"Relax into the reality of your cosmic smallness. The plain truth is that you are a speck on a speck. But you’re a lovely little speck, and beloved by a few other specks. That’s a good life."
Hi,
My name is Madhav Khandelwal, aka Maddy / Shunya.
My spawn location was Hyderabad, India in 2003, and shortly thereafter, my family moved to a small town when I was 3 where I grew up reading and playing a lot of sports, especially football.
I took a drop year after high school, and then moved to Bangalore for college where I (almost) majored in Psychology, Sociology and Economics.
As of early 2026, I'm living in Mumbai and keep travelling between Bangalore and my hometown.
As I'm writing this, I find it limiting to box myself into fixed labels. So, instead you can just scroll down here to look at my past quests and the things that currently make me excited to get out of my bed in the morning.
I jot down my internal monologue sometimes, that exposes my worldviews and the quirky nerd in me. Please don’t psy-op me tho, thanks.
In a nutshell, I’m a rationally optimistic human as of 2026 with truth-seeking being my core compass for navigating life.
Also, my chronological age is 22. Yet to test for my biological one.
Tangents I currently find interesting
Reorganising society for 21st century/Network States, Psychedelic research, BCIs, d/acc, Future of humanity and space, Post-AGI world as we transition through the chaos tunnel, Indian deeptech ecosystem and maximising my inputs for playfulness and fun (while on my journey to be post-money). I could def use some advice for the last one if you’ve got any.
Here’s a list of things that I want to write about. (coming soon)
Some past quests, listed in no particular order
- Founding member at ZuGrama (short stint, bad timing)
- Launched The Future Series while I was at ZuGrama
- Was lead designer on $100k+ web projects along with a team of a creative director, project manager and developers working for a US agency with clients like UN, Boston Dynamics and more while in my 2nd year of college
-Traded NFTs during my drop year after 12th grade. Had a relatively good run but decided to drop it and focus on cultivating long term skills.
- Helped build a side project called Dintern, which was basically an internship for a day kinda platform to give highschool students a taste of different professions so they could choose what they want to do in college more wisely. (colleges are low-key redundant now)
- It got pivoted into an EF backed edtech startup where I witnessed the journey of going from -1 to 0 with 2 great lowkey mentors/co-founders (I was an intern back then)
- Was the most fascinating journey for me as a 18 yr old rebel kid who grew up hating the indian education system in a small town in India
- Left that to join college
- Probably built the first directory for pop-up villages and the first network state related event in India where I screened the first docfilm made on network states by Jean
- And a lot more random things which include but are not limited to selling custom printed tshirts, running google ads for local tattoo studio, SMM for a local cafe, making WP websites between 8th to 12th grade.
Get in touch
If you feel like reaching out please do. What's the point of using the internet if we don’t use it to humanly connect with people we might not have otherwise met in a previous era due to geographical constraints.
I still find it fascinating that somehow out of 8.3 billion people in this world, you somehow landed up on my website and are now reading this. Cheers!
Email - hey[at]shunya[dot]wtf
X - @chickenpaparazi
Last published on 6th March 2026