There’s a particular kind of thrill in being a fourth-standard student who knows more about computers than the teacher assigned to teach you. For Mehar, co-founder and CEO of TinkerHub Foundation, this wasn’t arrogance. It was just circumstance. Growing up in Calicut, Kerala, he had an uncle who ran a computer centre, a cousin with a machine at home, and the kind of restless curiosity that turns every available resource into a classroom. By the time his school got its first computer, he was already helping the teacher figure things out.
That instinct, to share what you know and to pull people alongside you rather than race ahead alone, would go on to define everything Mehar built next. Today, TinkerHub, the nonprofit he co-founded, spans 60 campuses across India with 30,000 members, runs a 24/7 open maker space in Kochi, and has helped thousands of young people, many of them from government colleges in remote parts of Kerala, discover that technology is something they can build, not just consume. Every single programme is free, funded not by fees or grants but by the community it has built over the years.
But none of it was planned. It began, as most meaningful things do, with a group of friends and a space that didn’t exist yet.
A Seventh Grader With a Company Name
Long before he had a startup to register, Mehar had a name for one. Sitting on a school step in seventh standard with a friend, the two were dreaming up companies they might someday run. That afternoon, they landed on Anamega, a word rooted in Sanskrit literary folklore, referring to the finger that has no name yet. It was never formally registered, but it stuck.
Government Schools, Linux Books, and a 15-Rupee Magazine That Changed Everything
Mehar’s educational journey ran entirely through public institutions, government schools and a government engineering college.
When Kerala introduced Linux-based open source computing into the school syllabus, Mehar’s uncle, a Malayalam teacher turned technology trainer, brought home a thick book on how Linux actually worked. Mehar devoured it. His grandfather, recognising the hunger, would bring him InfoKairali, a popular science magazine that cost just fifteen rupees. Inside its pages, Mehar first encountered phrases like “on-demand video streaming,” a concept so foreign in a world without 4G that he couldn’t quite picture what it meant. He’d later understand it as OTT platforms.
For his plus one and plus two years, Mehar chose a school an hour from home, one of the few in the region offering computer science, waking at 6 a.m. daily for the commute. He expected to learn how to build websites. Instead, he got ones’ complement and theory. It wasn’t what he’d hoped for. But he didn’t stop learning outside the classroom.
The Maker Party That Started Everything
By third year of engineering at CUSAT (Cochin University of Science and Technology), Mehar had already been volunteering with Mozilla, the global nonprofit best known for Firefox, but whose real mission was far broader: digital literacy, internet privacy, and helping everyday people understand how the technology shaping their lives actually worked.
One of Mozilla’s flagship programmes was the Web Maker Party, a learning festival built around creation rather than consumption. Mehar and a small group of students decided to host one on campus.
They needed 100 to 150 volunteers to staff 50 learning stations. Each station was hands-on: a small robot you could reprogram by changing one line of code, a Wikipedia page you could actually edit, a 3D printer whose logic you could follow.
What happened next surprised everyone. The first-year volunteers, who’d been given just a quick briefing, found themselves by afternoon fielding questions from ISRO-affiliated professors and senior researchers.
“By the time it’s afternoon,” Mehar recalls, “these volunteers had answers for most of the frequently asked questions. And the guests were professors who used to work with ISRO.”
Building the Space That Didn’t Exist
There was just one problem: there was nowhere to go next.
CUSAT had good internet, but only in the library, and only on library computers. Startup Village, India’s first public-private partnership incubation centre just three kilometres away, had an open floor that was 24/7 accessible, with beanbags, internet, and no gatekeeping.
Mehar and his peers began lobbying the university for a community space of their own. An old library building had just been vacated. They got it.
What followed was something that grew organically, almost accidentally. Every noon, someone from the community would design a poster (“Learn Canva Tonight” or “WordPress for Beginners”) and post it in the group. By evening, anywhere from ten to a hundred people would show up, sometimes it was a startup founder riding over from Startup Village. Sometimes it was someone who’d returned from NASA and happened to be visiting family in Kochi.
When first-year students saw third-years building projects that weren’t part of any syllabus, winning competitions, and getting into good startups, that became the new normal.
The Chai Maker Principle
While still in college, Mehar had also begun building BlackBerry apps independently, earning enough by third year that he stopped taking money from home. One of his apps became the top paid utility app in the US BlackBerry store for a month. In college, with expenses of around four thousand rupees a month, the income felt like freedom. It also gave him something more valuable: proof that a kid from Calicut, could build something the world wanted.
This experience shaped how he would later explain technology to students.
“I’m a chai maker. I know how to make chai in Cochin. If you take me to a village in France tonight and ask me to make chai, the currency is different, what you call chai might be different, but the chai-making is still there.”
His point: the technology stack will always change. The language used to build Android apps in 2015 was Java; by graduation, it had shifted to Kotlin. The tools changed. The students who survived that shift weren’t the ones who memorised the most syntax. They were the ones who understood fundamentals deeply enough to figure out the rest on the go.
“People who know how to figure out technology on the go are so rare,” he told The Logical Indian. “And all the companies want that kind of people. When ChatGPT came, the next day everyone wanted people with those skills, but nobody in the world had five years of LLM experience back then.”
TinkerHub: A Community That Grows Itself
After graduating, Mehar joined the Kerala Startup Mission as a Technology Innovation Fellow. He worked closely with the government on building innovation ecosystems across the state, visiting engineering colleges perched on hilltops in the middle of rubber estates and watching small communities of curious students quietly transform campus culture. But the idea that had taken root in CUSAT’s old library building never left him.
By around 2018, what had started as informal evening sessions had a name, TinkerHub, and a structure unlike most education nonprofits in India.
There are no MOUs with colleges. No government certifications. No formal curriculum. Instead, TinkerHub works on a deceptively simple principle: if you’ve learned something and want to share it, come. And if you join, you bring a friend.
“Think of it as a community that helps you. But you need to help your friends,” Mehar explained in conversation with The Logical Indian. “And people are very happy to do that, because in every college there will be one or two kids who know a lot of new technology, and most other students won’t have any idea at all. These people will be really frustrated: I want to do things, I want to go for programmes, but I need three or four people to come with me.”
Useless Projects and the Reinvention of the Hackathon
One of TinkerHub’s most beloved programmes is called Useless Projects.
The name is deliberately provocative. Most sponsors wouldn’t touch it. Several colleges initially balked. But for the Gen Z students TinkerHub is trying to reach, the name was magnetic, which was exactly the point.
The typical hackathon format, Mehar argues, is broken: hand a second-year student a massive social problem and tell them to solve it overnight. It doesn’t work. Social problems are nuanced. No one solves them in twelve hours with a demo app.
What TinkerHub tries to do instead is get young people excited about learning and building something crazy. Because once you start building, even something seemingly pointless, you begin to realise that most problems aren’t unique to you.
The Girls Who Wrote Code Through the Night
Last year, TinkerHub hosted the world’s largest offline hackathon for girls. This year’s edition, spread across 60 to 70 venues across Kerala, brought in around 3,000 participants. Approximately 2,500 of them wrote their first line of code that night.
Getting hundreds of volunteers and mentors to travel to colleges on a Friday evening and stay awake through the night helping young women build for the first time was, against all odds, not the hard part. Mehar posted on Instagram stories and people came.
“We easily got a couple of hundred people,” he said. “So I think we were able to build that community.”
This weekend, 500 of those girls are coming to Kochi for a follow-up conference.
Tinker Space: A Public Library for Hackers
In Kochi, TinkerHub runs Tinker Space, an open, 24/7 community space that Mehar describes as a public library, but for makers. On any given day, 100 to 150 people pass through, working on personal projects or collaborating on experiments that don’t fit neatly into any existing category.
Recently, a Texas Instruments engineer visiting from Bangalore took a group of ten to twenty young makers on a night walk, asking them to document what they saw and create art from it. One participant, a self-described “pure hacker” with no prior interest in art, noticed the light pollution blurring the night sky. He built a system where a camera measured light intensity in real time and visualised how many stars were theoretically visible above the city’s glow.
That’s the intersection TinkerHub is chasing: not just technology for technology’s sake, but technology as a lens through which everything else becomes more interesting.
Tinker Space recently hosted a five-day session with Agami, an organisation working on justice innovation, bringing together judges, IAS and IPS officers, and TinkerHub’s young community to explore how AI could transform the justice system.
The Hardest Year
None of this came without cost.
When Mehar eventually left his job at Startup Mission to commit to TinkerHub full-time, the next year and a half was, by his own account, the hardest period of his life.
“Poverty is the uncertainty about the next meal,” he says, without drama. “It might come in the next two hours. It might not come in the next two days. You don’t know.”
What got him through was the community he had spent years building. Friends offered to cover meals. A close friend told him flatly: “It would be a shame on all of us if you’re quitting this because you can’t make fifty thousand a month. We’ll figure out something.”
Eventually, the thesis was held. If you generate enough value, some of it comes back. Today, around 50 to 60 people contribute financially to keep Tinker Space running every month, not through grants or government funding, but through people who passed through the community and wanted to pay it forward.
Social Innovation
Mehar is precise about this distinction. TinkerHub is not a charity. It doesn’t go to communities to help them and then leave.
“Social innovation is trying to figure out a problem. It’s not like there are some people you are trying to help,” he told The Logical Indian. “The basic question is: what is the kind of world you want to live in, and what are you going to do about that?”
He’s been reading Moral Ambition, a book that argues that people with rare skills and knowledge have a responsibility to contribute those skills meaningfully, not just donate money to worthy causes, but actually put their expertise to work.
“In an era where knowledge is the core thing, some of us who got that kind of exposure are responsible to contribute cognitively,” he says. “If you really want to build a future, we want your brains.”
“What if I want our kids to learn about self-driving cars, and I want somebody working in that technology to come and take a session, but it’s a for-profit entity and their per-hour rate is two lakh rupees? How many students in India could afford that kind of education?”
The Future He’s Building
TinkerHub is growing in ways Mehar never quite planned for. He was in Bangalore last week, helping set up a hacker space at the Visvesvaraya Technology Museum. Ashoka University in Sonipat has started exploring partnerships with TinkerHub to explore how community-led learning cultures are built. A workbook is almost ready for anyone, anywhere, who wants to create a community space tailored to their own context. Even Bihar’s government is visiting next week, hoping to replicate what Mehar has built in Kerala.
“The best hope was like, we have all this knowledge. Somebody from that community needs to do something and come to us for whatever experience we have,” he says. He wants the model to spread, but he’s clear-eyed that the spread has to come from within communities, not from TinkerHub parachuting in.
For now, he stays in Kochi. Deliberately.
“There are a lot of people asking, why can’t you go and do it in Bangalore? In that case, going and doing it in Silicon Valley might be easiest. Everyone understands that. They’re happy to put money in. But then who is going to do it in Kochi?”
Someone has to build the future they want to live in. Mehar decided it was going to be him.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
Mehar’s story is not one of overnight success or born genius. It is one of curiosity compounded over years, of community built one conversation at a time, and of a quiet but firm conviction that the future belongs to those willing to build it. In a country where access to opportunity remains deeply unequal, TinkerHub is proof that the right culture, in the right room, can change the trajectory of a life.
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