'What's next?': How a 16-year-old brain tumour survivor found his world in code

A brain tumour took Manohar away from school. A laptop bought during his recovery introduced him to coding. Years later, the 16-year-old is building platforms of his own. All this, while thinking about and planning how technology can make learning and opportunity more accessible.

At 16, Manohar already had to think about things most teenagers never encounter.

His journey began in Class 7, when headaches and double vision led his family to seek medical help. His left eye also began changing position. After scans and hospital visits, including at Karimnagar Civil Hospital and NIMS, he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. His treatment eventually involved three surgeries, four cycles of chemotherapy and 17 days of radiation over two years.

The illness disrupted his education, but his recovery gave him time to discover coding. His father bought him a laptop during that period, and what began as something to do while he was away from school soon became an intense interest in technology.

“I started website building. Then I did app building, dashboard designing, AI agent building and social agents,” he says. He says he has built thousands of websites and wants to become a professional in every skill he learns.

Now in Class 11, studying CEC, Manohar says he wants to pursue BPA next. He taught himself coding and says he has built thousands of websites. For him, however, coding is not simply a skill to earn a living, but a way of solving problems and a relentless exercise in learning. He describes himself as someone who wants to become a professional in whatever he learns. His motivation, he says, was not simply to distract himself from illness.

“I didn’t learn all this just to escape from something. It became, ‘What’s next? What’s next? Can we do it even better?’” he says.

That mindset has led to two ideas he is particularly focused on building ClickBook and M-Glad.

ClickBook is his vision of a learning and skills platform. It is a tutoring website that offers tutoring services for 5th to 10th grade students in very easy and informative formats. He wants it to go beyond conventional academics, allowing people to learn everything from website development and app building to logo designing and other skills, using AI powered educational assistant. His idea is that a person should be able to build a useful skillset regardless of where they begin.

He also wants learning to be affordable. Manohar speaks of bringing a professional tuition service that could cost around ₹55,000 down to less than ₹1,000.

M-Glad is based on a different gap he believes he has identified: opportunity. He imagines it as a platform connecting job seekers, enterprises, investors, startup founders, contractors and others. But unlike conventional social media, Manohar insists that there should be little room for distraction.

No jokes. No random quotes. No dancing videos. No unnecessary conversations. If someone posts, he says, it should be something useful, be it a job opportunity, a tender, an investment opportunity, a business requirement, a résumé or a portfolio. He says irrelevant content will be removed because even the platform's storage should be used for something meaningful. He is handling the work himself, with his father providing financial support whenever required.

Even the names have personal meaning. M-Glad, he explains, comes from the idea of being fortunate or lucky. ClickBook combines the digital, with “book” at "one click".

For Manohar, however, these platforms are not simply technology projects. They are attempts to address what he sees as a larger problem: people may have skills, products or ideas, but lack the opportunity to reach the right person. He wants opportunities to be based on skill and hard work rather than money, background or influence.

His ambitions are strikingly large for someone who is still in school. But perhaps the best description of how he sees himself came when he was asked what he wanted to become.

“I don’t want to be like a leaf on a tree; I want to be like a flower.”

He explains the analogy very simply. A tree has many leaves, but he wants to stand out, become successful and become someone who can make a difference.

His father, who works in motor winding and farming, and his mother, a homemaker, have supported him through the journey. His father not only stood by him during treatment but bought him the laptop that became the starting point for his second life  one built around code.

Manohar knows that his ideas may take time. He has already approached institutions, including government schools, about making ClickBook available to students, and says he remains willing to provide it if an opportunity arises.

For now, he is still learning, building and testing.

And every time he finishes one thing, he seems to return to the same question that began it all: What’s next?