I’ve never been much of a writer—preferring to let our incredible partners, teammates, and volunteers take the spotlight. But some stories demand to be told by the person who lived them. This is one of them.

Maybe it’s nostalgia kicking in (hello, midlife!), but this isn’t just a trip down memory lane. It’s a love letter to an adventure that changed me—and, I hope, left a tiny dent in the universe.

How It All Began

Let’s keep it real: The Wingify Foundation wasn’t born from some grand corporate manifesto. It started with a “Well, we have to do this… so let’s do it right.”

Back in 2009, my son Paras bootstrapped Wingify into existence. By 2010, we were officially a company—him coding, selling, and hustling; me handling the “unglamorous” but crucial back-end work (accounting, legal, ops—you get the drill). We were profitable from Day 1, which was thrilling… until our auditor dropped a bombshell: “Congrats, you’re now big enough for mandatory CSR!”

Year 1? We took the easy route—cutting a cheque to the PM’s Relief Fund (and sending our poor CA on a wild goose chase for a receipt). Year 2? We funded an NGO… and quickly realized good intentions ≠ good impact. Frustrated (and honestly, a little ashamed), we decided: If we’re going to do this, we’re doing it OUR way.

And so, in 2015, the Wingify Foundation was born.

From Rural Roots to Fighting for the Air We Breathe

Our early days were all about rural development—food, farming, skilling, even winning a national CSR award. Then COVID hit. Overnight, we pivoted to saving lives: oxygen cylinders, hospital wards, vaccination drives.

But post-pandemic, a book (Doing Good Better by William MacAskill) slapped me awake: Climate change is the fight of our lifetime. So we went all-in on Delhi’s toxic air—because if we couldn’t fix the whole planet, we could at least move the needle where we stood. Don’t take my word for it—our partners, scrappy team, and die-hard volunteers did the heavy lifting. See the magic here.

Why This Goodbye Hurts (And Excites Me)

A few months ago, I stepped down as Wingify’s trustee. It’s bittersweet—this Foundation was my heartwork, not just homework. I never took a salary, but the rewards? Immeasurable.

Now? I’m doubling down on impact—with a twist.

What’s Next: Nexus 3P Foundation

Impact investing isn’t charity. It’s betting on solutions that outlive us. That’s why we’ve launched Nexus 3P (Planet, People, and your choice of the third P—Purpose? Peace? Positive? Possible? Peace? Prosperous? Profit? You pick.).

We’re building a launchpad for sustainable agriculture, environmental tech, and public health innovation—because the future isn’t just coming; it’s ours to shape.

Join Us (If You Dare)

This isn’t for everyone. But if you’re:

• A fearless builder (founders, we need you),
• A data-obsessed truth-seeker (IQ won’t scare you),
• A relentless connector (coalitions > clout),
• A strategic fundraiser (money moves missions),

…then let’s talk.

We’re recruiting interns, dreamers, and doers—full-time, part-time, Delhi-based or remote. Want a resume that says “I played it safe”? Cool. But if you’d rather leave a legacy, drop us a line.

The world doesn’t need more followers. It needs architects of change.

Ready to build? → reachout@nexus3p.org

(And to every soul who walked this journey with me—thank you. This isn’t goodbye. It’s “See you in the trenches.”)

 Let’s go.

Welcome to the exciting world of EcoNagri, where gaming meets environmental consciousness! Whether you’re a city planner at heart or a sustainability enthusiast, EcoNagri offers a unique blend of fun and learning, making it the perfect choice for anyone passionate about building a better future. Dive into a game that not only entertains but also educates on the delicate balance between urban development and environmental preservation.

What is EcoNagri?

EcoNagri is an innovative game developed by Wingify Earth, designed to simulate the challenges and rewards of building a thriving, sustainable city. The game allows players to become virtual urban planners, making strategic decisions that affect the air quality index (AQI) and gross domestic product (GDP) of their city. With each decision, players learn the impact of urban activities on the environment, making it a great educational tool for all ages.

Why Play EcoNagri?

Educational and Fun: EcoNagri combines the excitement of city-building games with educational elements that raise awareness about sustainability. It’s a great way to learn about environmental issues while enjoying the thrill of gameplay.

Strategic Gameplay: Every choice in EcoNagri impacts your city’s development and its environment. From placing parks to reduce air pollution to deciding on the placement of industrial zones, the game challenges you to think critically and plan strategically.

Diverse Building Options: Players can construct various types of buildings, each with different effects on the city’s AQI and GDP. This includes parks, solar farms, research facilities, and more, allowing for diverse strategies and cityscapes.

Engaging Challenges: The game is filled with engaging challenges that keep you on your toes. Whether it’s managing resources or responding to environmental crises, EcoNagri keeps gameplay exciting and dynamic.

How EcoNagri Promotes Environmental Awareness
EcoNagri is not just a game; it’s a movement towards more sustainable urban planning practices. By simulating real-world environmental issues, the game provides a platform for players to understand the consequences of various urban development choices. This awareness is crucial in educating the next generation of planners and environmental advocates.

Join the EcoNagri Community

By playing EcoNagri, you join a community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about making a difference. Wingify Earth offers a platform where players can share experiences, strategies, and learnings from the game, fostering a community that supports and promotes environmental sustainability.

Your City, Your Impact

Imagine building a city where every decision you make contributes to its health and prosperity. In EcoNagri, your city’s success is measured not just by economic achievements but also by how well you maintain a healthy environment. This makes playing EcoNagri a rewarding experience, as every level up signifies a step towards more sustainable living practices.

Conclusion

EcoNagri is more than just a game; it’s a tool for change. By engaging with this game, you’re not only enjoying a world of strategic city-building but also contributing to a broader conversation about sustainable development. Ready to build your dream city and make a tangible impact on the planet? Play EcoNagri today and start your journey towards a greener, more sustainable future.

Join us at EcoNagri to start building your eco-friendly city now!

There is little doubt that air pollution is a complex issue with multiple emission sources deeply enmeshed with rapid urbanization. These sources include vehicular pollution, construction and dust, manufacturing and small-scale industry promotion, use of fossil fuels, power generation, biomass burning, and conventional forms of agriculture. Air pollution debilitatingly impacts public health, the economy, climate change, and the environment.

While it is predominantly regarded as an urban issue, there is growing recognition that it dispels devastation over more expansive geography and rapidly rises in smaller towns as they grow. 93% of India lives in areas below the WHO safety standards. We believe that to bring about change, short-term policies and knee-jerk reactions should be replaced by a long-term sustainable alternative to peoples’ lives and lifestyles, urban governance, infrastructure, power generation, and public transport with people’s participation. Educating, sensitizing, and providing a vocabulary of these issues and solutions to the younger generation is essential. Deliberate long-term strategies, build sustainable solutions and prioritize the planet’s prosperity over short-term needs.

Toward this end, Wingify Foundation commissioned Civic Games Lab to develop a board game on air pollution to highlight the dynamics, plan, and need for addressing climate change and air pollution on a priority basis.

Have a board game club that would like to play Fixit? Drop a few words to me at reachout@wingifyfoundation.org and tell us the names of eight players who follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter @wingifyearth so we may send you a game box.

Before you categorize this post as tl: dr, just read three lines in the footnote (*)

For someone who believes in ghosts, “not seeing is believing.” For the rest of us, it has always been “Seeing is believing.” But what if we remain ignorant of some modern ghosts (rather devils) just because we don’t see them or don’t see their connection with devils?

In this post, I’ll be building my thesis on the “subject” on the premise that “not seeing is believing” and ghosts of another kind that we don’t see as many vested interests don’t want us to see. But before I jump on the subject, let me share some personal anecdotes that lead me to the subject of this post.

When I first moved to the Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, as 16 years old hosteler in 1973 to pursue an honors graduate course in Agriculture, little did I know that one day I would become what I have become today.

As the years progressed, pursuing my honors degree, the prevailing American academic credit system over a trimester academic year offered plenty of flexibility regarding what you can specialize in and how much time you can invest in obtaining a graduate or a postgraduate degree.

This way, one could earn a four-year degree course in three years by taking more credits every trimester or taking higher degree courses – like courses meant for M.Sc. / Ph.D. while still graduating. The system offered plenty of opportunities for everyone to decide and choose the study and work area they wished to pursue later in life. An excellent educational system, in my view.

During my final graduation year, I took 500 and 600 series of advanced Biochemistry and Molecular Biology courses (usually taken by M.Sc. and Ph.D. students). During those times, both these subjects, besides cybernetics, were as cutting edge as AI and Robotics are in present times. Cybernetics, though, was unavailable as a study course at my university at that time.

To cut a long story short, Biochemistry became my first academic love. I decided to pursue a master’s degree in the nascent field of Nutritional biochemistry. Eventually, two years later, I became a postgraduate Hons degree holder in the exciting field of Animal Nutritional Biochemistry.

However, a series of events, including the stormy and turbulent events in the 80s, including the terrorism in Punjab, made me put my first love for Animal Nutrition and milk at NDDB on the back burner. But to be honest, I kept the nutritional biochemistry spark burning through occasional readings from journals like Nature, Scientific American, Economist, and the like. In 1987 I jumped into another exciting field of perishable foods, fruit, and vegetables. I continued building, restructuring, and remodeling the perishable food value chains of the corporates in various geographies across the World until 2009.

The catalyst that got me deep diving into nutritional biochemistry, a subject I once excelled in and loved so much, was a suggestion from Paras, my son, that my wife and I both should get our whole body Dexa scan done.

I knew that the Dexa scan is used to measure bone mass but little did I know that the scan also measures the body fat and soft tissue composition. One of the indices it helps calculate is the number for the fat mass index FMI, which has a distinct advantage over BMI for defining obesity since it is independent of lean mass status.

Being a diabetic, albeit a controlled one, with a spouse on the wrong side of BMI, we initially decided to get a Dexa scan done on myself.

Long story short – despite having a “lean and normal” weight status under the BMI regime, Dexa tagged me as internally obese. I was shocked. Instinctively, being a former nutritionist, I knew that my internal obesity was related to nutrition and the food I eat.

From here started my quest to re-discover, refresh and update my knowledge of Nutritional Biochemistry.

I started scavenging the Internet for reliable, latest, and authoritative sources of information. One lazy Sunday, I stumbled upon a YouTube video lecture titled Sugar – the Bitter Truth by Robert H Lustig, courtesy of the University of California Television (UCTV), in their excellent and enlightening “Mini Medical School for the Public” lecture series. The next day I watched two of Dr. Lustig’s video lectures, Fat Chance: Fructose 2.0. and “Processed Food: An Experiment That Failed.”

Subsequently, I read three of his books, Fat Chance, Metabolical, and The Hacking of the American Mind, which I strongly recommend everyone should read; I sincerely mean everyone.

Though I’m a qualified Nutritional Biochemist and have a fair amount of understanding of the connection between the food we eat and our health and well-being but Dr. Lustig, made a very compelling case that food is the ONLY lever we have to affect biochemical and neurological changes to improve our health, and to affect political change to improve our economy and environment. He insists that if we don’t fix our food and change how and how we eat, we’ll continue to have chronic diseases, bankrupt healthcare, and threaten the planet. His lectures and books offered hope explaining what’s needed to fix all these.

You’ll wonder why I’m so unabashedly promoting Dr. Robert H Lustig. Seven reasons.

One – Dr Lustig is not only an excellent orator but also a superb writer. He uses difficult yet tedious (to many ignorant of human body and mind mechanics) subjects like biochemistry and neuroscience to educate the listeners and readers bout the toxic environment we currently find ourselves in, even more importantly, how we remain there.

Two – He knows what he is talking. Dr. Lustig is a professor emeritus of Paediatrics, Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He specializes in the field of neuroendocrinology, with an emphasis on the regulation of energy balance by the central nervous system. His research and clinical practice have focused on childhood obesity and diabetes. Dr. Lustig holds a Bachelor’s in Science from MIT and a Doctorate in Medicine from Cornell University. Medical College, and a Master of Law from U.C. Hastings College of the Law.

Before treating obese children, he trained for over sixteen years as a neuroscientist – six years cutting up and studying the brains of rats at the Rockefeller University in New York and ten more years growing neurons in Petri dishes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Tennessee, Memphis. These years in the lab afforded him a unique view of the relationship between hormones and behaviour.

Three – Looking at the World drowning in the sea of metabolic disorders like Obesity, Diabetes, Cardio Vascular Disorders, Cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Depression, Gut issues, Infertility and PCOS, Chronic Fatigue, Poor Sleep, Arthritis, and even innocent Pimples (I can continue with the list till proverbial cows come home – also remember you can’t get an insurance cover on any of the metabolic diseases), there need to be some champion;

Four – who could tell us in simple language how and why a band of 30 trillion cells and 30 trillion bacteria musicians within each of us are playing in the direction of a conductor called “What we eat”? The tunes churned by the music makers could be either gorgeous (read health) or very nasty (read any or multiple of above said metabolic disorders).

Five – who could, like Jeffery Wigand (research him on Google if you don’t know him), demonstrate to us poor souls how big corporates, Govts, and modern-day media and marketing are engaged in a covert conspiracy to defraud the public for their interest. “Dil Maange More” suddenly becomes relevant.

Six – The World needs someone who can tell the emperor has no clothes. That someone is Dr. Robert H Lustig. In the current context – Almost 80% of those who say they are fit and fine have a demon lurking inside their bodies.

Seven – Did I mention anywhere that Dr. Lustig In 2013 completed a Master of Studies in Law (MSL) also from UC Hastings College of the Law.

Thanks for reading this long post.

*If you love yourself and wish the best for your near and dear ones, perusing the links mentioned in this post shall change your and their lives forever. That’s the promise.

In retrospect, adding an Epilogue in the previous post was not the right idea. More water still had to flow down the polluted startup river called Buyhatke.

On a bright sunny day of 5 June 2022, I informed a Bitbns employee who was an ex-employee at one of my current advisory firms that I’m sick of his Bitbns’ shenanigans and shall be shortly going live on social media with exposure of hardships its customers face because its unethical and bad business practices.

Once I shared the link of my above-said draft blog post, magic happened. My link called me over the phone in the evening and told me that both Gold and Silver were visible in my portfolio. I could, at last, see both assets but both as unsold as on 5 June 2022, contrary to the fact that both had been sold on 4 May 2022. I was told to sell again these assets, which I dutifully did for an amount of redeemable INR 228011/- plus a withdrawable uninvested INR 437.44.

There was a shortfall of INR 15030/- which my contact told me was because of market fluctuation but promised that he would arrange transfer of that also because dysfunctional Bitbns website or wrong business partners (Oropocket) was none of my faults. I redeemed both the assets for INR 228011 and again stopped all SIPs as advised. I was told that it should take 5-7 days for the money to reflect in my account. I thanked my contact. Initiated a waiting period to see INR 228011 in my linked bank account though I had lost all trust and faith in Bitbns, Bitdroplet, and their parent firm Buyhatke.

I got swamped after 6 June 2022, and I kept my fingers crossed and waited for good things to happen. I had to do a lot of last-minute harsh weather planning for my travel plans to Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway, for an onward Arctic exploratory cruise to almost touching the North Pole from 11 June 2022 onwards.

I returned to India on 24 June 2022 and was delighted to see an entry dated 17 June 2022 proudly announcing a credit of INR 228011 in my bank account. But still no trace of balance INR 15030/-.

A single INR counts when the money at stake is one’s hard-earned money. The day before yesterday, I made a last-ditch effort to remind my BitBns contact of the promise he made on 6 June to transfer all amount due to me.

I got the following revert on WhatsApp.

“We are trying our best to get some solution around that discrepancy amount between the amount redeemed and the amount credited due to market price change of asset.

At the moment, oro pocket is not taking any accountability of this differential amount and not taking responsibility of non working API for weeks.”

The chase to recover INR 15 k goes on……

A disclosure on why I publicly posted this personal story and named names.

Well, I’m resourceful and rich enough to write off an amount of INR 4 Lakh but think of thousands of small investors who had invested many small amounts out of their hard-earned salaries on this website to invest in safe assets like Gold and Silver or volatile cryptos for that matter.

I had no intention of disclosing all personal details, but the shock, dismay, and mental agony I had to face and the pain of visualizing the plight of small investors compelled me to come out of my cocoon and share this true story. All names, figures and conversations are correct to my knowledge, and records are available.

Do we need more Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes?

Gentlemen and ladies – Make a comment on what you think of this dirty story and what advice you would give to founders and managers of new-age Indian start-ups.