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Grit, Curiosity, and the Making of GritWise: My Journey to Reimagine Education When I was fifteen, I wrote a tagline for myself: Enchanting Hope, Enhancing Lives. I didn’t know what it meant in practice. I didn’t know if it would lead me to startups, AI, mentoring, or education. But it became this quiet compass I carried everywhere—even when I wasn’t looking at it directly. A few years later, I found myself knee-deep in healthcare and emergency services with Swasthaadhaar and EmeReCard (now MyResQR). It was messy work. High stakes. Real in a way that leaves no space for ego. People’s lives depended on systems we were building from scratch. Then came PixelBrahma—leading teams, building products for companies like AMD India. That’s where I learned the tightrope walk between vision and execution, and the quiet weight of leading people when things are unclear. But education… education was always there in the background. At 18, an MBA professor invited me to join a venture. I said no—my own startup journey was just taking off. But the idea lingered. Over the years, I mentored more than fifty students. We’d sit in classrooms or cafés, chasing questions until they turned into insights. I started running sessions just to feel that moment where silence flips into energy and the air gets heavier with curiosity. Along the way, I met faculty who carried the same frustration I did. They weren’t anti-system—they were just tired of watching it reward compliance over courage, silence over questions. Then came July 2024. A quiet evening. A notebook in front of me. And a question that hit hard: If I had the next few decades to give to one thing—just one—what would it be? Something with real impact. Something that played to my strengths. Something I’d still want to do on my worst days. The answer wasn’t “EdTech.” It was an EdHumane approach—where AI isn’t the hero, but the amplifier. Where students are at the center. Where questions, voices, and curiosity drive everything. Years of mentoring boiled down to two traits that change lives: grit and relentless curiosity. Together, they lead to wisdom. Grit + Wise. The name almost named itself. We started experimenting. Early sessions online were humbling—many students stayed quiet while a few confident ones carried the conversation. It was a reminder: learning needs to be alive, human, collaborative. And the best place for that? A college campus, where everyone starts as equals. We piloted a program in a Kerala college. The students got it immediately. Faculty noticed the shift. One principal even suggested carving minutes out of other classes to run GritHour chapters. But the real win for me came outside the classroom—standing by the gate after a session, coffee in hand, watching students head home. Almost ninety percent stopped to say goodbye. That’s when it hit me: this isn’t about curriculum. It’s about connection. Still, expansion hit a wall. Management worried it would disrupt other classes. So we pivoted. If we couldn’t scale physically, we’d capture that same spark digitally—an app that could make learning feel just as alive and relatable in a student’s hand as it did in the room. I remember one faculty member telling me she’d stopped preparing for classes because students never asked questions anymore. I told her, my success is when you have to prepare—because they walk in curious, hungry, ready to challenge you. That’s why GritWise carries its tagline: Powered by Community. Elevated by AI. AI is a tool—not a replacement. This is Plato’s Academy, reimagined for the AI era. Today, GritWise is officially a Private Limited Company. GritWise Club Private Limited. My days are split between building with students and faculties, and crafting a product that redefines education as joyful, human, and curiosity-driven. From healthcare to mentoring, from live sessions to digital pilots—every step has been building toward this mission. And through it all, my compass never changed: Enchanting Hope, Enhancing Lives. GritWise is young, but the mission is not. It’s about raising a generation of bold thinkers, makers, and curiosity-chasers. About bringing back the joy in learning—making it something you feel, not just finish. And about using technology to lift our voices higher, not drown them out. Ten years after my first startup experiment, I’m finally where I was meant to be— shaping the future of education, one curious mind at a time.