From punch cards to medical devices
I can sense the wires. When data moves across a network, some part of me still feels the bits flowing through the copper, the way you feel a current. You don't learn that from a certification. You earn it over thirty years of taking machines apart and watching how they work, and how they break.
This is the story of that path: from a green-screen computer in 1990 to securing the medical devices that people's lives depend on today.
A green screen and 8KB of RAM
The first computer I touched, in 1990, had 8KB of RAM and a 100MB hard disk. We loaded games off 5-inch floppies and waited. My school had five computers at a time when most schools had none, an accident of timing that gave me a head start I was too young to recognize.
I had a second piece of luck. My father worked at a manufacturing plant, and every school holiday I'd tag along and intern. In the early '90s I watched engineers wire an entire enterprise network by hand: coaxial cable, racks, building to building. I didn't have the words for it then, but I was watching infrastructure being born. I even saw punch cards still being used to program CNC machines. The whole history of how humans instruct machines was passing in front of me.
Learning the machine from the inside
I learned to program in BASIC and FORTRAN, long before Python and Java were the on-ramp. I assembled my own computers, wrote assembly language with a debugger, and ran code on every Intel chip from the 8086 to the 486. I lived the shift from Lotus 1-2-3 to a graphical SmartSuite, from DOS to Windows 3.1, which shipped on six floppy disks and a fight with drivers, and into Linux when the penguin was still new.
Somewhere in there I picked up a habit my teachers found maddening. When one of them wrote a program on the blackboard, I'd spot the error before they finished writing it. I was scolded more than once. It took me years to understand that this wasn't mischief. It's simply how my mind works. It runs like a debugger. I see the flaw before it breaks.
That single trait, seeing the break before it happens, turned out to be the whole job.
Mumbai, and the world
My working life began on the morning of November 25th, 2000, when I stepped off the train at Dadar station with very little Hindi and a great deal of nerve. My first job was teaching. I lived among people from every corner of the country and learned to read rooms as well as machines. College had taught me survival; Mumbai taught me the world.
Into security
By 2002 I had drifted into security, and in 2004 I started my own security business. For the better part of two decades I secured some of the most demanding environments there are: government, law enforcement, banking, aerospace, pharma. High-stakes places where a mistake isn't a bug ticket; it's a headline. That work taught me the lesson I still build on: security isn't a product you install. It's a discipline you practice, from the silicon up.
What the pandemic took, and what it gave
COVID closed that chapter. I had to wind down what I'd spent years building, and that was hard. But I didn't leave the work; I distilled it. Twenty years of doing slowly became something I could explain, teach, and pass on.
Why medical devices
Today I lead security and technology at a medical-device manufacturer. Of every field I've worked in, this is the one whose stakes are the plainest: these are machines that keep people alive. A vulnerability here isn't a data point. It's a heartbeat. My whole strange path converges on it. To secure a device you have to understand it from the chip to the cloud, and I've spent my life on every layer of that stack.
Why I write
The internet has a short memory. My first company is gone; even a search engine has forgotten it ever existed. So I'm writing it down: the lessons, the failures, the things three decades taught me that no course covers. If you build, secure, or simply depend on the devices that run our lives, I hope some of it is useful to you.
One thing I believe above the rest: change is extraordinary in humans. We adapt; we always have. The machines keep changing, and so do we. The trick is to keep paying attention, and to do it now, because later has a quiet way of becoming never.
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