Life began in space so did my enterprise

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: Every entrepreneur's story is a thesis on innovation. But Ankur Puranik's passion for all things electronic and electrical made him a manufacturer of electronic ballast, electrical fittings, etc; and his new business model revolves around invertors and uninterrupted power supply equipment. But his best description can be found on geocities website put up ten years ago: ''Ankur Puranik is a 18-year-old student with a diploma in electronics and telecommunications. He's also Managing Director (... not to mention it's only qualified Mission Controller, Flight Director, Electronics and Telecommunications Engineer, Scientist and Astronomer) of the Spacelink Research Center. His tastes are eclectic: astronomy, computer programming, music, driving and swimming. He inhabits a building scheduled for demolition 20 years ago, and he's been a HITG subscriber from way, way back''.

Now Ankur is busy as an entrepreneur managing his company called Om Microelectronics, so much so that he insists on holding this interview in his car on his way back home late in the night. He made a FM transmitter and started his own FM radio broadcast station when he was in VIII standard. He hosted 'live' call-in shows and became a DJ pal in his building. The equipment he made was small enough to be able to broadcast over a kilometer radius. At the age of 16, during his college days he graduated to conducting bigger scientific experiments. He send a camera into 'space' by tying it to huge helium gas balloons. The idea was novel for a college kid, but the mechanism to make a rudimentary film camera click pictures automatically from up there tested his innovative mind. He modified and re-designed a mechanism from an old toy which had a wound-up spring that would press the click button on the camera every 15 - 30 seconds. But the problem then was that the balloons take time to reach up to 'space', and the camera would start clicking even as it left the ground. So he used a lit-up incense stick as a timer that would cut a thread and enable the camera and the mechanism to start clicking pictures after the camera had gained altitude.