About · Aniket BhardwajDwarka, New Delhi
Three marks kept me out of college. Five hundred rupees kept me out of engineering entirely. I was fourteen, and already earning my own school fees. Everything I've built in the eighteen years since — teaching, six ventures, five books — has come out of those two facts. This is the long version.
01Where it began
My mother, Poonam Devi, is a teacher, and the first job I ever had was hers. From class three I was checking her students' copies and totalling their marks in the evenings. It was not framed as work. It was simply what happened in our house.
By the time I was ten I had started my own — teaching the children of tenants in our building on our rooftop for twenty-five rupees a student. By class nine it had become deliberate: two home tuitions at three hundred and fifty rupees each, seven hundred a month, and five hundred of it going straight to my own tutor. I was fourteen, running a small business whose only product was my own education.
I say this for one reason. Everything my mother did, she did while struggling for it, and for me. What looks on paper like early ambition was really her refusal to let circumstances decide what her children could become. I learned the whole of my trade, and most of my stubbornness, at her side.
I have been doing a version of my mother's job since I was eight. I have never found a reason to stop.
02The turn
My Class 10 results came in June. In July I applied to Patna Science College. I missed the cut-off by three marks. Three.
In August I went to a coaching institute in Patna run by a chemistry teacher named Khakhan Mahto — one of the large, well-regarded ones, where everyone preparing for engineering wanted to be. I paid five hundred rupees for the trial classes. That was the money I had. When the next instalment came due I could not pay it, and I could not find anywhere else I could afford either.
So I did not prepare for engineering. Not that year, and as it turned out, not ever. I want to be exact, because it is the foundation of everything since. It was not that I couldn't do the work — I had been financing my own education for two years. The work was simply not available at a price I could reach.
What I decided that August was narrow, and I have never moved off it: I would earn enough that money would never again decide what I was allowed to learn. And having been on the wrong side of it once, I have never been able to stop noticing everyone else it happens to.
Having a good excuse and having a result, I learned at fourteen, are not related to each other in any way at all.
03Delhi
I already knew Zero Error Education — I had spent the first months of 2006 in Delhi, sitting in its classroom as a Class 10 student preparing for my board exams. So when, in 2007, my maternal uncle, Mr. Lokesh Kumar Singh — a senior police officer — offered me a way to finish class twelve in Delhi with a part-time job attached, I was not going somewhere unfamiliar. I was going back.
I lived with him for two or three years, and I would not be who I am without them. My education until then had been academic and financial: how to learn things, and how to pay for learning them. What he taught me was neither. How to conduct yourself. What to do when something is wrong in front of you and you are in a position to act. What a person owes to the place they live in, rather than what they can take from it. Almost everything I now do that has no commercial purpose comes directly out of those years.
In 2008 I walked back into Zero Error Education — this time as a teacher. Sixteen years old, doing the only thing I had ever been good at, in the same classrooms where I had sat as a student two years before.
04From student to chairman
I first walked into Zero Error Education as a student in 2006 and signed its closing papers in 2026 as its chairman. Each stage only happened because I'd done the previous one properly.
Where I first sat in the classroom of the organisation I would one day lead.
The first time anyone paid me properly for the thing I'd been doing since I was eight.
Operations and batches while completing my degree — the same study-by-day, teach-by-evening arrangement I'd run since class nine, now with better facilities.
The organisation formalised and my role with it. I built out the faculty side and learned to run a business by running one.
Seven years through incorporation, the shift to online teaching, and a planned, orderly close in June 2026. The pandemic changed something no syllabus could repair. In the years after 2020, the trust that classroom teaching depends on — between students, parents and teachers — never fully returned to what it had been. When I could see that the conditions the organisation was built for had gone, I chose to close it deliberately rather than let it drift.
05What I believe
Not the circumstances, not the timing, not what someone else should have handled first. I hold this precisely because I once had every reasonable excuse available — three marks, five hundred rupees — and learned that a good excuse changes nothing about where you end up.
Fees, timelines, whether a student is ready — asked plainly, answered plainly. Somebody should have told me, in that Patna office, that the trial fee was not the real cost. I have never let a family walk into that particular silence.
I don't rely on a method I can't rebuild from first principles, and I don't teach one either. It is why I ended up writing my own books and deriving my own shortcut rather than passing on somebody else's.
Three marks and five hundred rupees decided more about my education than my ability did. Every hour I spend making that less true for someone else — a free community quiz, an online class that reaches a small town, a book priced to be bought — is why the rest of this page exists.
06Outside the business
I take on things that have no commercial return, and I have lost things for it. Standing up to something wrong has cost me time, money and relationships more than once, and I expect it will again.
I don't present this as a virtue. It is closer to a temperament, and I learned it from my uncle rather than working it out myself. If something is wrong in front of me and I am in a position to act, the fact that acting is expensive has never seemed like an argument. I intend to keep doing it, and I know what it costs. The rule I follow is plain: when I come across a real problem — something genuinely wrong, not merely inconvenient — I step in and try to solve it, even when the cost of doing so falls on me.
07Education, books & research
Completed while working full-time — the same arrangement I'd run since class nine.
Where I learned research methodology properly: how to frame a question that can actually be answered.
My ground is quantum, nuclear and polymer chemistry — where a strong feel for mathematics and fast numerical work matter most.
Five published books in mathematics and chemistry — including the Square Root Shortcut, a method for the square root of any number without a calculator, now cited in Google's own AI-generated answers. Each began the same way: the version I needed didn't exist, so I wrote it.
Advanced Maths Tables · 978-93-5635-138-7
Square Root Shortcut · 978-93-5759-191-1
General Aptitude, JAM/NET/GATE · 978-93-5759-713-5
PhD Coursework in Chemistry · 978-93-5717-711-5
Periodic Table & Elements Data · 978-93-5626-428-1
√N ≈ √P + G₁G₂
08Where this is going
I'll be plain about the thing that sits under everything above, because it's the honest engine of it. At fourteen I was told, in effect, that money decided how far I could go in science. I have never accepted it.
What I am working towards — deliberately, every day — is to study at MIT, and then to work as a scientist at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN: the furthest edge of the science I was once priced out of. My ground for it is chemistry and mathematics — quantum, nuclear and polymer chemistry, and a facility with numbers I've had since I was a boy totalling my mother's mark registers. Whether or not that particular door opens, it is the direction every day's work now points.
Nearer at hand: the doctorate finished and published; the diagnostic part of teaching — the part that has never scaled — built properly into software; the tutoring network growing outward from Delhi; and eighteen years of things I've worked out and never written down, written down at last.
I would rather aim at the edge and fall short than aim at the comfortable and arrive bored.
09Registrations & directorships
Every entry below is verifiable on the public MCA and MSME registers. Please check them.
