolized from India suddenly became as commonplace as any other employer. Google, the dream job from afar, was simply where everyone worked - no different from how Infosys felt in Pune. This normalization of the extraordinary became a crucial lesson in removing artificial pedestals and seeing prestigious institutions for what they truly were: places where regular people did exceptional work.
While technology initially drew him to the Bay Area, something deeper kept him anchored there.
So I guess the Bay Area the what attracted me was the technology. But what kept me here is that there is a path to express your values through a product, in the Bay Area. And it can like, with the talent that you have surrounding you, you can actually take your values and your ideas to the world, and it’s not just it won’t just stay in the Bay Area. So how you use that opportunity, how you use that ecosystem is determined by you, but that ecosystem exists here where if you have a really hard technical problem, you can solve it by literally walking across the street to the person who probably built that piece of technology or giving a call to somebody who, like, who meet them in person and brainstorm on how to solve a hard problem that their piece of technology is causing in your product or something.
He discovered a unique ecosystem where personal values could be translated into products with global reach, where walking across the street might connect you with the person who built the very technology causing your current problem. This wasn’t just about access to talent - it was about the possibility of meaningful impact, of taking your deepest beliefs and scaling them to touch lives worldwide.
Tushar’s path to technology began with childhood wonder at simple computer optimizations - the magic of defragmenting a disk to make a computer run faster.
I think when I first like, when I got my first, like, I guess, computer, so to speak, I was just amazed that you can do some, quote, unquote, hacks where you defragment the disk, and your computer becomes a little faster or you clean up some press some button on some UI and the computer suddenly becomes faster. That curiosity, what got me in like, made me like, following that, I studied computer science in undergrad. Like, I was not the most, like a lot of people came from CBSE and studied, like, computer science, like, eleventh, twelfth, but I didn’t study computer science. I was just, like, curious about computers. Like, okay. How does this work? Right? So I think that curiosity of computers, and I think think now I call it curiosity of people, that kind of was, like, always there. Like, why are people suffering? Right? Like, there is in India, like, I grew up in an area where they were very close to, like, slum areas. Yeah. So I would be like, why does our house, like, feel it can it’ll survive a rainstorm and this other person’s house feel like it won’t?
But this technical curiosity was paralleled by a more profound human curiosity, born from growing up near slum areas in India. The stark contrast between houses that could survive storms and those that couldn’t planted seeds of questioning that would grow into a lifelong mission to understand and address human suffering.