— GK · Engineer · Entrepreneur · Guitarist

Strategy, Data & Tunes.

An engineer’s notes on strategy, AI, and the craft of sound — from a thermal power plant control room to driving business strategies, to transformer networks and tube amplifiers. One way of thinking, across the digital and analog worlds.

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Three threads, one mind.

01 / Strategy

Strategy

Decision frameworks and career journeys, drawn from running a power plant, turning around a factory, building an insurance BU, and founding a company.

02 / Data

Data

Learning to build and lead AI in the real world — transformers, fine-tuning, and enterprise software, explained from first principles.

03 / Tunes

Tunes

Tube amplifiers, transmission-line speakers, hi-fi, and sound engineering — the analog craft of building things that sing.

— Signature series

Tubes & Transformers

The bridge between the two worlds — explaining the machinery of AI through the machinery of sound. Vacuum tubes and neural networks, gain stages and attention. Same first principles, different medium.

Recent essays.

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Strategy13 Jun 2026Private

Modern Catastrophe Modelling

Part 10 of Notes on Reinsurance. Where XL prices actually come from — probabilistic event sets, exceedance curves, the four major vendors, and the Indian peril stack. The closing piece in the first arc of the series.

Strategy13 Jun 2026Private

Ind AS 117 and the Reinsurance-Held Module

Part 09 of Notes on Reinsurance. The accounting standard about to displace forty years of treaty-account-based measurement — the three measurement models, CSM on reinsurance held, the loss-recovery component, and what changes for the cedent.

Strategy13 Jun 2026Private

Reading GIC Re's Accounts

Part 08 of Notes on Reinsurance. A walk through the published numbers of India's sole national reinsurer — premium, combined ratio, retrocession, solvency. The numerical view of the institution described in Part 07.

Workshop

Things I’ve built.

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CB1070i integrated valve amplifier on its teak chassis

Integrated Amplifier2018

CB1070i — Ultra High-Fidelity Integrated Valve Amplifier

Push-pull EL34 integrated amplifier with an integrated preamp stage, five passive components in the signal path, and adaptive auto-bias. Three prototypes, four years of refinement, mentored by Claus Byrith.

Guitar Amplifier2018

Guitar Tube Amplifier — A Hiwatt-Inspired Head

A hand-wired 100 kHz-bandwidth Hiwatt-style guitar head, built around an Italian-wound Partridge-spec output transformer. Built for huge headroom, glassy midrange, and pedal chains that don't choke.

Custom-built transmission line loudspeaker

Loudspeaker2018

Transmission Line Loudspeaker — Designed to Disappear

A hand-crafted transmission-line loudspeaker tuned to 23 Hz, with an aluminium composite cone, aluminium dome tweeter, and a German-spec LCR crossover hand-tuned in REW. Speakers that get out of the way.

The arc

15+

industries — operated, taught & advised

Heavy industry to FMCG to AI — and a workbench full of guitars in between.

The long, unlikely version.

It starts in the control room of a multi-fuel thermal power plant — coal, oil, gas, three fuel paths and a great deal of steam — and ends, for now, somewhere between attention matrices and the warm side of a Pink Floyd record. In Between: a business education from IIM, then years of driving business strategiesacross industries. Then founding an insurtech company.

Around the day jobs there’s been a parallel life — teaching physics and chemistry, and advising or co-building startups in ed-tech, lending, logistics, shipping, furniture, luthiery, and studio management. Different industries, same instinct: find the system, find the leverage, build.

Underneath all of it: a guitarist and composer who builds tube amplifiers and transmission-line speakers by hand. The name is a double meaning — David Gilmour’s black Stratocaster, and the engineer’s habit of taking a black-box system apart until it stops being one.

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Operated · led · taught · advisedPowerTextiles & ApparelFMCGAutomotiveInsuranceSoftwareAIAudio & Hi-FiEducationEd-TechLendingLogisticsShippingFurnitureLuthieryStudio Management