The Journey, in Pictures
This is the story of my friend Venky — engineer, entrepreneur, chef, teacher. Told the way he tells it: lightly, with the hard parts left in.
BITS Pilani, not IIT. A studious boy with a mind built for systems — mathematics in one hand, physics in the other. Exceptional, in the quiet way that doesn't announce itself.
If the story stopped here, it would still be a good story. It doesn't stop here.
Years at Infosys. Travel that wrapped the planet twice. Deals large enough that, decades later, he tells the stories like science fiction — as though even he can't quite believe he was in the room.
An early shareholder, by the time it was time to leave.
A friend ran a kitchen. Venky walked in. The chefs assumed he was a plant — boss's man, here to spy, here to coast. So for days, no one spoke to him.
He washed vessels. He waited. Eventually someone passed him a knife and a pile of onions. He cut. He listened. He stayed.
Between the vessels and the dough, he flew to Italy. A Michelin-starred chef in Milan, a borrowed apron, an apprenticeship that stretched on. He came home sharpened — and ready to build something of his own.
His own brand. A pizza company that grew until it employed two hundred. Savings, sleepless years, the slow climb of doing the unfashionable work — all of it baked into the dough.
Then 2020 happened.
Savings, gone. Staff, scattered. For months he delivered the last pizzas himself. When customers tipped the delivery man at the door, he pocketed it without telling them whose company it was.
One day he saw a man on the street forcing his own children to beg. Something cracked open. We have hands. We have legs. We have minds. If we cannot recover from this, no one can.
Before the vessels and the dough, there were these two — and the deadpan he clearly inherited.
Appa: I am a very important person in this house!
Amma: Yes… only when the TV remote goes missing.
Appa: How could you say such a thing!
When I was scaling Travolopia India through COVID, Venky was the first person I hired. The first conversation lasted an hour in an empty pantry. It felt like meeting an old friend.
Today he runs operations, walks the stairs, lectures us about gut fibre, and reminds us — through how he lives — that the body and the mind are the same project.
Everything before this page was painted, because I wasn’t there. From here on it’s photographs, because I was.
Offsites and old temples, long tables, the office at odd hours, one bike on a forest trail. He is in almost every photograph I have from these years — which is, I think, the point.
I would not have built what I have built without your friendship. Wishing you health, happiness, and many more chapters — and to anyone reading: may you be lucky enough to know a Venky too.