Prashant was born in Pune but brought up in Bombay (now called Mumbai). He studied at St Johns High School and then went to Junior College at Ruparel. After that, he did his B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay and then M.S in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, US. After finishing graduate studies, he worked in the famed Silicon Valley for 6 years. He had a great 3 years at Intel. Then he worked for a startup called BTA Technologies, which later merged with Ultima Interconnect Technologies and existed as Celestry Design Technologies, before it was bought by Cadence in 2002 for $105 million. Prashant has a couple of patents to his name: US patent 7143021 and US patent 7181383. Throughout his career, Prashant has worked on hardware, software, and everything in between, and has done programming in 11 different languages: Verilog, VHDL, e/Specman, C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl/Tk, and HTML/XML.
Prashant came back to India for good in 2003. He started a software company in Mumbai along with his long-time friend and ran it for a year before deciding that he liked doing a job better than running his own company. So he worked at a small company called BitMapper in Pune for about 8 months and then joined Wipro Technologies where he worked for almost 4 years. In January 2009, he ventured out on his own again, and did many “crazy & interesting” things till November 2013, a phase which he calls his “real world MBA”. Currently, he works as the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of Cenergy MaxPower Pvt. Ltd., a company based in Mumbai, India that is into renewable energy with a strong focus on solar PV.
Writing wasn’t really his passion till 2003 which is when he decided to write Memory Remains, his debut fiction novel, which got published in June 2008. He published his debut non-fiction book Making It On My Own in March 2009. In May 2010, Prashant published 4 children’s story books. Prashant has also contributed one chapter to a book called Life Is; Death Is Not alongside eminent writers like Khushwant Singh and Amrita Pritam, and one chapter to a book titled Salmons of Narmada. Currently, Prashant is writing a series of articles on sustainability.
The publisher of the first edition of Memory Remains did such a horrible job that Prashant was sure he could do a 100 times better than him. So he became a publisher in August 2008 and founded APK Publishers; the second edition of Memory Remains and Making It On My Own were APK Publishers’ first two books. But as its tagline – By Writers, For Writers – says, the aim/mission of APK Publishers was (and still is) to help writers, particularly first-time writers, get their work published. True to its mission, APK Publishers has published more than 50 books till date, almost all of them by first-time writers! Prashant has compiled 2 anthologies of short stories and edited more than a dozen books for APK Publishers.
Prashant has a lot of extra-curricular interests. As a kid, he learnt tabla for 5 years and earned the praise of many distinguished tabla teachers who were all confident that he would become a professional tabla player as a grown-up. When he was in IIT, he learnt rhythm guitar from one of his wing-mates. In the U.S, he learnt to play the drums, and later learnt a bit of bass guitar himself. Although he prefers to listen to Indian classical, Western classical, Jazz, or Classic Rock music, he listens to all “good” music with equal interest. He also loves sightseeing, hiking, and cooking International cuisines (every once in a while) for his wife and daughters.
Prashant celebrates his birthday on the 20th of May.