I grew up in the countryside of India — Kushinagar, Uttar Pradesh — a long way from places like Dubai.
Back in 2012, as I was finishing my engineering diploma, I was selected for a place with the University of Ballarat (Australia), through its partner programme in Punjab. For a boy from a humble family in India, that letter felt like the door to everything I had quietly dreamed of. I didn't just want a degree. I wanted to do research — to work with data, with applied physics, with the slow and patient business of turning a hard problem into a solution that might actually help humanity. That was the future I let myself imagine.
Then the numbers came in. Tuition, travel, living — and the honest arithmetic of a family that simply could not afford it. The door closed before I ever walked through it. I didn't make a scene about it; you don't, when you understand why. I folded the dream away quietly, the way you put something precious in a drawer you slowly stop opening. The years moved on. So did I.
Or so I told myself.
The Drawer Opens, a Little
Because this week, something shifted. I completed Energy Within Environmental Constraints through HarvardX, the online learning initiative of Harvard University, and I secured a passing grade. Online, yes — and I know exactly what that is and what it isn't. It is not a degree from a hall I once couldn't reach. But it was the first time in a very long while that a door I had been turned away from opened again, even a little — and I felt the old dream stir in the drawer where I'd left it.
Let me tell you why this particular course mattered, and not only to my heart.
Following the Thread
Thirteen years ago I was working around high-voltage substations in India — energy at its rawest, humming and dangerous and alive. Today I look after residential communities in Dubai. On the surface, those two lives share nothing. But the thread running through all of it has always been the same: energy, and the cost of moving it through the world.
This course taught me to read that cost honestly — the way you might read a river. Where does the energy come from? What does it leave behind? Which choices are genuinely worth their price in carbon, and which only look that way until you do the sums? It gave me a vocabulary I had been missing: levelised cost, cost of mitigation — ways of weighing a solar panel against a coal plant with numbers instead of slogans. For the first time, an argument I had heard shouted about for years became something I could actually calculate.
And it sits closer to my daily work than I expected. Buildings breathe energy. They are among the single largest energy consumers on Earth, and in management every quiet decision — a chiller sized one way or another, a retrofit approved or deferred, an hour of cooling — is a small ripple in something far larger than the building it sits in. I had been making those decisions for years. Now I understand their weight.
What the Course Changed
It has also changed how I see the thing we call climate change. It is no longer a forecast to be argued over on the news. It is already measurable, already here — in the record heat and the relentless cooling demand we now live with in the Gulf, with natural cycles like El Niño riding on top of an already-warming world. We like to blame the heat on the season.
The season is only part of the story. Look beneath the surface, and the rest of it is there — patient, and undeniable.
I won't pretend I have become the researcher that younger version of me imagined. The drawer is open again, but the work is only beginning — in a new way that helps and supports "Mother Nature."
For Anyone Who Folded a Dream Away
And to anyone reading this who once folded a dream away because the timing, or the money, or the world simply wasn't ready: it keeps.
Dreams keep better than we fear. Sometimes, years later, a door you had stopped watching opens just enough to let you through.
My heartfelt thanks to Professor David Keith and Daniel Thorpe, whose teaching made a genuinely hard subject clear, rigorous, and human.
Some doors you wait your whole life to reach.
This one was worth the wait.