Khushaank Gupta

My name is Khushaank Gupta. I was born in Visakhapatnam — a coastal city in Andhra Pradesh with salt in its air and a certain quiet grandeur — and raised in Haryana, a place I have a complicated, honest affection for. I am eighteen years old. Not the kind of eighteen that is waiting for life to begin, but the kind that is already in the middle of it, watching carefully, building quietly, and occasionally wondering what all of it means.

There is a particular stage of life I find myself in right now — one that does not have a clean name but feels like standing at an intersection where every direction looks valid and none of them looks certain. From the outside, things appear to have fallen into place. A professional degree. A university enrolment. Projects in motion. People who believe in where this is heading. From the inside, it looks more like a patient vigil — an observer watching patterns form in the world around him, drawing meaning from other people's stories with clarity, while his own story quietly asks to be given more time. I am in no rush to force it. I have learned that time, when you respect it, tends to reveal what it is holding.

Formally, I am a student — pursuing ACCA, the Association of Certified Chartered Accountants, alongside a Bachelor of Commerce from Delhi University. These are not accidental choices. Finance, at its core, is the language of how the world moves, who holds power, and how value is created or destroyed. I chose to become fluent in it not because numbers are my love, but because they are the infrastructure through which everything else I care about operates.

What I care about — what I genuinely lose sleep over — is artificial intelligence. Not in the abstract, theoretical sense that fills conference panels and opinion pieces. In the deeply practical, hands-in-the-dirt sense. I want to know where AI can be implemented in a business workflow, how it can remove friction, how it can give a small business or a common person a capability that used to belong only to large institutions. I do not come from the tech industry. I have no computer science degree, no engineering background. What I have is an obsession that showed up uninvited and never left, and a conviction that the intersection of finance and AI is one of the most consequential places to be standing right now.

I have already started building. With little more than a working knowledge of HTML and the leverage of AI tools, I designed and sold websites to local businesses around me — real projects, real clients, real outcomes. It was scrappy and imperfect and exactly the kind of education no classroom offers. Currently, I am building knotes.in — a free platform where people can write, share, and express whatever is on their mind without the noise of algorithms or the pressure of performance. A space for honest thought. I write there myself sometimes. I believe the act of expression — finding the words for what lives in your chest — is one of the most undervalued forms of emotional intelligence.

I also built Bloom, a personal finance tracking tool designed for the common person — someone who does not have a wealth manager or a financial advisor but deserves to understand where their money goes. Bloom was built using AI. Most of what I build is. And then there is my personal AI — an application that runs locally on my laptop, trained on how I think, how I reason, how I make decisions. When I need a second opinion, I ask it: what would Khushaank do? It is equal parts experiment and mirror. Equal parts tool and companion.

I have thought a lot — more than most people my age would admit to — about what the necessities of being human actually are. Survival is the foundation. Safety and protection, the next layer. And then, social connection — the need to be witnessed, to belong, to matter to someone. What I find most interesting is that most of the world's problems, including the ones inside individual people, tend to be failures at one of those three layers. We are not as complicated as we pretend to be. We are, mostly, just trying to feel safe and seen.

I believe in gratitude — not the performative kind posted on the internet, but the quiet, daily practice of recognising what is already here. I believe in discipline not as punishment but as the most generous thing you can offer your future self. I believe in humanity — in the assumption that most people are doing the best they can with what they have, even when that best is not very good. And I believe, deeply, in expression. The journal. The conversation. The written word. Whatever form it takes. I keep a scribble notebook — no structure, no rules, no audience. Thoughts, feelings, letters to no one in particular. It is the most honest thing about me, and it belongs entirely to me.

I will also say this about missing goals: I have ten alarms set for the mornings I intend to wake up early, and sometimes I miss them all the same. People see that and conclude the intention was never real. What they miss is the regret that follows — sharp and useful — and the quiet recalibration that comes after it. Missing a goal is not evidence of not caring. It is evidence of being human. What matters is the direction you point yourself in afterward.

Harvey Specter taught me something that no business school textbook ever could — not about law, but about posture. About how the way you carry yourself determines what kinds of conversations you get invited into. I watched Suits and something clicked into place. Not the arrogance of it, but the intention. The deliberateness. The idea that how you present your thinking is as important as the thinking itself.

Rich Dad Poor Dad broke something open in me regarding money — how the poor and middle class think about it versus how the wealthy do. Who Moved the Cheese taught me not to confuse comfort with stability. John Maxwell's How Successful People Think gave me frameworks for something I had already been doing instinctively but could not articulate. These books do not just sit on a shelf. They are ongoing conversations I keep returning to.

For music, I live between worlds. Diljit Dosanjh for the feeling of home and warmth. Hip-hop for the energy of ambition and defiance. Jazz and blues for the evenings when thinking requires space — when the mind needs something that moves slowly and says more than the notes themselves. Chill music, mostly. I like a soundtrack that holds the room without demanding attention.

I am selective about what I watch and listen to beyond that. Most of what exists online feels designed to take something from you — your attention, your outrage, your time. I prefer to be deliberate. A few good podcasts. The right book for the week. Conversations that leave you thinking. I would rather go deep in one direction than be broadly, shallowly informed about everything.

My closest friends — school friends I have not seen in months now, people I miss more than I say out loud — would describe me as goal-oriented, creative, and someone with genuine optimism about what is possible. I think that is accurate. I would add: an observer. Someone who enters a room and watches before he speaks. Not from shyness, but from preference. I find that the people who watch carefully tend to understand more than the ones who talk first.

One of the things I have worked hardest to develop — at an age when most people are still entirely inside their own perspective — is the ability to hold someone else's point of view with genuine curiosity. Not to agree with it, necessarily, but to actually feel how they arrived there. This makes me useful to people. It also makes me someone the people around me tend to confide in, compare themselves to, or simply feel at ease with. I do not think of this as a talent. I think of it as a practice.

A good day, for me, looks like this: deep work in the field of AI — building something, learning something, solving something. Good food, because the body is the vessel and it deserves to be taken care of. Exercise, for the same reason. A few chapters of whatever book I am in the middle of. And somewhere in there, a moment of quiet — the kind where you are not doing anything, just present, and the noise of ambition settles long enough for something like peace to show up.

I do not have a twenty-year plan. I have a direction. The intersection of finance and technology — specifically, using AI to democratise access to financial understanding, to automate the friction that keeps small businesses and ordinary people from making smart decisions with their money — is where I intend to build. I believe my background in ACCA is not a departure from tech; it is the credential that gives me the right to stand in boardrooms and speak the language of those who control the capital, while also understanding the architecture of the tools that will change how that capital moves.

I am in Haryana right now. Studying online. Building from my room. Wanting, quietly, to be somewhere larger — a city that moves faster, people who are building at the edges of what is possible. That season is coming. I can feel it. Until then, I am doing what observers do best: paying attention, making things, writing in my notebook, and trusting that the patterns will reveal themselves when I have earned the clarity to read them.

If you are younger than me reading this, I hope something here gives you permission to be exactly where you are — not behind, not lost, just early. And if you are older: I hope something here feels, if nothing else, familiar. We are all, at every age, just trying to understand what we are doing here and doing our best with the answer we have so far.