Karthik Subbaraj

Karthik Subbaraj, man—talk about a wild career pivot. The guy starts off code-crunching in the cubicle jungles of Infosys, Bangalore, probably dreaming in Java, and somewhere along the way, movies sneak up on him like a plot twist he didn’t see coming. Instead of just binging films after work (like the rest of us), he gets all fired up about actually making them. Wild, right? So he jumps into this one-day workshop on filmmaking with Sanjay Nambiar—just a single day, not even a full course. It’s like learning to swim by dipping your toes in the pool and then cannonballing right in. He goes back to Madurai, home turf, and decides to shoot a short film called "Kaatchipizhai." Not exactly Hollywood budget—probably more like scraping together cash from friends and praying the camera battery lasts. But hey, the short gets picked for "Naalaya Iyakunar," which is basically the launchpad for new filmmakers in Tamil cinema. That’s not nothing. That’s the sort of break people chase for years. Subbaraj’s story is the kind you tell your mom when she says you’re wasting your degree. He’s proof that, sometimes, you just gotta trust your gut and chase the thing that keeps you up at night—whether that’s coding or directing actors who’ve never seen a green screen before. Dewy-eyed techie to indie film director, all on the back of a one-day crash course and a whole lot of what-the-hell-let’s-do-this energy.