Pick your pursuit. Bring your buddies. Ride the road.
Your journey. Your people. Your files. Mahanu is a home for builders and learners — friends, families, and small circles turning an idea into real work, getting genuinely better in their own pursuits of truth and beauty, and owning every byte of it.
free and open source · your files stay private, always · no feeds, no ads, no likesA project of your own — not a feed
Yours, forever
your project lives as open-format files on your own disk
Start in the app and your files are on your disk from the first save — storing on our servers is opt-in, for backup, sync, publishing. Every note and image is an open-format file any computer can read, yours to keep even if you delete Mahanu.
Edit live, together
edit with your circle at the same time — it just merges
No conflicted copies and no final_v2_FINAL. Everyone's change lands on everyone's device, even after being offline.
Nothing lost
every version of everything, remembered
See who changed what, revisit any earlier day, and restore anything. A restore is just another entry in the story.
Safe by design
no likes, no followers, invite-only inside
Only a project's card is public. Everything else — whether it sits on your disk or our server — is always private, the team's alone.
Live — running today
India's Education Reform Commons
a few parents' shared notebook on India's education reforms
Ideas, experiences, and objections arrive by form, GitHub, or email — collated here, checked against sources, polished, and kept up to date.
visit project →Mahanu and the Entropy Warriors
Everything starts with a small question
Story form of the motivation and philosophy for starting a project in Mahanu.
visit project →My First Video Game
ten years old, one finished game
A ten-year-old builds and finishes their first real video game — designed, vibe-coded with an AI helper, playtested and shipped — learning that an idea in your head can become something other people actually play.
visit project →Proposed — under review & platform empowerment
Badminton for Life
the rally that never ends
Make badminton a lifelong fitness habit and get properly good at it — regular games, footwork and strokes trained on purpose, playable at any age.
visit project →Balcony Birding
a life list from one window
Learn the birds around the house — calls before colors, seasons and visitors, a proper life list built from the balcony and morning walks, one confirmed species at a time.
visit project →Basketball, All In
as far as practice can take me
Find out how good I can actually get at basketball — fundamentals drilled, games played, and progress measured honestly against last month's self.
visit project →Board Games Night
a monthly night that actually happens
Keep a monthly board-games night alive and good — hosts and games rotate, one new game gets taught each month, and a running scoreboard nobody takes too seriously.
visit project →Boards & Balance
skateboard, waveboard, upright
Learn skateboarding and waveboarding from zero — balance drills, safe falls, first real rides — with protective gear as rule one.
visit project →Breathing Easy
allergies and asthma, managed
Manage childhood allergies and asthma calmly and well — triggers mapped, medicines and action plans kept current, seasons anticipated — so breathing trouble stays an event, never an identity.
visit project →Car for the Ghats
the machine earns the mountain
Keep the car honestly ready for Western Ghats off-roading — a maintenance schedule that's actually followed, the right upgrades, pre-trip inspection checklists, and a log of what each trail taught us.
visit project →Carnatic Junior Exam
ready when the examiner says begin
Prepare for the Carnatic junior grade exam — cover the syllabus piece by piece, keep a daily practice log with recordings, and rehearse under exam conditions before the real day.
visit project →Carnatic Senior Exam
the senior grade is a different animal
Prepare for the Carnatic senior grade exam — heavier repertoire, deeper theory, and the stamina to hold quality across a long syllabus, with weekly recordings telling the truth.
visit project →Carnatic Singing — Practice
One learner, one raga at a time.
A solo practice project: daily log, recordings to hear my own progress, and collected lessons — a project of one, with room for a teacher later.
visit project →Chess at Home
parent versus kids; may the better plan win
The family getting better at chess together — daily puzzles, one opening each, a house ladder on the fridge, and learning to lose a won game gracefully.
visit project →Choosing a Major
pick the field with reasons attached
Decide what to study by testing it — read about each candidate field, talk to people who work in it, try a small project in it — and choose with evidence instead of vibes.
visit project →Coins, With Stories
small change, long histories
Preserve the coin collection properly and tell the story behind every piece — the era, the journey, the reason it stayed — so it can be shown and understood, not just stored.
visit project →College Search
find the reachable colleges and the road in
Work out which colleges are genuinely reachable, what each one requires, and turn the gap between here and there into a prep plan with dates on it.
visit project →Democracy, Examined
how self-rule actually worked
Understand humanity's experiments in democracy — what worked, what failed, and the current state of representative and direct forms — well enough to reason out what would work if a new order were set up from scratch, say on Mars.
visit project →Drawing, Illustration & Comics
Draw every day; keep the evidence.
A solo art-practice project: daily pages, studies of artists I admire, and finished pieces — with the whole messy trail kept, because progress you can see is the best teacher.
visit project →Everyone Ready
the skills that save a life, spread wide
Learn the life-saving basics — first aid and CPR, fire safety, flood and snake-bite response — and then teach them outward through home, work, school, and the neighbourhood, so that when seconds count, someone nearby always knows what to do.
visit project →First 10K
from the couch to a timed finish line
Train from not-running to a first timed 10K without getting hurt — a sane plan, easy-pace discipline, shoes that fit, and a race picked in advance so the date does the motivating.
visit project →Fit at 80
trek-ready now, spry at eighty
The two of us training together at home — strength, mobility, and diet on a schedule that survives school pickups — to stay trek-ready and grandkid-ready into our eighties, with old knees respected rather than ignored.
visit project →Fit Past 75
strength and sharpness, gently
Help parents past seventy-five stay physically and mentally fit — daily walks and balance work, light strength, puzzles and games and real conversation, checkups tracked — done with them, not to them.
visit project →Freestyle Feet
zumba, shuffle, zero stage fright
Learn to move on impulse — zumba grooves picked up on the fly and shuffle steps drilled until they are reflex — dancing for joy, not for an audience.
visit project →Garage Band
A band that actually practices.
Get good enough together to play a real show: shared practice schedule with RSVPs, setlists, lyrics, and our recordings — one place the whole band owns.
visit project →Getting Relativity
Einstein, intuition first
Genuinely understand special and general relativity — intuition built first, then the math that makes it precise — until spacetime diagrams and curved geometry feel earned rather than memorized.
visit project →Grade 8, For Real
marks as a side effect of understanding
Ace CBSE grade 8 by actually understanding it — kitchen-table experiments, camps, the good corners of YouTube, Brilliant — so the fun does the memorizing.
visit project →Grandpa at Ninety-Five
care with dignity, shared
Look after a ninety-five-year-old grandfather well — medicines, doctors, daily comfort, and real company — organized so the care is shared, nothing depends on one person's memory, and his dignity leads every decision.
visit project →Hands-On Science
see it work, then build it
Understand how things actually work — engineering and experiment videos watched together, the safe ones recreated at home, and a build log of what we tried, what surprised us, and why.
visit project →Holiday Home in the Ghats
learn to build a house by building one
Get from plot to livable holiday home in the Western Ghats — land and permissions, architects and contractors, monsoon-proof construction, and a budget that stays honest the whole way.
visit project →Home Cooking
weeknight dinners, learned properly
Learn to cook — technique from the channels we trust, a rotation of healthy Indian dinners, and the recipe backlog finally cooked through, one real dish at a time.
visit project →Illustrated Books
books, from manuscript to bookshelf
Manage our next illustrated books as mahanu projects — manuscript, illustration, editing, print, and release — with each book running as its own sub-project under this card.
visit project →In Touch
friendships maintained on purpose
Keep real friendships alive deliberately — a gentle rhythm of calls, meetups, and remembering what matters to whom — because staying close is a practice, not an accident.
visit project →Inbox Triage
inbox in, the right projects out
Get good at keeping the vault fed and orderly — a repeatable drill for turning whatever lands in the inbox (takeout exports, saved pages, clippings, idea lists) into well-placed project material, with small single-purpose tools for the mechanical steps and documented skills for the judgment, so any member or assistant runs it the same way each time.
visit project →India at the Olympics
a nation's medals, followed properly
Follow India's Olympic journey — Games by Games, sport by sport — the medals and the near-misses, the athletes and the systems that made or failed them — understood with real depth instead of once-every-four-years headlines.
visit project →Indoor Plants
learn what each plant is actually asking for
Get better at keeping houseplants alive and thriving — reading light and water, soil and repotting, catching pests early — with a care log per plant instead of guesswork.
visit project →Investing Beyond India
cross-border investing, actually understood
Learn how investing outside India really works — brokers and platforms, moving money out and bringing it back, and the compliance that follows (Schedule FA, taxes) — research collected and compared, our own decisions recorded with reasons.
visit project →Kannada Sahitya
the canon, collected and sung
Collect and study the best of Kannada literature — Basavanna and the 12th-century sharana vachanas, the dasa sahitya of Purandaradasa and Kanakadasa with its music, Mankutimmana Kagga, and the modern masters — lyrics, recordings, and interviews gathered in one place.
visit project →Karnataka by Road
the home state, one drive at a time
See Karnataka by road — plan the loops, drive them, and log every trip with routes, stays, and what was worth the kilometres.
visit project →Karnataka on Foot
every trail, eventually
Trek Karnataka end to end — tick off its trails season by season, and write up the treks already done, so the record grows at both ends.
visit project →Keyboard to Guitar
ten fingers, six strings, theory already paid for
A keyboard player learning guitar — lean on what transfers (theory, ears, rhythm), respect what doesn't (everything the hands do), and get from first chords to whole songs.
visit project →Learn Crochet
one hook, endless loops
Learn crochet from the first slip knot — the core stitches, reading a pattern, and finishing real pieces — building from a wobbly dishcloth to something worth gifting, one small project at a time.
visit project →Life on Earth
the living world, watched closely
Learn the living world together — biology, natural history, the human body, and earth science — through a curated library and field notes from balcony, garden, and pond.
visit project →Managing the FIRE Money
the corpus has one job — outlast us
Manage the money behind financial independence deliberately — asset allocation, a safe withdrawal plan, the cash buffer, and the discipline to leave it alone — so that early retirement stays retired through good markets and bad.
visit project →Math by Card Tricks
a deck of cards is a back door into math
A parent making math likable for the kids — learn a trick, perform it, then discover together the math that makes it work, one trick at a time.
visit project →Monsoon Ready
house and car, rain-proofed on time
Get the household through every monsoon on purpose instead of by surprise — sump and tank checks, leak hunts, rust rounds, and the car's wet-season readiness — run as a checklist before the first cloudburst.
visit project →Music as Code
the score is source code
Learn to make music by programming it — live-coding environments like Strudel and the wider family of music-programming languages — where composing means writing code that sings.
visit project →One Raga, Many Traditions
the same notes, every tradition
Take one raga or scale at a time and follow it across traditions — Carnatic, Hindustani, Western, Arabic and beyond — on voice, piano, guitar, and GeoShred, until the differences and the common ground are truly heard.
visit project →Paid Summer Vacation in Music School
Prep work and research before committing
Answer few questions with evidence — what can I get out of the paid summer program at a music school, the cost, the commitment, what does genuinely prepared look like — then do the preparing.
visit project →Quantum Computing, Ground Up
qubits without hand-waving
Learn quantum computing properly — the linear algebra, the computer science, and the algorithms — built from the math up to Shor and Grover without skipping the hard parts.
visit project →Road to the Olympiad
problem by problem to nationals
Work seriously toward the national rounds of the mathematical olympiad — past problems, technique, and the long patience of proof — measuring progress in problems truly solved.
visit project →Robotics Competition Team
Build season is short. Ship the robot.
A team building a competition robot on a deadline: the build plan, task lists, parts inventory, and what we learn on the way to the regional — owned by the team, not lost when the season ends.
visit project →Running the Dance School
admin done well so teaching gets the attention
Run the dance school better — student batches and progress, sponsor relationships that outlast one event, productions planned early instead of heroically.
visit project →Saved for Later
every "save for later", finally dealt with
Get the family's "save for later" trails out of their silos — watch-lists, wish-lists, to-read shelves, bookmarks — preserve each raw export verbatim, and actually work through the backlog instead of hoarding links. Sorting a fresh export into projects is done with the Inbox Triage drill; this is where the archive and the backlog live.
visit project →Squash for Life
fitness with a scoreboard
Make squash a lifelong fitness habit and get properly good at it — regular court time, technique worked on deliberately, and a body that thanks us at seventy.
visit project →Stamps, With Stories
an album that explains itself
Preserve the stamp collection properly and give every page its story — where each stamp came from and why it mattered — so the album becomes something to show, not just something kept.
visit project →Study Circle — Math & Physics
We work the problems, then argue about them.
A small circle working through math and physics together: shared notes, collected resources, and weekly problem sets we publish so anyone can work along.
visit project →The Bookshop Café
a room for books and coffee
Plan and open a café-bookstore — the concept, the space, the shelves and the menu, the economics — learning what it takes to run a place where people come to read and linger.
visit project →The Childhood Bookshelf
the books that made us
Document the books the family loved as children — which ones, why they mattered, and who should inherit them — before the memories fade past retrieving.
visit project →The City House Notebook
what building it taught us
Write down everything building the city house taught us — what worked, what we would never repeat, which people and materials proved themselves — so the next build starts wiser than the first did.
visit project →The Cold-Water Pond
be the keeper the fish deserve
Learn to look after a cold-water pond properly — water quality, seasonal care, feeding right, spotting illness early — so the fish thrive instead of merely surviving.
visit project →The Fallacy Field Guide
spotting nonsense, starting with our own
Get good at recognizing fallacies, biases, and manufactured nonsense — in our own thinking first, then in the press, the sales pitch, and the speech — with a growing field guide of named patterns and live examples.
visit project →The Family Cookbook
recipes rescued from memory
Cook the family's dishes with the people who still make them from memory — measure the pinches, write down the steps, photograph the result — until the cookbook exists outside anyone's head.
visit project →The Family Songbook
children's songs in five languages
Gather the children's songs of Kannada, Hindi, English, French, and Sanskrit into one songbook the family can actually sing — with ukulele chords or simple notes for every one.
visit project →The Family Wills
the kindest paperwork there is
Make a proper, valid will for every adult in the family — assets and wishes written down, executors and guardians chosen, the documents findable when they're needed — so that a hard day is never made harder by paperwork nobody can locate.
visit project →The First Film
from script to screen, once for real
Make a movie start to finish — script, shoot, edit, release — learning filmmaking by actually finishing one instead of only talking about it.
visit project →The First Novel
blank page to finished manuscript
Write a novel from blank page to finished manuscript — the idea, the outline, the daily words, the revisions — and see it all the way through to done.
visit project →The High Notes
extend the range without breaking it
A singer trained in Carnatic and Western styles extending reliable range upward — technique over force, safe daily practice, and recordings that prove which exercises actually move the ceiling.
visit project →The Home Café
coffee and bakes, house-made
Learn the café's craft at home — brewing coffee more ways than one, and baking the scones, biscuits, cookies, and brookies that belong beside it.
visit project →The Home Studio
idea to finished track, at home
Learn music production — recording, arranging, mixing, and mastering — until a track can go from idea to finished in a home studio.
visit project →The Japan Trip
planned like we mean it
Plan the Japan trip end to end — season and route, rail passes and bookings, a budget that survives contact with Tokyo, and enough Japanese to be polite.
visit project →The Lunchbox Rotation
a month of lunches, none of them dull
Build a rotation of school-lunch recipes worth packing every day — quick in the morning, good cold or from a hot-pack, kid-approved and reasonably healthy — so the daily lunchbox stops being a 7 a.m. scramble.
visit project →The Myopia Watch
young eyes, guarded early
Manage childhood myopia with evidence — outdoor hours, screen rules, regular checkups, and honest notes on what the doctors say versus what the internet claims.
visit project →The Night Sky
astronomy from the balcony
Learn the night sky from home — what's overhead this month, spaceflight worth following, and eventually a small telescope chosen with reasons — observation notes over headlines.
visit project →The Photo Archive
thirty years of photos, findable
Digitize, dedupe, date, and caption decades of family photos into one archive with real backups — so the pictures outlive the shoeboxes, the phones, and the drives.
visit project →The Piano Path
as far as the keys go
Take piano as far as deliberate practice allows — technique, repertoire, and theory on a steady schedule, with recordings marking the distance covered.
visit project →The Players We Forgot
what became of the taluk champions
Trace what happened to India's taluk, district, and state-level athletes of the last fifty years — where the talent went when the medals stopped, what the system gave them and what it didn't — a documented answer to a question almost nobody asks.
visit project →The Poetry Room
verses worth living with
Read and savour poetry across our languages — the romantic verse of Sanskrit and Kannada, the philosophical poems and songs of Hindi and Kannada — collected with translations and the reason each one stays.
visit project →The Restaurant
from kitchen dream to open doors
Work out what it takes to open a restaurant — concept, menu, kitchen, costs, and service — and learn the business by planning it for real.
visit project →The Small EV Decision
one city car, chosen with evidence
Choose the family's next small city EV properly — shortlist the real contenders, test-drive them, tally running costs, charging, and service honestly — and record why the winner won.
visit project →The Subhashita Shelf
wisdom verses, no doctrine required
Collect the Sanskrit sayings that stand on plain human wisdom rather than faith — subhashitas gathered, translated, and organized so the best of them are always at hand.
visit project →The Third Racquet
squash, badminton… now tennis
Add tennis to a life that already plays squash and badminton — learn what transfers, unlearn what doesn't, and earn real rallies on the big court.
visit project →The Western Voice
trained, not just sung
Train western vocals seriously — technique, ear, and repertoire — and find out how far this voice can go in that idiom.
visit project →The Wisdom Shelf
the best of every tradition
Get familiar with the world's philosophies — Greek, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, ancient and modern — and collect the wisdom that survives contact with real life.
visit project →Thinking in Algorithms
problems, decomposed
Learn computational thinking as a life skill — breaking problems into parts, attacking each systematically, and knowing the classic algorithms well enough to reach for them by instinct.
visit project →Twisted Tongues
five languages, tied in knots
Collect and master tongue twisters and twister songs across Kannada, Hindi, English, French, and Sanskrit — for diction, for language love, and for the laughing fits.
visit project →Two Wheels at Eight
one kid, one bicycle, zero stabilisers
Get an eight-year-old riding a bicycle confidently and safely — balance first, pedals second, road sense always — and celebrate properly the day the wobble disappears.
visit project →Under the Microscope
the small world, catalogued
Document and learn from our own microscope images — catalogue them, identify what's in them, and build the understanding to read the small world with a real eye.
visit project →Guides for people using Mahanu
One page of short answers — what you own, how projects stay safe, and why Mahanu is built this way — each linking to the full guide.
Read the FAQ →Legal & trust documents
The hosted service's terms, privacy commitments, and safety policies — published like everything else. Every document is listed on one page.
Read the documents →
Mahanu
