Rajesh Kumar

Optimizing life, one day after the next

About

07 Feb 2017

I'm a bit of a nomad or a world citizen depending on how you look at it. The first thing that makes me feel incredibly singled-out when interacting with most people is that I'm not attached to a single place, city, or country. As a result, I find it hard to stay put in one place for too long. This, as it turns out, can be pretty hard for a lot of people to grasp (including myself). Fortunately, if you cast your net wide enough, there are many more people like me as I've come to realize over the past decade or so.

I was born in Chennai (formerly Madras), a city in India with half as many people as New York City. Though I was born there, I was moved out promptly so I never lived there. I've visited several times though, often months at a time, so I still have a lot of Indian in me. I grew up in Dubai with my parents and brother, spending the first 15 years of my life getting to school in the hot desert sands by camel. Just kidding, we had air conditioned school buses that picked me up outside my apartment and dropped us inside the school grounds. In 2002, we immigrated to Vancouver, Canada where I wrapped up high school in the burbs.

I thought the weather change from Dubai to Vancouver was drastic until I moved to Waterloo for undergrad. Also in Canada, but 5 hours by flight. 5 years of engineering and a couple minors later, I moved again. This time to San Francisco to start my career as a software engineer at a then-popular social gaming company called Zynga. A year-and-a-half after rubbing shoulders with the makers of Farmville, I moved back to Toronto to be closer to my girlfriend, soon to be fiancée. We got married a year-and-a-half later and moved back again to San Francisco where we currently live (quite happily, I must admit).

What's after San Francisco? Who knows. It's an open playground out there.

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