How To Realize The Ultimate Rendition Of The American Dream (Journey From Indian Railways To SpaceX) - w/ Sanjeev

Naman introduces Sanjeev Sharma, a principal engineer at SpaceX whose path runs from Indian Railways in the 1990s to hard-drive engineering in the United States and, eventually, reusable rockets. The conversation begins with the version of India in which Sanjeev entered engineering, then follows the technical knowledge, immigration decisions, financial risks, and career bets that made each transition possible.

Naman asks Sanjeev to begin with his decade in Indian Railways and explain what engineering work felt like in India during the early 1990s. He is especially interested in how someone working inside a large government system eventually arrived at SpaceX without treating the two careers as unrelated chapters.

Sanjeev says his father was an engineer, so machines and the way people designed them interested him early. He began at the University of Roorkee, now IIT Roorkee, but moved after being admitted through the UPSC process to the railway institute in Jamalpur. The institute recruited students after Class 12 for a four-year mechanical engineering program with both theory and practical railway training. Because the selection process took months, he was already well into his first year at Roorkee when the railway offer arrived.

After graduating, Sanjeev spent two years in Dhanbad with Eastern Railway, mostly in operations. That experience convinced him that design sat upstream of the systems he was operating. He moved to the newly established Rail Coach Factory in Punjab, where computerization was entering design and manufacturing. The factory had modern tools, strong funding, and colleagues who were willing to learn together. That environment turned a general interest in engineering into a specific commitment to design and analysis.

The new factory mattered because it let the team build methods at the same time it built products. Computer-aided design and manufacturing tools were entering the organization, and Sanjeev could learn directly from senior engineers while experimenting with a new technical workflow. He remembers being surprised that a government factory could provide state-of-the-art technology and enough funding to use it seriously. The experience complicated the easy story that innovation was impossible in public service: the larger system could be slow, but the right local team still created exceptional work.