Rajkot to Berlin
Six cities, in order. The shape was only visible from the last one.
Six cities, in the order they happened. Written out like that it looks like a plan. It wasn’t — each move was made with the information available at the time, and the shape only appeared looking back from the last one.
Rajkot was a Master of Computer Science at Atmiya University, a private university in Gujarat — and, more than the degree, the friends and the city. Nobody remembers a syllabus. Everybody remembers who they were arguing with at midnight.
Ahmedabad was the first real system: a management platform for a pharmaceutical business, built as an internship. It is still the best project of those years, because it was the first time the requirements came from how a business actually worked rather than from a brief written for practice. The gap between a specification and a working company is the thing a university cannot teach; it is learned the first time someone explains why a process that looked simplifiable has to stay complicated.
Hyderabad was three months inside TCS’s Initial Learning Programme — thousands of graduates on the same curriculum at the same time. Scale, before anything else.
Mumbai was the first client engagement: a McKinsey account, staffed through TCS. Bangalore came after it.
Berlin is where the sequence stopped being one. The city is the base now, not the backdrop, and has its own entry. The rest of this site is what happened once the moving stopped.