The Story
A Different Version of Myself
In July 2017, at forty-five, I bought a Rubik’s Cube for less than four hundred rupees at a bookshop counter in Mumbai’s airport, while waiting out a delayed flight. I did not know it yet, but I was not just boarding a plane. I was taking off toward an entirely different version of myself.
The Cube at the Airport
By 2017 I was twenty-three years into a career in media sales, and reading, then yoga, had spent the two years before that quietly clearing some space in me I didn’t have a name for yet. None of that explains why a cube sitting between a rack of bookmarks and a pen stand, not even displayed prominently, was the thing I picked up that day instead of the business book I’d been holding. It just was.
Nobody announces destiny. It does not arrive with fanfare or ceremony. It sits on a counter. Between a rack of bookmarks and a pen stand. And it waits for you to be bored enough, curious enough, or brave enough to pick it up.
One Turn at a Time
Teaching Myself
There was no course for this, no teacher. I learned to solve that first cube from YouTube tutorials and algorithm sheets, the same way I’d later teach myself everything else this practice needed. Solving it the first time is still one of the clearest memories I have.
I can do this. And if I can do this, what else can I do?
One Turn at a Time
The standard cube stopped being enough almost immediately. A Mastermorphix, my first shape-shifting puzzle, changed its entire geometry with every move, so there was no longer a stable shape to check my progress against. A Ghost Cube went further still: no colour at all, every sticker identical, and a shape-shifter on top of that, no colour cues and no stable shape to hold onto, just the mechanism itself. It took three days to solve. Three days I didn’t want to stop trying.
From Solver to Designer
In 2020 I came across hand-designed, 3D-printed puzzles for the first time and knew immediately I wanted to make my own, not just solve what already existed. There was a real problem in the way: I didn’t know CAD, and in-person classes weren’t an option that year. So I taught myself SolidWorks from a stranger’s YouTube channel instead, the same way I’d taught myself to solve that first cube.
YouTube was the university. Persistence was the degree.
One Turn at a Time
My first 3D printer arrived in October 2021. Every design since has had to clear the same three bars: playable, smooth, and elegant. Function, mechanism, and appearance, in that order, none of them optional.
A solver learns to work within the mechanism. A designer questions the mechanism itself. A solver asks: how do I get from scrambled to solved? A designer asks: what would happen if the mechanism moved differently?
One Turn at a Time
The Museum, and the World
Not every design I’ve submitted to the Twisty Puzzle Museum has been accepted, some were turned down because the exact mechanism had already been done before, and every rejection pushed me to design something that hadn’t been imagined yet. My first sale followed in August 2022, and the collectors and designers I’ve met since, across India and abroad, turned a solitary hobby into a genuine community.
Each rejection meant I needed to think differently, go further, design something that had genuinely not been imagined before. In a strange way, the rejections made me a better designer.
One Turn at a Time
Not every encounter with the wider puzzle world has been friendly. One of my original designs was copied by a manufacturer without permission. I refused to sell them the rights.
I can give you a licence. But I will not sell the rights. The design is mine. It will remain mine.
One Turn at a Time
A better kind of partnership came later: in 2025, one of my original designs, Manish Hexacopter, went into licensed mass production and is now sold in more than eighteen countries, under its own name, still credited as mine. A second design, the Manish Cubo-copter Plus, followed in June 2026, also mass-produced by Calvin’s Puzzles and now sold worldwide.
Where It Stands Now
More than 150 twisty puzzle designs and counting, 99 of them currently listed in the Twisty Puzzle Museum. None of it happened alone. My wife, Bhavini, has been my most trusted colour consultant on every new design, and has never once complained about a living room full of 3d printed parts and tangled filament.
Cubing is no longer your passion. It has become your obsession.
Bhavini Rathod, quoted in One Turn at a Time
My daughter, Rutvi, is the reason any of this happened at all — the self-help book that started clearing space in me back in 2015 was her recommendation.
The full account of all of it, thirty years in media sales, a ₹400 cube, teaching myself CAD in a pandemic, the museum, the community, the setbacks, is written out in far more detail than a website page allows, in my book, One Turn at a Time, published in 2026.
You don’t solve life by rushing. You solve it one turn at a time.
One Turn at a Time