It all began three years ago and life has since been “hectic” and also not devoid of some “stress”.
By the age of 16, Kaushal has collaborated on projects with multinational corporate bigwigs like ING-Europe, DBS, Wells Fargo and Dell. He has also developed Cricket19, an-app based cricket game which had over 18 million downloads.
The authority with which he juggles technical jargon about software development, robotics, cybersecurity, home assistants and artificial intelligence belies his years and the braces on his teeth, which are a constant reminder that the tech wizard sitting before you is a teenager.
A wonder kid.
"I am completely self-taught in the field of software development," he says.
The son of a former IT teacher from Hyderabad in southern India, Kaushal says it all began as he casually flipped through the pages of some old books on computer science that his mother had kept in his room.
Kaushal giving a presentation. Source: Supplied
“My mum taught IT when we were in India. I read about the programming language C and at one stage, almost gave up. But then I read further, watched online tutorials and today I know 90 programming languages,” says Kaushal whose parents migrated with him to Australia in 2013, when he was nine years old.
“Now I know how to code in 90 programming languages, and I’m fluent in 47 of those. There are around 700 programming languages across the world. I don’t think I’ll need them all but my goal is to learn them all as I want to work with each language at least once in my lifetime,” says Kaushal, who studies at St. Andrews Christian College in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburb of Wantirna South.
A conversation with this gifted teenager can cause your jaw to drop as he tells you he has founded an IT company which does a “range of stuff”.
He says he is “a huge cybersecurity guy” who is very concerned about his “clients and their banking needs”, and who “employs contractors” in his company, adding that he's not interested in the gaming sector at all.
“Our next project is on farmers,” says Kaushal who wishes to address the financial problems they are facing in India and Australia, often due to natural causes like drought.
Source: Supplied
Kaushal tells SBS Punjabi that he has been invited to the elite IoT Conference next year in the US, where only the world’s top 200 developers get invited.
Does he miss being like other teenagers who study, play, party?
“Yes, sometimes I do. But you have to sacrifice something for other things,” Kaushal replies with the maturity that far belie his age, perhaps living upto the Sanskrit meaning of his name - ‘skill’.
Click on the player at the top of the page to listen to this interview in English.
