Dr. Tarique Sani

I was born and brought up in a town called Nagpur in central India. It is a sleepy town surrounded by jungles in all directions. If you ever come to India to see the tigers, you will most likely pass through Nagpur airport.

I grew up wanting to be a wildlife veterinary doctor, but my mother’s tragic death when I was fifteen changed that ambition to be a human doctor. I studied general medicine, then did a post-graduate degree in pediatrics and, for the heck of it, the second one in forensic medicine. During my medical career, I served as a forensic pathologist for the government, performed 1500+ autopsies. Most of them were criminal cases and accident victims. I also had a private practice in pediatrics for four years.

During medical school, I also learned how to play the stock market as an aside. Very sensibly quit that once the objectives were achieved.

I was introduced to open-source software in 1997 and have relied on it for business and personal use since then. Thanks to open source, I started a software company. The company grew into architecting high-performance web backends using PHP. Finally wound that company down in January 2020 after a very profitable 22 years, during which I served as the CTO. Currently, I am an advisor to some upcoming local startups in the Internet Of Things sector.

In between, I co-authored a book on PHP when writing books was not in fashion, and it did well on Amazon. Was a team member of foss.in the largest open source conference in the eastern hemisphere. Was team lead for some successful open source projects. The largest among them grew from 1000 odd downloads to 6 million +. This project was also a mentor participant organization for Google Summer of Code a few times.

I was also a serious amateur wildlife photographer till 2014. All photos taken by me are free under a creative commons license. They are widely published in books, research journals, also used by some zoos.

At the peak of my professional success, around 2009, for no known reason, I got depressed. Got un-depressed with the help of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy(CBT). By 2013 I got certified for practicing CBT. 2020 Covid Pandemic made me move my practice online.

When I am not practicing CBT, I do ultra distance cycling or running.  I have fostered several communities locally and online in Social Arts, Ornithology, Urban Farming, and Food Appreciation, to name a few. My strength lies in starting community-based projects in a manner that they become self-sustainable. I do this using a simple method of Build, Operate, Transfer. 

First, I think that people should not feel blamed for thinking and feeling the way they do. Our thinking, emotions, and behaviors are a sum of all our life experiences, past and present, including childhood experiences. That said, I do believe we are responsible for our behavior and changing what we want to be different, but it is almost impossible to change if we keep feeling ashamed, guilty, or embarrassed about the way things are with us.

I believe emotions happen for a reason. While you might not be able to stop those emotions from arising, you can by working on how you respond to them, you can change the trajectory and impact of these emotions.

Please don’t trust me, blindly. I don’t want you to follow me blindly. We will design behavioral experiments to test out new ways of responding to the situations you are facing. Please do the experiments for yourself and then decide whether these changes are worth making.