About

At the beginning of a Turkish movie "Sevimli Tehlikeli", a small girl refuses to accept a narration as a Story if the narration doesn't start with "Once upon a time". So here it goes...

Once upon a time, I was born in Hyderabad, the emerging capital of Indian cinema, to a family that has love-hate relationship with cinema. Love for the art form; Hate for the business and culture of it. So for the love of it, my mom sent me to music classes; father sent me to dance classes; and now I do theatre and cinema.

And because of the hate, everyone ensured that I studied well.
Long story short, I studied Mechanical Engineering at NITK Surathkal and Public Policy with the UPSC exam. I developed interest in using technology for public problems. I'm happy that I found opportunities in using data technologies to solve problems in Urbanisation, Flood management, Air pollution and Social science research in general.

I've travelled wide ideologically. I almost became part of the R.S.S when lack of public transport and my discomfort with commuting helped me from not attending the induction ceremony. Later, I pivoted to Swami Vivekananda, Marx, Gandhi, Dr.B.R.Ambedkar etc. I learned that no one is perfect, which seems very obvious now. I stopped taking ideological stances and try to maintain an independent thought - People from all ideologies do give me material in that regard.

I'm an existentialist. I believe that life has no god-given purpose or meaning. Individuals should create their own meaning, which might appear meaningless to others. If money is the measure of value, freedom is the measure of life. I try to maximise freedom for a better life and most of my decisions reflect this.

I write letters every week. Please subscribe to them if you want to be in touch with me :)
You can also subscribe to this site's RSS Feed here: https://d-saikrishna.github.io/feed.xml

Or you can write to me at saikrishnadammalapati@gmail.com