About Me

I am Keerthi, an electronics engineer who left the desk to pick up a camera, and somewhere along the way became a photographer, a writer, and the person behind a cloud kitchen.

My business partner and I opened a franchise outlet at the end of 2019. Months later the pandemic closed it, and left a loss in our laps I’d rather not put a number on. We could have taken that as our answer.

Instead, at the end of 2020, we started Telangana Inti Ruchulu. The food I grew up on, cooked to order and sent out. No dining room this time, and no rent on empty chairs.

I don’t think people are meant to be one thing

We’re the most intelligent creatures on this planet, and somehow we’ve agreed to describe ourselves in a single line on a business card. I’ve never managed it.

I think we’re built to think in three dimensions, not two. To move, to change our minds, to want several things at once and go after all of them. We’re explorers!

The blog is just what that looks like when I write it down. A Pinch of Everything…!

Before the camera

I was a quiet child. Watchful more than talkative, the one at the edge of the room taking everything in and saying very little about it.

All of it came out on paper. I sketched what I saw, and when what I saw wasn’t enough, I drew it the way I wanted it to be instead. The canvas was where I put the world out. It was also where I went to get away from it.

There was no camera yet. There was just a girl, a pencil, and a very long habit of noticing.

I don’t have a single one of those sketches now. They were lost when we moved to Hyderabad, my father’s dream city.

Maybe that is why I hold on to everything now. Every photograph I take is a small refusal, a way of not losing the same thing twice.

The desk that bought the camera

Electronics got me the degree. The degree got me a desk. I joined IBM in 2012 as an Associate System Engineer, then moved into testing as a QA Analyst. Four years in all.

And I was good at it. That is the part people struggle with. Everyone expects the story where I was drowning, missing deadlines, hating every Monday. It wasn’t that. I was competent, I was reliable, I was the person you asked when something broke. None of it ever reached the part of me that was actually alive.

The 9 to 5 gave me stability, and stability is not nothing. But it never once gave me fulfilment. My passions were photography and building something of my own, and neither of them had a seat at that desk.

It felt like sitting on a throne made of thorns. Impressive from the outside. Bleeding on the inside.

But, I have to admit, that job bought me my first camera, a Canon 50D. And I’m grateful to it for that. Because the only hours that felt like mine were the ones spent somewhere, anywhere, with my camera, taking it along for a ride.

2016

So in 2016, I left IBM.

By the end, the job had swallowed everything. In the office at nine in the morning, home at midnight, cleaning up messes other people had made and walked away from, repairing what their carelessness had sabotaged. And on one of those nights I finally asked myself the question. Why am I suffering for someone else’s misdeeds? Why am I missing out on everything that is actually mine, everything that actually makes me happy?

I did not leave for a sabbatical. I did not leave to find myself. I left to become a photographer and an entrepreneur, because staying had begun to cost me more than going ever would. My heart was aching in a way I could not explain to anyone, least of all my family and my closest friends, who looked at my job and saw a daughter doing well.

One person understood. Pappa told me to follow my dreams, and that whichever path I chose, he would stand behind me like a rock.

He did not make the choice for me. He took the fear out of it. I was not frightened of failing, or of losing everything I had built so far, because I knew that whichever way it went he would hold me up and set me moving again.

Everything I actually wanted was somewhere else. In art, in food, in building something of my own. Knowing he was behind me is what let me go and find it.

How the writing started

The camera came first. The words took some convincing.

I had been putting photographs on Instagram since 2015, back when I was still at the desk. Just the images, no explanation. My friend Saumy wanted me to show the world the beauty I see through my captures. Not only the image, but what was running through my thoughts when I took it. He convinced me to put both out there. He pushed. He kept pushing. He didn’t give up on me. So yes, he won!

I knew I could write. That was never the question. What I didn’t know, until he introduced me to blogging, was that I loved it.

Thoughts Thru Lens started later that same year, once I had already walked out. I owe him that.

Everything since

Restaurant research. Travel. Exposure I never expected. Long days that started before the kitchen did.

The years since 2016 have not been a straight line. You already know how 2019 ended and what 2020 cost us. What I didn’t expect was how much the failure would teach me. Almost everything I know about running a kitchen properly, I learned from the one that didn’t survive.

Telangana Inti Ruchulu is still running. It’s also just the first one; I have every intention of building more.

And I still wake up with a spark. I know exactly what the day will throw at me. Running a kitchen teaches you that quickly. And I still look forward to it. Still excited about what I’ll get to see, and photograph, and hand over to a few hundred people I’ve never met but somehow feel connected to.

Who this is for

I’ve never cared much about the numbers.

What I want is the same thing I wanted in 2016. To find the people who read and write and wander the way I do. Explorers. Or anyone who landed here looking for a reason to start something.

And I don’t only want to talk at you. Some of the best things I’ve learnt came from people in the comments. So say something. I’m listening.

What you’ll find here

Six facets, though I’ve never really thought of them as separate.

Photographs, and the places that made them. Konark. Ellora. Places near home I’ve explored more times than I can count.

Food. Cooked, eaten, and thought about far more than is reasonable.

Honest opinions on books, restaurants, and whatever lands on my desk. Given plainly, even when plain wasn’t what anyone hoped for.

Fiction. Stories I invented, because sometimes the real ones aren’t enough.

And everything that won’t sit still in a category. The sketching. The soccer. The reading. The businesses I’m building. The ideas that turn up at 2am and won’t leave.

Different faces of one person. Begin wherever something calls to you. Whatever brought you here, I’m glad it did.

What connects them

Not the subject. The attention.

I learnt to notice long before I could afford a camera. A quiet kid at the edge of the room, taking everything in. The camera didn’t give me that. It just gave me somewhere to put it. Every photograph on this site is the same act: slowing down enough to actually see the thing in front of me, whether that’s a sunrise, a plate of food, or a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.

That’s the whole practice. Look properly. Stay a moment longer than you need to.

Most of all, stay in the moment!

Thank you for being here

There’s a great deal I’m grateful for. Pappa, first and always. A job I didn’t enjoy that bought me my first camera. A friend who wouldn’t stop telling me to write. A business that failed and taught me more than the one that survived. A kitchen that gets up every morning and cooks.

And you. What I care about is that someone I’ve never met reads something I wrote and recognises themselves in it. That still astonishes me.

So stay a while. Read something. And if it stirs anything, tell me. The comments are where the best conversations on this blog have happened.

Let’s make something

A story worth telling.

A book or a movie that deserves an honest review.

A restaurant or a product you’d like written about and photographed.

An idea that needs a photographer and a writer in the same person.

Whichever it is, I’d like to hear about it.

I work with brands, authors, restaurants, and people building something of their own. I say yes to what genuinely interests me, and I tell the truth about it afterwards. That is the whole arrangement!

So write to me at [email protected]. Tell me what you’re making.

I’m curious by trade.