ABOUT

#showyourwork

I'm a professional educator with over a decade of experience,
but that's just a part of my pie.

Creativity runs deep in me, and I’ve done a little bit of almost everything there is to do. You can find my career output on LinkedIn. On this page you will find a brief sampling of everything else. Well, strike that. On this page you will find a comprehensive list of almost everything I have done since employment. Backed up with evidence where possible.

(This page is under construction in terms of look and feel and organization.)

Social Metrics:

2100+ Connections On LinkedIn

2100+ Followers On Instagram

Zero Activity On Twitter

Reddit Remembers Me

General Metrics:

Life Metrics:

  • Read 1000+ books.
  • Watched 1500+ movies according to IMDB. Watched many before IMDB was around.
  • Heard more music on tapes and CDs than anyone else I know.
  • Remember Livejournal? Remember the Nokia 3100? Remember Half Life? System Shock?

Career Metrics:

  • Read 200+ textbooks.
  • Submitted 1000+ assignments.
  • Worked on 12 projects.
  • Procured 1 Bachelor’s degree.
  • Procured 1 Master’s degree.
  • Lost count of courses and certifications.
  • Taught 4000+ students over a decade long career.

Skill Metrics:

  • Proficient in 10 visual/design/editing suites
  • Self-taught musician.
  • Learned almost everything non-degree-program oriented from Youtube.
  • Learned a bunch of programming languages without any current personal/career use cases.

Job Metrics:

Major Courses Taught:

  • Engineering Mechanics through five revisions of curriculum.
  • Engineering Graphics through four revisions of curriculum.
  • AutoCAD 2013 through 2023 and counting.
  • 3D Modeling (with Blender) and Printing
  • Indian Traditional Values
  • Mechanics of Electromechanical Systems (MEMS)

Other Courses Conducted/Evaluated:

  • Photography and Photo Editing
  • Beach cleaning activities
  • Music Appreciation
  • Workplace ethics drama evaluations
  • Entrepreneurship in the 2020s
  • Yoga vidya.
  • Short Filmmaking.
  • Film Appreciation.

More Work Metrics:

  • Institute-level Admissions in-charge for 10+ years.
  • Overseeing placement and IIC activities as an Industry Relations Committee core member for 5+ years.
  • Organizing the annual alumni meet for 5+ years.
  • First Year Induction Program coordinator and speaker.
  • Editor for institute news in the Bhavan’s campus magazine for 8+ years.

Interpersonal Metrics:

Evaluated:

  • 20+ Case Study Competitions, including 8 national competitions.
  • 10+ national debate competitions on current affairs and technology.
  • 20+ Elevator Pitch competitions.
  • 10+ Ideation Competitions.
  • 2 major event-organization competitions.
  • 600+ candidates for committee selection interviews.
  • 20+ candidates for the college’s non-teaching position technical skills.
  • 200+ candidates for proficiency in music, drama, dance and art.

Mentoring Metrics:

  • Polished 100+ resumes to make them placement ready.
  • Edited and proofread 20+ SOPs for international Masters program applications, including Georgiatech and Oxford.
  • Broke down the Masters/MBA/Job brick wall of confusion for 30+ students. All successfully pursuing their clarified careers and vocations.
  • Coached 50+ students with critical interview roadblocks. At least 10 of whom got a job offer with their very next campus interview.

More Mentoring Metrics:

  • Counseled countless students through speech impediments, linguistic barriers and developing better social connections.
  • Improved the extracurricular profile of hundreds of students through various creative affiliations and gentle persuasion.
  • Solidified the conversational skills of 100+ students through informal sessions.
  • Spread the physical book-reading virus in our digital millennium to stave off the upcoming dystopian apocalypse. (Heh.)

Committee Metrics:

 

College committees are an enterprise by themselves. Acting at times independent of and at times wholly depedent on institute support, they need the same dedication and project management skills as any medium sized business team. The caveat is that the team changes every year, with the bulk of the team comprising students who are not only new to the committee but new to the college itself. They all involve heavy recruitment processes and training, just on a lighter scale than placement rounds.

Each committee comprises 50+ people. I’ve handled all of these committees for 5+ years. That’s 20 teams of 50+ people over the years, with each year upscaling the previous.

You can find out more about these committees on their Instagram pages:

E-Cell, IR and IIC Metrics:

  • These committees focus on entrepreneurship, employability and innovation. 
  • Under my mentorship, E-Cell won third place at IIT-Bombay’s NEC competition twice, and first place in 2020 and 2023 out of 700+ competing teams each year (including B-schools and other IITs).
  • E-Cell’s event calendar now includes national business case study competitions, which I have designed and evaluated in all of its iterations.
  • IR has expanded its catalog to inventive takes on interview and placement education events.
  • I’m a central part of the strategizing and execution of the IR and IIC events.

SPark Metrics:

  • The official college magazine, photography and videography club of the institute. 
  • Covers all events on campus, and has an active photography Operations division, which I have mobilized to cover college festivals with footfalls in the thousands.
  • Promotes regular columns and hosts the annual Open Mic of the institute, having executed multiple editions of the same in offline venues, and in a recording studio, broadcast live, during the Covid-19 lockdown.
  • Scripted/Directed the online audio podcast–SParkCasts–during Covid-19 lockdown and additionally hosted all offline video editions from 2023 onwards.
  •  #readabook

Mudra Metrics:

  • The cultural club of the institute.
  • Houses music, dance, drama and fine arts under its umbrella, including the official college dance and fashion teams, as well as the music band.
  • I monitor all cultural output and frequently contribute to the same.
  • Wrote/Directed two short films, and multiple short monologues and skits.
  • Wrote/Directed a webseries currently under production.
  • Released multiple musical performances with student bandmates.
  • Directed, shot and edited multiple music and dance performances.
  • Auditioned over 300 musicians, dancers, actors and fine arts students in the process.
  • You can find samples of my output in Mudra down below.

 

OCULUS:

And then there’s Oculus, the institute’s annual Technocultural festival. Since its inception in 2019, I have contributed to the front and backend of the grand inter-college event. Performing in its events, setting up the backstage pre-event itinerary with sound checks and tech support, and being the go-to guy for the main festival days that the students turn to whenever they need something.

Music

I’m a vocalist. But also: with a bunch of local stage performances and open mics and years of tinkering around in music production software, I’ve been around the microphone and speakers well before Youtube content creators made them commonplace.

1. Hallelujah

  • Recorded separately in each bandmate’s home and compiled on my DAW during COVID-19 lockdown, a tribute to Cohen and Buckley with my small spin on it:
 
 
 
 
 
 
View this post on Instagram
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A post shared by Mudra – Listen To Your Art (@mudra_s.p.i.t)

 

2. Slow Dancing In A Burning Room

  • Performed in a live broadcast recording studio during the COVID-19 pandemic for SPark, this was the highest view-count performance of the evening.
  • COVID-19 restrictions mandated masks before and after the performance, and it was a fun challenge performing with someone else setting up the instruments for my bandmates.
 
 
  • Read the livestream chat. They went a little nuts.
 
 

3. Snuff

  • Performed live to an audience of 400+ people, and later recorded from the ground up and mixed. I handled 80% of the entire song. It’s my best work yet:

4.. Hotel California

  • Stay tuned…
 
 
  • Coming soon.
 
 

Drama/Film

The vast majority of my collaborative film work comes from my student projects, all of which I have written and directed. I’ve also picked up proficiency in Davinci Resolve for video editing and am learning compositing as we go along. I have a screenwriting certification to pad things out.

My latest public work:

1. This Is My Show.

2. Pravaah Trailer.

 3. Priority: Trailer:

Priority (A Halloween Horror Short Film):

4. Spark Release Video.

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
View this post on Instagram
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A post shared by SPark (@whatignitessp)

 

 

 

5. Jekyll/Hide – Performed live in an online Open Mic, this was a single actor, dual personality performance that is now lost in time.

6. My most recent editing job was a submission to Filmsupply’s annual Editfest. You can take a look at it here. It’s pretty groovy:

Fashion/Dance

With no prior professional experience with fashion, in 2022 I pulled together a student fashion show in 9 days flat. With a miniscule budget, we sourced costumes, props, hair and makeup, gathered a team of students with little to no prior stage presence, and rehearsing in grueling hot afternoons, we pulled it off. Performance video available upon request. 

Recently, I directed, shot and edited a small dance performance. Take a look:

Our second fashion show performance was very well-received. You can watch it here:

As a part of learning video editing in Davinci Resolve, I prepared a music video using the Editfest competition footage and music: Calica – Don’t (Instagram).

I’ve also shot and edited a fair number of performances, which you can see here:

(P.S.: I have a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering and an Assistant Professor's day job. More on that later. But in the meantime, I made some introductory content for AutoCAD for 2D drawing. It's available here:)


There’s a lot more short form content on my Instagram, all shot, cut and synced by me:

Podcasts

During the Covid-19 Pandemic, we released multiple episodes of an online podcast, SParkCasts. Recorded and executed completely online. It’s all available on SPark’s Instagram. Links below (too many embedded Instagram posts slow the page down to a crawl; just click the links, folks).

The audio editions are available here:

We also released video podcasts. Shot, scripted and edited by me:

We switched over to Youtube after that. These are hour long deep dives into various topics, such as the Metaverse and 2023 movies to look out for. This time I’m also in front of the camera, not just doing backend stuff. Fun:
  •  
 
 
 
 

3D Modeling

I started fiddling in 3D Studio Max R3 (way back in the 2000s), then quit it for over a decade because I didn’t have a good enough machine to handle it. But these days you can do 3D on pretty much anything, and I’ve been steadily progressing with Blender. Enough to start a full-fledged module on 3D modeling in my first year tech shop syllabus. Some samples of my work, based on tutorials (all on Instagram):

Screenplays/Writing

I’ve written the screenplays for all my short films and projects, including Pravaah, Priority, Teacher’s Day skits, two episodes of This Is My Show, Jekyll/Hyde among others.

I wrote a short film script as a part of John Warren’s Writing The Short five-week course, titled Responsible Citizen, alongside multiple 3 page screenplays for competitions.

I’m currently working a feature-length animated film screenplay as a part of a 12 week course.

My completed scripts are available upon request, but not publicly displayed. Please contact me to read them.

I recently also wrote a 5000 word deep dive into the plot of Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher. I’m particularly happy with the depth of my study. You can read it here: Study of Usher.

Jack of All Trades?

There are things I left out (such as the videos I made for advertising the college to prospective students), but that’s a pretty long list of things to see. Hopefully it gives you a sense of my diversity.

The world rewards focused professionals, but I’m not wired that way. As you can see, I can wrestle multiple domains with adequate competency, given local and budgetary constraints. As long as there is a creative energy to the work and it appeals to me, I’ll get it done.

 

Current Affairs:

I’m currently learning AR/VR through Facebook/Meta’s Spark application, dabbling in AI created artwork (you can find examples of the same on my Instagram by clicking here), and getting back into the groove of writing. 

I also learned how to build this website from Youtube, and am tinkering with it as we go along.

I learned everything the hard way; by myself. You don’t have to. I will teach you. Or better yet, I’ll work with you. For a fair price. To find out more, go to my Services page and let’s take it forward.

I sleep to wake; and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I must go.

(Theodore Roethke)