The life of Manu Vishranti

Early years

Manu Vishranti is the pen name of Manav Sharma, who was born in New Delhi in 1990 and grew up in Moga, Punjab, where he went to school. His mother taught Hindi at a government aided school in Moga, and it was a house in which reading and study were taken for granted. He took the non medical science stream in Classes 11 and 12, and technical subjects came easily to him.

A loss, and a first business

In 2008, during his first year of a Bachelor of Computer Applications at Dayanand Mathura Das (DM) College, Moga, his father, the late Sh. Ashwani Sharma, died. The family responsibilities passed to him: a sister whose wedding he would see through, and a brother three years younger. He stayed in Moga to support the family. In the holidays of that first year he had already worked twelve to fourteen hours a day as a helper in a sanitary ware shop.

By his second year he had decided to build a business of his own. He began making websites and social media pages, and writing their content, for small businesses: a property developer in the city, a school and a hotel. He called the venture Aimru Technologies, a name made by rearranging the letters of his own full name, at a time when few people in a town like Moga used the word startup.

A mountain, an award and a chessboard

That same first year, while his father was being treated for cancer at PGI Chandigarh, Manav, an NCC cadet at his college, was one of only twenty cadets in India selected for the NCC Boys' Mountaineering Expedition to Bhagirathi II, a climb up the Gangotri glacier past Gaumukh, with Shivling standing on his right. Dainik Jagran reported his selection on 20 May 2008. He did not want to leave. His father, by then in the fourth stage of his illness, insisted that he go and not let the chance pass, and collected every newspaper cutting about the selection and pasted them on a sheet of paper.

Later that year the Swami Vivekananda Study Circle selected him for its National Youth Award. It had written to more than 300 colleges across Punjab and chose 23 students through merit and interview. His father cut out and pasted these reports too. The award, the National Youth Award 2009, was presented on 14 February 2009 at Kamla Lohtia College, Ludhiana, as part of the National Youth Day celebrations. By then Manav was a Senior Under Officer in his college's NCC unit, and he received the award with his mother beside him. Dainik Bhaskar reported the honour from Moga.

Chess came from his father too, who was a strong player himself and took him to the local chess club from the time he was in Class 1. Later Manav won a gold and a bronze medal at the Panjab University Inter-College Chess Championship, and was selected for the university's team at the national inter-university chess championship, played at Vellore. For 2011-12, as a student of its Department of Computer Science, the university awarded him its Campus Colour in Chess for distinguished performance in inter-university tournaments. His father did not live to see those medals, and Manav gives him the whole credit for them. On every one of these journeys, from the mountain to the award to the chessboard, he had the full support of his family.

Chandigarh, and a master's degree

After his graduation he took a year away from study to set up the business in Chandigarh. Once he was sure he could hold his ground in the city, through many ups and downs, he sat the entrance examination for the Master of Computer Applications at Panjab University. He was placed 31st in India and took one of the few seats on the main campus in Sector 14, living in Boys Hostel No. 1, which spared him the cost of rented rooms. In the same season he scored in the 99.44th percentile of a National Aptitude Test; testing his own mind now and then is something he still enjoys. He has always held that a rupee saved is worth no less than a rupee earned.

A rupee saved is worth no less than a rupee earned.

Meshcron Technologies

He then founded Meshcron Technologies Private Limited, first with an office in Sector 45, Chandigarh, and a year later in a larger space in Sector 70, Mohali, as the team grew. For three years the company served clients across the world with IT services, game development and digital marketing, and he learned the trade from the ground up.

Alongside it he built projects of his own with collaborators, among them a quiz game modelled on Kaun Banega Crorepati. He was drawn to systems programming, operating systems and networking protocols, and he wrote a paper comparing the properties of the natural neuron with those of artificial neural networks. It was never published, since his degree was a master's and not a doctorate.

The turn to the old texts

So much business, so young, opened something in him, and he felt a deep need to learn India's ancient texts. He returned to Moga and, with his partner, wound up the company to take a completely different path. By then his sister was married and his brother had begun his own master's degree.

For the next three to four years, until 2018, he studied the Vedas, the Puranas, Vedanta, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita, and every other text he could reach, some closely and some in passing. His days were given to three things: reading, eating and playing games. He started a YouTube channel for his gameplay, under the name Black Mamba. To earn, he taught mathematics, science and computers, and founded MIMS, the Manav Institute of Maths and Science, at his home in Moga. Lovely Professional University reached out to work with him for its entrance test, LPUNEST.

Since 2018

In 2018 a company in Mohali invited him to advise it twice a week as a business consultant, on problems much like the ones he had met in his own company. The advice worked, and at the company's request he joined it full time. He has been with it since, through Covid and every other crisis, and is with it still in 2026.

On the day of Dussehra in 2024 he married Yukti Sharma.

The writing

His writing and his meditation are not the work of a year or two. They are spread across many years of notes, kept here and there, in the belief that one day they would find their light. The Five Wounds, a series of five novels and a companion volume in English, is his first published work, out from Walnut Publication on 18 September 2026. His Hindi meditation diary Neti Neti, the Sundar Kand game Lanka Ki Khoj and the novel saga Untalis Lankayen are on their way.

He lives and writes in Dehradun, in a house that carries the same name as his pen: Manu Vishranti.