Poems I've written, books I'm reading, and ideas I can't stop turning over. Engineering is how I make things. This is how I make sense of them.
Poems
01
Memory · Childhood · Identity
chinni ki dahi
They lined us up like we were already sorted,
small feet, pressed shirts, the world not yet a blade,
then the teacher's voice, and I felt the room decide me,
felt the air go out, felt something in me fade...
02
Home · Delhi · Roots
where i am from
I am from fireflies,
from ancestral hymns and
love.
I am from the place I still
call home
even in my dreams...
Currently Reading & Thinking About
Deep Dive
The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus
The essay on philosophical suicide hit me differently than Camus intended. I have a different stand — one that diverges sharply from his conclusion.
I think philosophical suicide is worse than physical death. Death, even in its cowardice, leaves remembrance — a trace that someone was once awake and questioning. But to surrender the will to question, to take that leap of faith away from absurdity, is the ultimate act of cowardice: it takes even the remembrance. The person who kills themselves philosophically has erased the proof that they ever truly lived.
Camus argues for revolt against absurdity. I'd argue that philosophical surrender is a more complete defeat — because at least the cowardice of real death still leaves a ghost.
🔭
For the Love of Physics
Walter Lewin
What I loved: he doesn't bury you in maths. He shows you that physics is just looking at the world honestly and asking obvious questions without embarrassment. It's about the love of the subject — and that you can learn any subject by treating it as simple, beautiful logic.
🚀
Ignited Minds: Unleashing the Power Within India
APJ Abdul Kalam
Learning how to fly — in every sense of the word. A reminder that vision at scale is possible, and that the people who change the world are usually the ones who refuse to stop asking what it could become.
✈️
Learning How to Fly
APJ Abdul Kalam
A different kind of flight — inward as much as upward.
My Ideal
Richard Feynman
Feynman is everything I aspire to be: Nobel Prize in Physics, made ideas feel like play, and spent a life proving that curiosity beats credential. The man learned safe-cracking, played bongo drums, drew, painted, and then went home and solved quantum electrodynamics.
He's also — reportedly — one of the lowest IQ Nobel laureates in history, which I find both extraordinarily comforting and absolutely hilarious. The implication being: the smartest thing you can do is not worry about being smart.
If he won a Nobel at his IQ, I feel reasonably assured I can do anything I set my mind to. Statistically speaking.
"I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there."
Things I Think About
⚙️
Systems & Scale
Everything is a system. The best engineering problems and the best human problems have the same structure: constraints, feedback loops, and the search for elegant solutions.
🪞
Identity & Belonging
Growing up between Delhi and Melbourne teaches you that belonging is something you build, not find. The in-between is where the most interesting people live.
🌏
Policy & People
The gap between what we know about inequality and what actually changes it is enormous. Irada is my attempt to build a bridge across that gap — starting with women's empowerment.
📖
Absurdity & Action
Camus was onto something. The world doesn't owe meaning. But I think the response to that isn't revolt — it's creation. You make meaning. You build things. You refuse to go quiet.
🔬
Physics as a Way of Seeing
The best thing about engineering isn't solving problems. It's developing a way of looking at the world where everything is interesting — every crack in the pavement, every shadow, every sound.
✍️
Writing as Survival
I didn't choose to write poetry. It chose me. It's what happens when feelings have nowhere else to go — when the engineering mind needs somewhere to put what the equations can't hold.
They lined us up like we were already sorted,
small feet, pressed shirts, the world not yet a blade,
then the teacher's voice, and I felt the room decide me,
felt the air go out, felt something in me fade.
I clowned and begged and gave until I emptied,
fed myself to mouths that never once said stay,
broke open on the gates I thought would love me,
and learned to haunt the edges of my own day.
There was a boy being torn apart in public
and I was brightest, I could have stayed still,
but I knew that sound, the silence after laughter,
the red-eared shame that time alone can't fill.
So I handed him the question with the answer,
watched something in his chest unknot and breathe,
and I wept inside for both of us that moment,
for everything the world had made us need.
But I remember too a swing in golden nothing,
mango-sticky hands, a sky with room to spare,
my grandmother's village holding still around me
like the world had briefly learned to just be there.
No eyes that needed proof, no voice that measured,
just a boy dissolving sweetly into sun,
before the classrooms taught him he was lacking,
before the losing had so much begun.
I have been late to every good thing in my life.
I have promised change in rooms where no one heard.
I have watched my father's face move through its seasons
and swallowed down the ones that left a bruise.
But I am still here, scraped, uneven, stubborn,
still wanting, which I've learned is not a flaw.
So I will ask for sweetness without apology,
without performance, bargain, proof, or war,
chinni ki dahi,
not because I've earned it.
Because I want it.
Because I always did.
Poem · Home · Delhi · Roots
where i am from
I am from fireflies,
from ancestral hymns and
love.
I am from the place I still
call home
even in my dreams,
where the air smells like my
grandmother.
I am from sugarcane,
from sweetness that stays on
the tongue.
I am from risk-takers and
devoted lovers,
from a clan that remembers
warriors.
I am from "you should
study"
and "you should go out."
I am from monkey-man
worshippers,
the god my mother loves.
I am from Delhi,
from potato and chutney,
from Diwali firecrackers
and the silence after.
I am from my grandfather's
warmth,
from midnight chai,
from photos of us
in my sister's phone.