Hey, I’m Deb :)

My friends also call me Reang.

Welcome to my blog. I write about life, learning, and the places I’ve visited.

I grew up daydreaming in a small village in Tripura, India.

That dream led me to the beautiful city of Vienna, where I studied for an MSc in Strategy, Innovation, and Management Control at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration) as a double-degree student.

Before that, I spent the first year of the two-year MBA program at a well known institute of management in Western India.

Even before that, I studied Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, where I also dabbled in computational biology, machine learning, and high-performance computing on the side. IITK changed my life.

When I’m not transforming raw data into actionable insights, I read, write, play badminton, and spend time in coffee shops my kitchen. I also maintain a bucket list.

I hope my essays leave you feeling hopeful about the future.

Some other pages you might like to read: iima courses, iitk courses, wu courses, ignou courses, mentorship

tags: academics books coffee iima iitk life mba reading review travel vienna

Follow along for occasional updates.

Essays

If you are new here, you may want to start with these.

All essays

Testimonials

A (select) collection of some of the nicest things people said to me. It feels good to read these now and then. Keeps me sane. Thank you for your kind words!

You are so great, may god fulfill all your dreams!

I was about to deactivate my LinkedIn because it seemed too overwhelming and that I wasn’t doing “enough” compared to my peers over there. Lo and behold! I came across your blog about your journey- quite intrigued me. I was under the impression that it must be another ego-centrist IIT-IIM Linkedin Influencer boasting about how to rise up from the struggles of life. I can find all the elements minus ego-centrism in your post … reading your article first thing in the morning today has been a mood booster for me and given me food for thought! … I would really like to thank you for that! And good luck with your next endeavors! Keep Inspiring!

Mast aadmi ho yaar tum

You are crisp. The narratives are so well structured. I thought that the last blog (found the link on Twitter) I read from you was the most honest-funniest-sarcastic-insightful anecdote, but this one surpassed the benchmark that I had randomly set in my head.

I just wanted to thank you for sharing your story with strangers across the internet. You might think that the potential for impact in your lifetime seem minuscule, but your journey resonates with many people in ways that you might not know about. Thank you for all you do once again!

Iam writing to you as I was applying for an Austrian RP and Visa and had a few doubts about it. Your article has helped me a lot in- In a lot of ways More than you will ever know.

I don’t quite remember how I stumbled upon your blog, but I know it was around 4 or 5 years ago at my previous job. I was supposed to be working, but I ended up reading one of your essays from start to finish in a single sitting. It felt authentic, completely free of the usual ‘write for the algorithm’ kind.

Bucket list

Sometimes I add/drop items from this list because the bucket gets full-ish, and it gets really heavy to carry them all.

  • Take a train journey
  • Meet HC Verma
  • Perform at an open mic
  • Graduate from college
  • Watch a live cricket match (India vs South Africa WC game at Eden Gardens; Kohli scored a century!)
  • Visit the mosques in Tehran, Iran
  • Visit Disneyland
  • Visit the Taj Mahal
  • Get a Ph.D.
  • Meet Prof. David J. Malan
  • Christmas in New York
  • Bhutan trip
  • Take a train to Saint Petersburg
  • Camel ride
  • Sunset pictures of Auckland, New Zealand
  • Buy a house
  • Learn to drive
  • Write in Paris
  • Attend a live concert (Ed Sheeran in Mumbai!)
  • Visit 50 countries — 7 countries so far :)
  • Get married
  • Visit The Rashtrapati Bhavan (What an honour!)
  • Write a book
  • Diplomat era
  • Speak fluent Mandarin
  • Learn my wife’s language
  • Silverstone F1 Grand Prix
  • Eat Unadon in Japan
  • Run a cafe, with a bookstore
  • Eat hilsa fish in Dhaka
  • Make sure my descendants are educated (This is going quite well) ~
  • Be kind ~
  • Promote tribal culture ~
  • Live a life filled with love, autonomy, and dignity ~

~ work in progress :)

Books I’ve read

This is a collection of books that I’ve read since high school, ordered roughly chronologically. These days I mostly read books about things concerning India and her people. I hope the list (and my comments) will help you find your next book. Titles with * are some of my favorites. Of course, if you have book recommendations, feel free to send me an email.

  • Wings of Fire: An Autobiography, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Arun Tiwari

  • Drums, Girls & Dangerous Pie, Jordan Sonnenblick

  • The Girl in Room 105, Chetan Bhagat

  • What Young India Wants, Chetan Bhagat

  • The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

  • The 3 Mistakes of My Life, Chetan Bhagat

  • Revolution Twenty20: Love . Corruption. Ambition, Chetan Bhagat

  • I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, Malala Yousafzai

  • One Indian Girl, Chetan Bhagat

  • Five Point Someone: What Not to Do at IIT, Chetan Bhagat

  • Memories of Midnight, Sidney Sheldon

  • Looking for Alaska, John Green

  • Shoe Dog, Phil Knight

  • Ikigai, Francesc Miralles, Héctor García

    • Ikigai is the book that made me give up on reading self-help books. I did not read a single self-help book after this. Very grateful that I came across it early in life.

  • Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson

  • Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Stephen Hawking

  • Quichotte, Salman Rushdie

  • Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ashlee Vance

  • A Man Called Ove**, Fredrik Backman

    • What a heart-wrenchingly-good book! It is tragic, but heart-warming at the same time. You feel a range of emotions while going through the pages. The book has so many good bits about human connection. It is really well-written. They also made it into an English film called A Man Called Otto - I loved it! It’s one of the movies I watched till the end without skipping ahead.

      We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like ‘if’.

  • Permanent Record, Edward Snowden

  • The Fault in Our Stars*, John Green

    • Hank Green’s brother writes quite well too.

      Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.

  • Educated**, Tara Westover

    • This is one of my favorite books. As someone who cares a lot about education, Educated felt deeply personal. I had to take deep breaths, and compose myself at various points before reading ahead. The words are that powerful. Tara Westover is an awesome writer, you should check out her essays too. The book also has this really powerful line:

      It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.

  • A Burning, Megha Majumdar

  • Atomic Habits, James Clear

  • Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone, Jill Tracie Nichols, Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw

  • Azaadi, Arundhati Roy

  • Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, Trevor Noah

  • A Gentleman in Moscow*, Amor Towles

    • A masterpiece in storytelling about love, friendships, life’s tragedies, and the whole human experience.

      Either way, he figured a cup of coffee would hit the spot. For what is more versatile? As at home in tin as it is in Limoges, coffee can energize the industrious at dawn, calm the reflective at noon, or raise the spirits of the beleagured in the middle of the night.

  • The Palace of Illusions, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  • Shiksha: My Experiments as an Education Minister, Manish Sisodia

  • All the Bright Places, Jennifer Niven

  • Milk and Honey, Rupi Kaur

  • Who Will Cry When You Die?, Robin S. Sharma

  • Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie

  • Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There, Rutger Bregman

  • How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, Bill Gates

  • Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  • Humankind: A Hopeful History*, Rutger Bregman

    • I have gifted this to a few people. Some said it paints a naive view of people’s nature, and of the world. That may be true but it is also true that I’m deeply hopeful about the prospects of Humankind.

      So what is this radical idea? That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.

  • The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, Melinda French Gates

  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

  • Zikora, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  • India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy*, Ramachandra Guha

    • You grow up, get lucky a few times, and end up walking the length of Ho Chi Minh Sarani.

      An early gesture was to rename Harrington Road after a hero of the world communist movement, so that at the height of the Vietnam War the address of the United States Consulate was 7 Ho Chi Minh Sarani, Calcutta.

  • On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century*, Timothy Snyder

  • Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport

  • The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

  • My Journey: Transforming Dreams into Actions, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

  • Nothing Much Happens, Kathryn Nicolai

  • The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race*, Walter Isaacson

  • My Life in Full, Indra Nooyi

  • How I Learned to Understand the World: A Memoir, Hans Rosling

  • Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Bureaucracy But Were Afraid to Ask, T. R. Raghunandan

  • Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, Huma Abedin

  • At Night All Blood Is Black, David Diop

  • Censoring the Word, Julian Petley

  • How to Win an Election: An Ancient Guide for Modern Politicians, Quintus Tullius Cicero

  • The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles

  • Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng

  • The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Christy Lefteri

  • Anxious People, Fredrik Backman

  • The Nine-Chambered Heart, Janice Pariat

  • Slow Boat, Hideo Furukawa

  • Policymaker’s Journal: From New Delhi to Washington D.C., Kaushik Basu

  • Defiant Dreams: The Journey of an Afghan Girl Who Risked Everything for Education, Sola Mahfouz, Malaina Kapoor

  • Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Paul Torday

  • System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot, Mehran Sahami, Jeremy M. Weinstein, Rob Reich

  • The Stationery Shop of Tehran, Marjan Kamali

  • Gandhi Before India, Ramachandra Guha

  • Northeast India: A Political History, Samrat Choudhury

    • I donated this to the Vikram Sarabhai Library at IIM Ahmedabad during my convocation. You should check it out when you visit the library. You can read more about the convocation here.

  • Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty and the Ways to End it, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

  • The Tatas: How a Family Built a Business and a Nation, Girish Kuber, Vikrant Pande

  • Accelerating India’s Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance*, Karthik Muralidharan

    • The first time I came across the works of Prof. Karthik Muralidharan was in Education Policy in India course at IIMA taught by Prof. Ambrish Dongre.

      While it may seem radical, it is no more so than India’s original democratic experiment of providing voting rights to all citizens—regardless of education or wealth—at Independence.

      A colonial state would not care if people were excluded from benefits for being illiterate and unable to fill a form. But, a democratic state should.

  • The Far Field, Madhuri Vijay

  • The Living Mountain, Amitav Ghosh

  • Bitter Wormwood*, Easterine Kire

    • This reminded me of home endlessly. It talks about really tragic stories but the stories are also about the struggles of everyday life in the village—about the resilience that people show in the face of adversity, about dignity, and connection between peoples. I’m so glad I picked up the book. You should too.

      All of history can be written in two small words: Challenge and Response.

      If life is hard to you, you simply harden yourself so its griefs are easier to bear. That is the only way to meet it.

  • India and the Bangladesh Liberation War, C. Dasgupta

  • These Hills Called Home, Temsula Ao

  • A Life in Diplomacy*, Maharajakrishna Rasgotra

  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari

  • The Visit, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  • The Last Queen, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

  • Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Satoshi Yagisawa

  • Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari

  • Breaking the Mould: Reimagining India’s Economic Future, Raghuram G. Rajan, Rohit Lamba

  • Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, Yuval Noah Harari

  • Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, Lori Gottlieb

  • Yuganta: The End of an Epoch, Irawati Karve

  • AI Snake Oil*, Sayash Kapoor, Arvind Narayanan

    • This is a book about What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference. The bold portion is literally in the title.

  • Next Door: Stories, Jahnavi Barua

  • Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China**, Yuan Yang

  • A Thousand Splendid Suns*, Khaled Hosseini

    • Much has been said about the author and his writings.

      Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.

  • Kamchatka*, Marcelo Figueras

    • A friend recommended this to me during the Christmas holiday season in 2025. It is a wholesome book. The narration is quite funny even though often the stories are about life’s tragedies. Something that stood out to me was how children’s lives change fundamentally (sometimes overnight) because of adult’s conflicts.

      love one another madly, the people you know, but more importantly the people who need love, because love is the only thing that is real, it is the light, everything else is darkness

Say hello?

  • Email: hi{at}reangdeba{dot}xyz. This is the best way to get in touch.
  • Socials:
  • I read [and reply to] all emails. There might be a delay sometimes but I try my best (it took me about a year to reply in one case from what I recall, but hey I’m only human).