Rustix | Building JurisIQ

AIR 1 in IIT-JEE. AIR 1 in AIEEE. Gold Medalist at the International Physics Olympiad. No other topper in the history of the IITs has ever secured that triple crown. Yet, 2 years later, he quit. In 2006, an eighteen-year-old Chandigarh boy, Raghu Mahajan, claimed the undisputed trophy of the Indian education system: Computer Science at @iitdelhi On paper, the script was already written. Coast through IIT, dominate placements, take a Silicon Valley offer, and end up as the face on a newspaper ad for a 2 Crore package. But he was not playing that game. Inside IIT Delhi, Mahajan found a campus life not very inspiring when it came to research. It was an optimization engine built to funnel the country's best minds into high-paying jobs. Not passion for learning. So he dropped out. He flew to Boston and transferred to MIT to study pure physics and mathematics. Then PhD at Stanford. Then, as a postdoc at Princeton, he co-authored foundational work with Juan Maldacena on the Page curve and black hole entropy, helping explain how information survives at the very edge of the universe. In 2024, after sixteen years abroad, he came back to India. He now works at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bengaluru as a humble researcher. His exact skill set is worth a fortune in finance and big tech. But he instead chose to use it on the hardest questions that no one pays him to answer. His prize is in the pursuit of those answers. And that is a flex money can't buy