There's a particular memory that stays with me. I'm somewhere between 10 and 13 years old, standing in a queue at the government ration shop in Tamil Nadu. My grandmother has brought me here, stationed me in this line, and left to do something else. I'll be here for three, maybe four hours.
The shop doesn't open daily. It's scheduled—once a week, sometimes once a month—and when it opens, everyone shows up at once. Rice, dal, sugar, kerosene. During Pongal, they distribute free dhotis that most people don't even use, along with rice and jaggery. The crowd is thick. People push. It's hot. It's loud. And I'm a small kid, holding our family's place in line, sometimes with my grandmother pulling the "he's just a child, let him through" card to speed things up.
I hated it. I didn't have the words for it then, but I knew I didn't want to spend my life fighting crowds for things.
The water was the same story. Kaveri river water used to come through these big public pipes installed around our area. To get drinking water, I'd cycle there with vessels, wait in another queue—10, 15 people on a good day—fill up, and cycle back. This was my routine from fifth to ninth grade. Tenth grade, they finally let me off household duties so I could focus on studies.
But eleventh and twelfth brought a new crowd. I had to travel 15 kilometers daily to SRV Boys Higher Secondary School in Rasipuram. The 7:15 AM bus. Sometimes manageable. Sometimes so packed that my school bag would hit people and they'd yell at me. The conductor struggling to squeeze through the bodies, collecting tickets.
Here's something that adds weight to all this: my father has been a bus conductor since 2007. His entire job, for the last 17 years, has been fighting the crowd. Every single day. People who won't buy tickets, people who won't stand properly, people who refuse to wait for the next bus even though it's 15 minutes away. The bus is full beyond capacity, and still they push in. I used to bring him food during his shifts. He'd extract himself from that cramped vehicle, take the bag from me, and go right back in.
He's still doing it.
College in Chennai was different. St. Joseph's College of Engineering. Also crowded, technically, but without the chaos. No fighting for food at the mess. No crushing to get somewhere. Everything distributed evenly, everyone gets their seat. The best college food in Tamil Nadu, honestly.
But traveling between Chennai and home—that brought back the old feelings. Holiday season, you can't get a bus from the usual stop. Everything's packed. Over time, I trained myself to wait. I'd stand for an hour, hour and a half, just to get a bus where I could sit by the window and actually enjoy the ride.
The worst was the trains. Unreserved coaches. I still remember taking the Pandian Express to Trichy with my friends Saravana Balaji and a few others. Fights breaking out over seats. Six people crammed into space meant for four. I've sat in the luggage rack—the one where people keep their bags—because there was nowhere else. The coach smelling terrible. People refusing to adjust even an inch.
During my Mu Sigma internship in Bangalore, I had to travel back to Chennai every week for exams. Eighth semester. The office was strict about timing—couldn't leave before 9:30 PM. So I'd head to Silk Board to catch a bus, and every bus would be packed. Sometimes I'd walk four or five kilometers to a depot just to board from the starting point. Sometimes I'd take the 2 AM bus and sleep on the steps or in the aisle.
One day, rushing to catch a bus to make it to the Mu Sigma campus for some important event, I lost my phone in the crowd. I cried the whole day.
Then something shifted.
Once I started earning properly, I started booking AC buses. Carpooling through BlaBlaCar. And then Vande Bharat came—that train was a blessing. No unreserved chaos. No strangers from general compartments spilling into your seat. Just book it, show up, sit by the window, watch the rural landscapes and forests pass by.
From 2022 to 2025, all my travel between Bangalore and home became pleasant. BlaBlaCar rides turned into good conversations—businessmen, professionals doing courses, people with interesting lives. We'd talk about food, places, politics. Real human connection, not survival mode.
Money bought me out of the crowd. That's the simple truth.
But my father is still in it. We've talked about early retirement. Someday.
Here's where the essay turns, because the crowd never really went away. It just changed form.
When I left Mu Sigma and started looking for new jobs, I applied to 200 positions in one night. Directly on company websites. Not a single callback. Then I paid for Naukri Premium, and suddenly I existed. Calls started coming—three, four a day. The platform's ranking system made me visible. From that point until my last job at Informatica, I never cold-applied anywhere again. People reached out to me, or I reached out directly to people I knew. The crowd at the gate became irrelevant because I found a different door.
Now I'm in New York, doing my MS at Columbia, and the subway here has crowds but not the chaos. A train every six minutes. No pushing, no crushing. If you miss one, another comes. The city works.
But the new crowd? It's everywhere else.
TA positions—applications flood in within hours. Internships—everyone applies, experienced people and freshers both, all looking the same to whoever's screening. Job postings on LinkedIn—200, 300 comments. People sharing ATS hacks, making multiple applications with tweaked resumes, gaming the system because the system is gameable.
I've been told: "Just get past the ATS." Apply 100 times. Format your resume this way. Add these keywords.
I don't want to.
Here's what I've realized. The crowd at the ration shop and the crowd in an ATS are the same crowd. A mass of people waiting at a door with a flawed key. The key has selective biases, incapabilities, randomness. The people holding it—whether it's an HR filtering 100 resumes or an algorithm ranking applicants—can't distinguish signal from noise when everyone looks similar.
Fighting that crowd is what I did as a child because I had no choice. I don't want to do it anymore.
So I work on myself instead. Projects, ideas, writing, building. Not to game a system, but to become undeniable to the people who matter—the founders, the chief data scientists, the heads of ML practices. The actual decision-makers. The ones who can look at what I've done and say, "Let's have a conversation. Ten minutes. Let's see."
In the future, there will be a new crowd I have to deal with—founders and players in the problem space we work in. In AI, in product building, looking for VCs, looking for clients. But that crowd values unique efforts, unique value propositions. Building value is the only way to avoid the crowd and have peace of mind.
All the crowd is waiting at the door. I'd rather find the person who holds the key and talk to them directly.
I spent enough of my childhood standing in lines. I'm done fighting crowds full of noise and chaos.
I'll take the alternative path.
I guess many of us are dealing with the crowds and the annoyance. Value proposition and building our identity is the way.
This post started as a voice memo—thoughts I needed to get out. Sometimes the clearest writing comes from just talking it through.