Ways of Working : Mehar on Community
Ways of Working. Issue 04.
Mehar co-founded TinkerHub, a community running across campuses and a space in Kochi. Before the conversation, I showed an issue of this newsletter for context. While going through it, he stopped at a screenshot and asked how subfolders work in Apple Notes. He knew the app, just not that part of it. That instinct to ask is more or less what TinkerHub is built on.
He has been running TinkerHub for close to a decade. Before that, a fellow at Kerala Startup Mission. Before that, a student building apps while still figuring things out. The labels have kept shifting, but the direction hasn’t changed much.
Before all this, there was just interest
Mehar’s interest in tech started early. A cousin ran a computer centre, so computers were always around, but unlike many kids his age, he wasn’t drawn to games. He was more curious about what was installed, what could be changed, and how things worked. By the time he got to college, that curiosity had already turned into trying things on his own.
In college, he found himself drawn to free and open source, learning from open courses, spending time around communities, and sharing whatever he was learning with friends and people in nearby colleges. Around the same time, he started reaching out to people he had never met. ICFOSS helped print posters for one of the stalls. Ubuntu CDs started arriving. None of it felt expected. Each small response felt like a surprise, but over time, it also gave him a better sense of how these communities worked, how people were willing to support, and how much of it started by simply asking.
By the time it was their turn to conduct events, he and his friends didn’t want to follow the usual format. Instead of putting up stalls that explained what someone had built, they opened things up and asked people to try things themselves. A Wikipedia page was edited live. Raspberry Pis, 3D printers, and other things were kept on tables for anyone to explore. The people running those stalls were not experts either. They were learning while showing, figuring things out as they went, and students stayed longer than expected, asked more questions, and kept coming back. By the time MakerParty happened, it didn’t feel like a separate event. It felt like many small experiments slowly finding their shape.
The college had its own constraints. The library had high-speed internet, but you couldn’t talk there. Classrooms had space for conversations, but no internet, and mobile data wasn’t really a thing yet. So they took an old library building and turned it into something in between. Students would come in the evenings, sit around, show whatever they were building, and talk through it. Sometimes it was something small, like a Flappy Bird clone built in JavaScript, but the technology usually came later in the conversation. What mattered first was the feeling that if someone around you could build this, maybe you could too.
It found its way
At a Startup Village event focused on building BlackBerry apps, he made a small wallpaper app, shared it on Facebook, and tagged the Startup Village people. He didn’t think much of it. They appreciated the effort, and that led to a test device. Something small, noticed, and that made him want to keep going.
Over time he built many apps, include Secure Browser. A very broken one at first, missing basic features. He kept adding to it, figuring things out along the way. When a second version was ready, he had to decide whether to give existing users a free update or ask them to pay again. He used a third way: he asked people to either review the app or buy it, and shared a link. He had no way of knowing if anyone actually reviewed anything. He was just watching whether people took the link. They did. The app climbed the BlackBerry App World rankings, stayed there for a while, made some money, and showed up in the newspapers.
It keeps going without a plan
He continued what he had started in college. When Startup Mission offered a community grant, they registered as a society. That didn’t change how things worked. It stayed informal, with events and meetups happening based on who was around, with friends supporting things just to keep them going.
At some point they tried making it more sustainable, a bootcamp model. It didn’t work. Around then, Hrishikesh connected him to Kailash Nadh. Mehar had no idea who he was, just some random tech guy from Bangalore, but as the call went on much longer than expected, having someone completely outside his circle align with what they were trying to do felt like validation, something he remembers telling him directly. Zerodha later funded TinkerHub, and now Samagata Foundation continues some of that support. But what stayed from that first conversation was simpler. That the idea wasn’t strange.
Without a fixed version
What TinkerHub becomes is less about structure and more about how things are done. Initially it spread to tier-2 colleges where this kind of exposure was limited. Students started getting access to events, internships, and people. That created a loop of confidence, for students, for colleges, and for him, that this could keep going.
TinkerHub’s events are not framed as something being done for students. They are something students can choose to be part of. Not a benefit, but an opportunity for those who are curious, and there is an effort to make it something people actually enjoy being part of.
The people running it in each place are usually close in age and context to the students themselves. Ownership stays with whoever is doing the work. The same idea looks different depending on who is taking it forward, and that variation is not something they try to fix. It can be tiring. It doesn’t lead to making things tighter. They have tried tools, Slack, Notion, others. None of them became central. Tools matter only when someone chooses to use and maintain them. What holds things together is not a system but a high level of agency in each person doing the work. Over time, he has also learned to spot what could fail. The obvious failure points get looked at early. The rest is left to flow.
Some of what they do makes this visible more directly. One program is called Useless Projects, an overnight make-a-thon where students build something explicitly, proudly useless. Not a solution to a problem. Not a pitch. Just something made. Sponsors hesitated. Universities weren’t sure. Students understood it immediately. The word landed exactly where it needed to.
There is a similar logic in code-walking, an event they ran with another team, where participants moved through a space, observed it, and build an art based on what they noticed. Not a product. Something between observation and making that didn’t fit any familiar category, and that wasn’t a problem.
Being around people like that
He likes to walk, think while walking, and walk with people who think. Many of his ideas seem to come from movement, and writing becomes a way of continuing those thoughts. He isn’t someone who journals every day or maintains a writing routine, but he writes when something stays with him. He also keeps a typewriter around. It is slower and full of typos, but he likes writing on it. It helps him stay with a thought a little longer.
Books are around him most of the time, scattered across where he lives and works, making it easier to pick one up whenever he feels like it. He reads multiple books in parallel, moving between them based on what catches his attention. Sometimes it links back to his notes, sometimes it doesn’t. There was also a period where Vipassana helped him see things more clearly. It remains an influence on how he observes things, without becoming something he structures his life around.
His attention also moves beyond tech and community problems. Something like noticing flowers in a park sits alongside building something technical. He lit up talking about Kochi Reads, people gathering in a public park just to read together, inspired by something that had started in Bengaluru. That kind of thing matters to him, even when he has nothing to do with it.
It stays open
He tends to move on things on his own first, picking them up, figuring them out, and bringing others in as it goes. The conversation moves that way too.
When it reaches AI, it doesn’t settle there. He is positive about it, and also worried, and also unclear. He is watching what others are doing, trying things, moving from there. He thinks coding as a job might not hold its current shape. He says so without making it sound like a conclusion. What he keeps returning to is something more durable than any particular skill. Learning how to learn. Identifying problems worth solving. Staying curious without needing everything to be clear first.
There is a word that keeps coming back through the conversation. Good. Not as a filler, but as something he actually means. Good people. Good place. Good society. Good course. He uses it often enough that it stops feeling like a word and starts feeling like a position. His first event was called do-gooders. A friend sponsored it. That is where it started, and that is more or less where it still is.