Hi everyone, it’s been a while before I dive into my small observation for the day.

I have realized one thing, people hate people being themselves. That’s the general answer, and one of the happiest people you know is probably someone who accepts the way people are without prejudice.

You need to open your arms before you think, oh, can this person even fit here. Maybe they feel the same way, and they can open their arms for you too, and hold you tight together. Sometimes, in the moment you disqualify someone already, you lose the chance of having a charismatic human in your life.

When you’re a big girl sitting in your corporate chamber, you do miss those folks who used to just be themselves and kind to everyone. They overshared their life with you, even told you about their favorite pickle. Them being themselves is what lets you keep them in your mind in a different place, and they hit your head in an uncanny moment that makes you feel like woah, they were unique and weird.

The whole point of life is to be weird and open. You will miss all the moments like water in the rain when you succumb to the sheet in front of you, when you could always choose to puddle in the mud and be happy instead. Caring about your clothes even before you jump is foresight, hardly something worth overthinking.

Coming to the point.

I saw a tweet today, and this person, I forgot the username since I was scrolling twt early in the morning. It went something like:

haha i understand why we have editors, because i have seen how normal people write

The comments were filled with things like:

i asked this lady, are you a writer, and she replied, yes i am, but guess what, she was writing on substack

and plenty of other mean, degrading comments like that. If I were a teenager now, I might have liked the way people stay mean, because there’s a pleasure in putting other people down, since you might appear cool by calling someone out, because that’s how you see it in the films. You need to call someone out in the crowd who’s busy doing their own stuff, and you just point them out enjoying their weird, cute little space. I’ve been on both sides, and now I feel all this comes from someone who’s neither an editor nor a writer, just a mere human performing for the sake of mean culture.

Which reminds me of something I’ve been liking for the past two days, Niu Lai, this Chinese film made by two people, director Xin Yumeng and his mother, Sun Lifang, who also wrote and sang the theme song herself, raw and unedited. People called it worse than AI, but really it’s crossing box office numbers, and their handmade poster is making just as much headline noise as the film itself.

Now for sure, there would have been so many people telling them, or the team, this isn’t a real movie, or something along those lines, but he did it anyway, without punching his head against the wall or thinking too much about perfection, and they just put out this beautiful, weird, chaotic mess that I really adore.

It’s like a childlike drawing by a human who never learned to draw, and that gives me hope to make something myself too.

So for anything you really want to experience, you don’t need an editor. You can always just do it, and learn in the process. The process is the real life, the rest is just outcome, and I think even before the outcome arrives, you should just leave and move on to the next adventure.

Because sometimes you need to express yourself raw and real, that’s what makes you human. That’s how I’ll remember your favorite dish, your pickle, even your favorite color.

I need the real, true distinction in you. Which reminds me, I promised my friends something, but I’ve been busy studying and trying to land the next big girl job (SWE), so I’ll surely do it after getting the job, because I just love my people. I wouldn’t be me if there weren’t so many different people around me being themselves. I hate the days my friends have their bad days, even someone who stays in Dubai or Hong Kong or Seattle. They light up my mood, even just by reacting to my text or anything. That makes me feel like yes, we are in a safe space.

People have cute faces, and the best part is how they smile. When I was a bully, I used to avoid noticing these things publicly, just to stay this mean little human, but now I’m like, wow, they are beautiful people.

And they don’t need to edit, regulate, or change themselves.

So you don’t need an editor in the process, in the process of becoming, experiencing yourself.

Save those big words for when you go publish something, or when something happens that feels like a crazy crossover.

Till then, be yourself.

Take care.

Love you, Gauri.

And in the end, don’t yuck someone’s yum.

It’s nothing horrible, to be honest, just a lot of questions about adulting. How do I take a decision when I am somewhere questioning my own fate. I end up comparing myself to people near me. Yesterday I was 23 and I am gonna be 26 this year and I feel like I never acted my age, always dreamt of having a future but somewhere I was there in the moment, naively figuring out life. But this year, when I turn 26, I feel a bit of panic, that I am not there where other people are, maybe where they are at 22. I am not there where people are at 24. I wasted my time, not building a serious career, and then I compare those versions with myself.

I self evaluate myself so much that I start comparing myself to everyone in the lane present. They chose different paths, yet I am beginning to let their thoughts conquer me. I feel rigid in how I think and I hate my own self.

I have love for everything I do but I feel I don’t love my own kind. I have done things differently but nothing in combination feels celebrated like theirs.

People say comparison is the thief of joy, well I feel its self awareness, and you compare your whole life anyway. One compares, then moves.

I have so many ideas but the execution is far far far away because of many factors, emotionally and strategically. It’s like fighting against our own kind. It’s like Franz realising there’s no door or body left to wake up for. I know it all sounds depressing but it is the truth.

The self conscious, too little to see yourself, is like your dying identity in your own pool of waste.

And then I think, if I was a day, I would be Thursday. Because I love Thursdays. If somebody asks me which day you wanna take a leave, Thursday. Which day are you so productive, Thursday. Which day you feel like writing, Thursday. Which day is best for living, Thursday. Which day were you born, Sunday, but which day feels like your Thursday.

Thursday is who I am. I will never be an optimal weekend, neither a blue or productive Monday, I am like the day I love.
I am the most creative edge existing in the middle and therefore I choose everything. I
encapsulated everything that exists with it.

I wanna be a writer, yes.
I wanna write for env, earth, birds and bugs, yes.
I wanna use code as my instrument, yes.
I wanna learn design, yes.
I will spend my whole life learning, yes.

But when this is all yes, then why are you afraid, kid, to not be figuring it out everyday, why do you want the ultimate when its clear in your head.

Life is like a sudden headache and then feeling that headache for the rest of your life, because that reminds you how worse it can be with other illness, but guess what, you just got a headache. I have no means to end this. But I love Thursday.

And therefore, if there’s a day I purpose for myself, it’s Thursday. A day of longing and belonging. A day maybe I will evaporate. The day I will feel like dying. The day I am resting and not sulking. The day I don’t judge myself on the basis. It’s like something I can’t design, I draw and I don’t know how to draw so I try. I try hard enough to be there.

Ahh yess This is the life update, signing off.

Love, Gauri.
Love you all. Kisses for you all, muaah.

There are two things above I want to mention.

• When you force something, the emotion you carry when you are forcing it disappears, and all the receiver understands is the force, which is such a gleaming obstacle.

• You can’t win if your mind and body aren’t aligned.

I am writing this from the corner of my heart, the phase I have been through. I think I can say I was depressed for the last 2.5 to 3 years, and it really shakens you. The first time I noticed this phenomenon in my body, I was standing and I just can not move. It’s like when you are asleep but you can not wake up yet, and you know the dream is over. When you are right yet can’t prove it, because you are not as powerful as your opponent, so you gulp your saliva inside you and keep that as a knot of yes, this happened, and I know from now on. [the accident and recovery phase]

The moment I start to feel bad, my teeth feel like they’re falling, my skin color drops, and it’s a visible change, anyone in my family can tell. It’s weird, yet it happens.

I remember I was in 12th standard and, being the topper, I scored 55 at the final exam in mathematics, and my parents aren’t the loving parents when it comes to scores, and the moment you ruin something, that’s literally stamped for the rest of your life. This is the first time my body was registering hatred for itself knowingly, not because others were questioning me, but because I was questioning myself. I was sacrificing my bubbliness bit by bit after knowing that this is really my marks.

This happened for a lot of reasons. My parents were fighting the whole damn time, for a week, my exam was around the corner, and I am the sort of person who can’t focus when their parents are fighting. It may seem to them I am studying, but I was not able to, because the people I love were fighting, and as the eldest daughter, I am not a person who tries to ask for help, because I heard this the whole time and I wore it like a badge, that hey, I am brave, and even I am struggling. I don’t ask for help because I can handle myself. But I couldn’t, and on the result day I realized that I am a failure. Who am I?

This fear led to a point where I just started questioning myself a lot. To this day I sometimes get in a hurry and question myself, that hey, are you worthy enough.

I think the childhood trauma stems in you, and you carry it when you are older. And you need to fix it once, by drowning in it and therapizing your understanding, your becoming, and your next steps.

I also feel sometimes that I hate being in a position where I am sad, because a normal person who doesn’t have anything to associate with this feeling, I feel the distance where I can be sad and find solutions.

The last time I felt my heart struggling and my body numb is just a week ago, and before that, near my accident.

I feel sometimes maybe I have issues, I don’t know what, but why did that happen to me? Why?

Why can’t I be a normal person? I don’t want to show my struggles in public, because the cost wasn’t just the looks, but whatever came after it. And well, it took time. I hate that. I do think positives, but in this case I feel the negatives are burning my head, and I see that in real life. It’s like you say India is progressing and doesn’t have casteism, or we don’t judge people based on their looks, we know the obvious, and being in a position where I see my standing in the obvious hurts me.

I also feel that people get tired of hearing your pain, so sailor, you are your own.

So why was I sad last week?

I was prepping for masters this whole damn time. From October 2024, I am constantly in this process. I prepped for GMAT because that year I wanted to go in for MBA plus something creative in some countries. I got the offers, but I was skeptical. Skipped the year 2025 and took some time, revisited my whole theory, asking myself do I really want to do this. Then I moved to Bangalore, and in this process, being with myself, I realized I just want to create things, and I love visuals and 3D from the beginning of my life, since that maths exam. So I prepped for the year 2026 intake, GRE, and applied to all the MSc programs where I had a creative edge, design blend, and clear motives.

Then I got into Trinity and DCU (Ireland), fully funded via scholarships as well, for that year. I was so happy. I paused making content, left the job, moved back to Gurgaon, my parents’ house. Handled all the paperwork, and then gave IELTS and DET recently, because well, I love to overprepare all the damn time.

So after doing it, I got 7.5 in IELTS and 130+ in DET.

I was happy. I went further in and got all the docs for living expenses and prepped for all the affidavits. In the process, in my head and heart, I was so happy because I can see that happening, my life in a new place and with things I love.

In the meantime, I was handling my father’s situation in the hospital. He got some issue in the ribcage and back. He was supportive till his health didn’t go worse.

Now just a week ago, we had a fight. I cried in the end because I felt everything is working for me, why can’t I go? For them, I can’t, because he wants someone who’s responsible when he is in the hospital and all.

Even I explained how I am helping, but the answer was clear, I was helping him in his daily chores.

So now I am not going, and this is not a normal or neutral feeling. I feel like a loser, and I feel so bad that I don’t have a lot of money saved with me. I moved last year (2025), and living alone is expensive when you do a lot of things.

Then I won’t be able to go because someone is dependent on me. My two years wasted in this.

I replied to the college that hey, I won’t be coming, and so on. I felt everything crashing around me. I am not ready for this.

I wanted to surprise everyone. I was quiet for so long because I wanted to tell my folks, hey, this happened. I was away from screens, not focusing on my other very serious side quest, content, fully.

I am devastated and broken. This is not happening, and I have to stay with family and take care of them. It’s fine, the taking care and all I can do easily, but I won’t be going, and this made my heart silent, and for some time now I don’t want to do anything, I am feeling bad. I am feeling like that kid who didn’t score well for some reason, and I hate that.

All the money in the procedure to apply, select room, deposit, tests, docs, and so many other things is wasted now.

And yes, I am quantifying my value with my effort I put in and its result.

I am feeling bad, and I think it’s gonna stay for a while like that.

I am happy for anyone who will be going. And even if I try to change my mind, my heart, my body stores the pain in different forms, so I just can’t or feel like doing anything.

I am not even scrolling. I am just on the bed lying down and writing.

I feel like a failure, not because this degree would have given me something, but I will be late to experience this. There have been times where I have been late to experience things, and I hated it.

I want to be the go grabber and oh shes so enigmatic.

Fun fact: my father is very athletic. It’s something that came out of thin air, or the pain he’s just resisting, and finally it revealed itself into something big. And being diabetic makes it worse. So, advice: if you feel weird in your body, go for the checkup, don’t think too much, especially if it’s persistent. Don’t feel like it’s okay.

So yes.

And I don’t want to be sad around the folks who are living their life at the best, who have the job and are happy with their partner.

I have to reveal one more thing. I hate that I have to create reels to be something I want, to show my efforts and value via that. I am in a bad mood, so maybe this is what my sense says.

I have been making carousels, the posts that you see now as an 18 year old, and yet I don’t have the numbers. I am okay everyday, but I think when you feel bad, everything that’s bad with you in your head erupts and eats your brain.

The movie recs, the fit inspo, I have been doing since 2018, being a 17.5 year old kid. I started writing on Medium, then switched to Substack. I understand myself isn’t too much out there, but it is. I don’t know, man. I am creating things, I know when we do things we shouldn’t quantify, but you feel it, dude.

Am I doing everything the wrong way? Because guess what, I felt I can be, and people will be attracted, and I will make a cult afterwards.

I don’t have a community, and this year I am gonna be 26. I feel bad, saddest this whole time, and then I scratch the whole damn place, I have gotten injuries because I can see it in me where I was helpless, and I can’t remove a few things.

I can’t go back in time.

This is the most complaining substack I have written, and I hate to admit it. It’s like that.

I will be fine and quieter, and it kinda takes me to all the places. I felt bad.

Also stopped playing badminton.

Don’t worry world, I will be like the others. I feel betrayed in my own skin.

Because even if I deny it, we love the quiet people, in your workplace and everywhere else, and even me on my good day might agree to this. And on a bad day or week, you feel ugly.

That’s all. I hope this time I don’t go into distressing myself too much, but I am just beyond my words and don’t want to talk to anyone.

Not comparing, but the self belief kicks in, and I don’t want this to depress or sadden me over again. But I can’t run away from my tears, as feeling everything is who I become and who I am.

Yet I would love to say, do your thing, and find the time for it. It will get better, maybe I’ll look back on it one day and laugh. I will do better in the future, for sure, but at this very moment my body is trying to remember all the pain and shattering me with it.

But hey stranger, I believe in you, and you should do better too, so I can be proud of you. I believe in you.

Loveya, Gauri

If rivers had kings, much of South Asia had already chosen theirs long before scientists arrived.

Across the Himalayas, the foothills of Nepal, the rivers of Bhutan, and the countless tributaries descending toward the plains, stories circulated about a fish that seemed larger than its surroundings. Fishermen spoke of it with the kind of admiration usually reserved for formidable animals. Temple communities protected it. British anglers crossed continents to pursue it. Naturalists filled notebooks with descriptions of its strength. Generations carried these stories downstream together with the rivers themselves.

The fish moved easily between different worlds. It appeared in temple pools and scientific papers, in folklore and conservation reports, in conversations about luck, abundance, and river health. A villager feeding fish beside a shrine, a biologist collecting genetic samples, and an angler standing waist-deep in a Himalayan current all encounter the same animal and somehow leave with different stories.

The mahseer encourages that tendency. Rivers produced the fish, but rivers alone do not explain its place in memory. Wherever mahseer occur, other stories seem to gather around them.

A Fish Born From Geological Violence

The story begins far beneath the water.

Roughly fifty million years ago, the Indian Plate collided with Eurasia. The impact altered an entire continent. Land folded upward. Valleys opened. The Himalayas emerged. Rivers began carving pathways through landscapes that were still taking shape. Sediment travelled vast distances. Watersheds formed, shifted, and separated. Entire freshwater worlds emerged from geological forces operating far below the surface.

Those rivers became evolutionary laboratories.

A mountain determines where water flows. Water determines where fish can travel. Populations remain connected for thousands of years and then become isolated when a river changes course. Tributaries merge. Valleys separate. Landscapes rearrange themselves. Across immense spans of time, these changes leave traces inside living things.

Many researchers believe the diversification of mahseer species is deeply connected to the formation and rearrangement of Asian river systems. Their evolutionary history follows the geography of the continent with remarkable fidelity. Ancient connections between rivers survive indirectly through genetics, distribution, and behaviour.

A mountain rises. A river shifts. A lineage follows a different path.

The Carp That Followed The Current

One of the first surprises awaiting anyone who studies mahseer is their family tree. The fish belong to the carp family, a lineage more commonly associated with ponds, lakes, and slow-moving waters. The relationship becomes difficult to see once the fish enters a mountain river.

Everything about the mahseer reflects a life spent negotiating movement. The body narrows into a streamlined profile. Large scales protect against abrasive currents and suspended debris. Muscles concentrate around propulsion. The tail becomes an instrument of endurance, capable of driving the fish through water that rarely stops moving.

Early anglers became fascinated by this combination of size and power. Fishing journals from the nineteenth century describe encounters that sometimes lasted hours. Rivers participated in these contests as much as the fish themselves. Current, depth, submerged rocks, and distance all became part of the struggle. Reading these accounts today, one begins to understand why the mahseer acquired such a reputation. Observers repeatedly encountered a fish shaped by forces far larger than itself.

The river remained present in every movement.

Rivers Remember Differently Than We Do

Human memory tends to favour permanence. Rivers encourage a different perspective.

A map suggests stability. A river suggests movement. Channels migrate. Tributaries disappear. Floods create temporary worlds that exist for weeks before vanishing again. Geological time reveals a landscape in constant negotiation with water.

The mahseer experiences that instability across generations. Populations expand when river systems connect and become isolated when barriers emerge. Floods create pathways. Droughts create separation. Entire lineages arise through repeated cycles of contact and isolation unfolding across thousands of years.

A fish swimming through a Himalayan river today carries traces of environments that may no longer exist. Ancient channels, forgotten tributaries, and vanished connections survive indirectly through evolutionary history. The landscape changes. The memory remains. A river remembers through geography and inheritance.

The Fish That Plants Forests

A river and a forest appear, at first glance, to occupy separate worlds. One moves. The other stands rooted in place. The monsoon dissolves that distinction.

As floodwaters rise, rivers enter surrounding forests. Branches extend over newly expanded channels. Fruits fall into the current. Seeds drift through temporary waterways connecting habitats that spend most of the year apart. Water enters the forest. The forest enters the river.

Mahseer participate in this seasonal exchange through their feeding habits. Fruits and seeds form part of their diet in many river systems. Some seeds survive digestion and return to the landscape elsewhere. Ecologists refer to this process as ichthyochory, seed dispersal by fish, a phrase that sounds technical until one pauses to consider the image it describes. The boundaries between ecosystems become harder to draw.

A fish becomes part of a tree’s future. A forest extends its reach through a river.

Temple Pools And Sacred Geography

The fish remained at the centre.

Temple pools appear repeatedly throughout the history of the mahseer. Visitors arrived carrying offerings. Fish gathered near the surface. Children returned years later and found the same pools occupied by even larger fish. Stories accumulated around particular individuals. Certain fish acquired names. Others acquired reputations.

Over time, these places became archives of a different kind. Large breeding adults survived. Generations of fish occupied the same water. Memory persisted there alongside biology. Sacred geography and freshwater ecology became intertwined in ways that neither vocabulary fully captures.

A visitor standing beside such a pool might describe the experience through faith. A biologist might describe it through population dynamics. Both would be looking into the same water.

The Mystery Of The Giants

Historical accounts of mahseer contain a recurring figure: the giant.

Fishing journals describe fish exceeding fifty kilograms. Local stories mention individuals remembered decades after their disappearance. Photographs survive. Measurements survive. So do arguments.

The fascination persists because certainty remains elusive. The historical record contains enough evidence to sustain curiosity and enough ambiguity to sustain debate. Similar descriptions emerge from different rivers, different decades, and different observers. Together they hint at landscapes capable of producing fish larger than those most people encounter today.

The giant mahseer occupies a curious territory between documentation and folklore. Measurements anchor it to history. Stories carry it further downstream.

River communities continue speaking about enormous fish long after the fish themselves have vanished.

A Fish At The Intersection Of Worlds

Few freshwater animals gather so many histories around themselves. The mahseer belongs to mountains through geology, to rivers through migration, to forests through ecology, to temples through culture, and to science through a collection of questions that remain unresolved.

Different observers encounter different aspects of the same fish. A river ecologist sees connectivity. A geneticist sees evolutionary history. A fisherman sees endurance. A temple visitor sees continuity. Each perspective reveals part of the story without exhausting it.

The fish continues moving beneath the surface while these interpretations accumulate above it.

For something that spends its life underwater, the mahseer reveals an extraordinary amount about the landscapes through which it swims.

For further inspiration, you can read/search topics below:

• The Book of the Mahseer

• The Rod in India

• FishBase

• IUCN Red List

• https://wasiindia.com/the-mahseer/

Posters for the Mahseer :

Most blue animals are not actually blue.

Their skin manipulates light in ways that only appear blue to human eyes. Butterflies, peacocks, morpho beetles, even most blue reef fish — all optical illusions. Microscopic physical structures scatter light at specific wavelengths. The color is architectural, not chemical. Remove the structure and there is nothing underneath.

The mandarin dragonet does something almost no vertebrate does. It makes actual blue pigment, stored inside specialized cells called cyanophores, deposited directly into its skin. Its blue is not reflective. Not structural. Not a trick of light bouncing off nano-scale geometry.

Its skin is genuinely blue.

And somehow, that is still not the strangest thing about it.

It does not look like something evolution would make

The first time most people see a mandarin dragonet, it feels artificial.

Not rare-and-beautiful artificial. More like someone handed the design brief to an illustrator who had never heard the word restraint, and then nobody checked the final file before it went to print. Electric blue curves. Orange contour lines that look like topographic maps of a coastline nobody has named yet. Irregular maze patterns. Flowing neon geometry that does not repeat, does not tile, does not follow any rhythm a human eye can predict.

Nothing about it feels like biology. Underwater photographers consistently reach for the same comparisons: ceramic glazing, psychedelic art, digital rendering, something made rather than grown.

And the fish is tiny. Six to eight centimeters. Roughly the size of your finger. Smaller than most of the common reef fish swimming past it without a second glance. It is one of the most visually dramatic vertebrates on Earth and one of the easiest things in the ocean to miss.

Where the name came from, and the scientist who ran out of words

In 1927, an ichthyologist named Henry Weed Fowler formally described the species and named it Synchiropus splendidus. The species name comes from the Latin splendidus, meaning splendid or magnificent. It was, essentially, the scientific community admitting it had no more precise word for what it was looking at.

Etymology

The genus name Synchiropus translates roughly to “moving the hands together,” a reference to the way the fish uses its pectoral fins in unison, like two palms pushing slowly through water. Even the taxonomy captures something true about how strangely it moves.

The common name “mandarin” came from the Qing Dynasty court officials of imperial China, whose ceremonial silk robes featured elaborate embroidered patterns in exactly these colors: electric blue, saffron orange, maze-like geometric forms covering every surface. The fish and the fabric were designed entirely independently, one by evolution over millions of years, one by imperial tailors over generations of craft. They ended up in almost the same place.

The dragonet evolved inside the Coral Triangle, a roughly six-million-square-kilometer stretch of ocean spanning Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, and the Solomon Islands. It contains more marine species than any other region on Earth. The dragonet family, Callionymidae, diversified here over tens of millions of years. The mandarin dragonet is one of its most extreme results.

It never really left. It is still there, in exactly those reefs, hovering above coral rubble in water shallow enough to snorkel.

Three pigment cells that make scientists genuinely excited

The mandarin dragonet has become important in pigment research because its color system works differently from almost every other vertebrate we know.

Three pigment cell types operate simultaneously inside its skin. Cyanophores produce true blue pigment, the rare one, the one that breaks the rule most vertebrates follow without knowing they follow it. Of roughly 66,000 known vertebrate species, only a handful produce blue this way. Xanthophores produce yellow to orange tones, creating the warm contour lines that map across the body like elevation markings on an old cartographic print. Melanophores produce darker contrast regions, defining the maze-like edges that give the pattern its depth and structure.

Researchers studying chromatophore systems often describe the dragonet’s skin as “living color architecture” because it behaves dynamically rather than staying visually static. During courtship, chromatophore cells appear to expand under hormonal cues. The fish turns up its own brightness. It almost appears illuminated from inside. It produces no light of its own.

The UV question

Many reef fish can see into the ultraviolet range that humans cannot perceive at all. It is entirely possible that the mandarin dragonet’s patterns look dramatically different to other dragonets than they do to us. What reads to human eyes as neon electric blue may be encoding mating information in wavelengths we cannot access. The patterns we find visually excessive may be far more precise and legible to the fish itself than they appear to us.

It replaced armor with chemistry, and it worked

Most reef fish are armored. Scales, bone plates, spines, speed. The ocean has refined many solutions to the problem of being eaten, and almost all of them involve becoming harder to eat.

The mandarin dragonet chose chemistry instead.

Its body is coated in thick mucus rather than scales. The coating discourages parasites, reduces bacterial growth, and carries mild toxicity along with a strong, distinctly unpleasant odor. Marine ich, the parasite that devastates aquarium fish populations, largely cannot establish itself on a dragonet’s skin. Predators learn to avoid it. Not because it fights back. Because catching it is a bad experience.

The bright coloration is almost certainly part of this system. A warning signal in the biological tradition of poison dart frogs and toxic beetles: the colors announce the unpleasantness before anything has to be confirmed by taste. The fish survives not by hiding, not by fleeing, but by becoming chemically inconvenient and making sure everyone in the reef knows it before they try.

Visually it appears fragile. Biologically it is one of the more defensively sophisticated fish in the water.

It hovers. It does not swim. There is a difference.

Mandarin dragonets move in a way that feels oddly calm compared to almost every other reef fish.

Using enlarged pectoral fins, they drift slowly across coral surfaces searching for copepods, tiny crustaceans, benthic microfauna. Watching one underwater feels less like watching a fish and more like watching something float through a space it has completely memorized. There is no urgency. No burst speed. No escape strategy beyond the chemical one.

Their feeding style depends entirely on patience and on living reef ecosystems dense enough to sustain continuous grazing. A dragonet in a healthy reef may travel across hundreds of coral heads in a single day, not because it swims fast, but because it never really stops moving.

They are specialized predators that happen to look ornamental. People keep making the mistake of treating them the other way around.

Every evening, twenty minutes after sunset

Every day, roughly twenty minutes after sunset, something happens above coral reefs wherever mandarin dragonets live.

Males and females rise slowly together from the reef floor. Dorsal fins fully extended. Colors at their most intense, the chromatophores expanded, the patterns vivid in the last fading light. Movement decelerating almost to a stop. For a few seconds they release eggs into the surrounding current. Then they vanish back into the coral.

The whole event lasts under a minute. The timing is governed by the rate at which light levels drop after sunset, consistent enough across days that both sexes respond to it as a shared environmental cue, with no coordination between individuals and no signals exchanged beforehand. Just two animals following the same clock, arriving at the same place, doing the same thing, and disappearing.

Underwater photographers plan entire dive trips around this window. Most leave without footage. The fish are not performing for anyone.

Males compete through beauty, not aggression

Mandarin dragonets show clear sexual dimorphism, and it tracks directly with how the species reproduces.

Males are brighter. More vivid coloration, an elongated dorsal spine, slightly larger bodies. But they compete visually more than physically. The male with the most intense color display and the most controlled, deliberate movement during courtship wins mating access. Fin display, color intensity, movement quality, courtship timing: these are what reproductive success is built on. Not aggression. Not size. Aesthetics as biological information.

Females have subtler coloration, shorter dorsal fins, and a rounder body profile. They are selecting for something real: males healthy enough to sustain expensive coloration and precise enough in movement to time the ascent correctly.

Fun fact

This makes the mandarin dragonet one of the few fish species where aesthetic quality, not physical dominance, determines reproductive success. Evolution ran a beauty competition across millions of years and built an entire species around the results.

Its closest relative looks equally impossible

The mandarin dragonet is not alone in looking like this.

Its close relative, the picturesque dragonet (Synchiropus picturatus), belongs to the same family, Callionymidae, and occupies similar reef environments across the western Pacific. But their patterns evolved differently. The mandarin runs to flowing stripes, smoother geometry, wave-like structures. The picturesque went toward circular rings, spotted formations, fragmented markings.

Both species feel strangely overdesigned for animals that spend most of their lives tucked inside coral rubble, visible to potential mates for only a narrow window each day. Why this level of visual complexity in animals this small and this cryptic by habitat is a question evolutionary biology has not fully resolved.

The aquarium trade almost finished what coral bleaching started

When reef photography began circulating widely online in the early 2000s, mandarin dragonets became one of the most sought-after aquarium fish in the world.

A lot of them died.

Not because they were physically delicate. Because people misunderstood what they were buying. Mandarin dragonets need mature reef biodiversity, continuous microfauna populations, stable ecosystems, and live feeding environments. They are not decorative fish that happen to eat. They are highly specialized reef predators that happen to look decorative. Most captive specimens refused processed food and starved. Millions were likely collected from wild reefs and lost before the trade understood the animal it was dealing with.

In 2007, researchers successfully bred mandarin dragonets in captivity for the first time and, more critically, trained the offspring to accept frozen copepods rather than live prey. That single breakthrough changed survival rates significantly and reduced pressure on wild populations.

What that breakthrough revealed

Captive-bred dragonets raised on frozen food from birth showed no strong preference for live prey. The fixation on live food appears to be environmentally conditioned rather than hard-wired. The aquarium trade’s decades of failure was partly a training problem, not purely a dietary one.

The reef is disappearing. So is everything that lives inside it.

The mandarin dragonet is currently listed as Least Concern by the IUCN. That reflects population numbers, not trajectory.

The fish is built for exactly one habitat: healthy, biodiverse, structurally intact coral reef. Coral reefs are bleaching at rates no previous geological era recorded. A bleached reef cannot sustain a dragonet population. The fish cannot adapt to other environments. There is no open-water version of this animal, no seagrass meadow fallback, no rocky shore contingency. It is reef or nothing.

Ocean warming is the primary driver of bleaching, driven by carbon emissions at a scale no individual choice alone will solve. But the individual choices do compound. And there are specific things worth doing.

If you care about what survives in these reefs

• Support reef restoration organizations directly. The Coral Restoration Foundation and Reef Check both fund active, in-water reef work.

• If you keep or buy aquarium fish, always confirm the specimen is captive-bred. Captive-bred dragonets exist and are significantly more likely to accept prepared food.

• Dive and snorkel responsibly. No touching coral, no standing on reef structures, no sunscreens containing oxybenzone. These things compound at scale across millions of reef visitors annually.

• Advocate for Marine Protected Areas. Reefs with fishing restrictions show measurable recovery. MPA expansion is one of the most evidence-backed conservation levers available.

• Talk about this fish. Species that people know about get protected. The mandarin dragonet is one of the most visually arresting creatures on Earth. It is good bait for conservation attention.

  

Why this fish keeps coming back

Maybe the strangest thing about the mandarin dragonet is not its biology.

It is the reaction people have when they see it.

The fish feels excessive. Its colors look too intentional. Its movement too controlled. Its patterns too precisely irregular to be random, too complex to be accidental, too vivid to be camouflage. It feels designed. But nothing about it was made for human attention.

Henry Weed Fowler named it splendidus in 1927 because he had no better word. Underwater photographers still reach for comparisons to art and illustration a century later because the biological vocabulary keeps running out.

We tend to assume that beauty in nature is directional. That it points toward something, that it is always a message. The peacock’s tail signals health. The poison dart frog’s color signals toxicity. The orchid’s shape signals food to a bee that is not there.

But the mandarin dragonet’s colors are doing several things simultaneously: warning predators, attracting mates, possibly encoding information in wavelengths humans cannot perceive at all. And none of those functions fully explain why the pattern had to be quite this elaborate. There is excess here that biology does not completely account for.

Deep inside coral systems, evolution spent millions of years building cyanophores that make impossible blue, mucus chemistry that replaced armor, a dusk ascent that nobody coordinates, patterns that researchers are still working to explain.

Not to impress anyone.

Just to survive.

And it kept doing it long before anyone was around to notice.

References & Further Reading

Species and biology: Mandarin Dragonet (Wikipedia) / Picturesque Dragonet / Dragonet Family

Pigment research: Genome study on mandarin fish pigmentation (PubMed) / Novel chromatophore study (ResearchGate) / Blue chromatophore research

Marine ecology and care: Ocean Blue Project / Top Shelf Aquatics care guide / OATA care sheet

more infographics here :

I use it, but I think, just like social media, and as I said earlier, in some years, the way people are now figuring out dumbphones/offline time from the internet, there will also be spaces without AI.

It’s sort of being enforced too much.

I hate it when people know the larger models aren’t really getting any better, only improving in terms of producing results beautifully, showing you the process of how it’s done, and basically becoming another Grammarly/Notion, pointing out mistakes that I need to correct myself or organizing my work.

The ick of things getting generated from AI without taste and copying someone else’s work, it’s an ick from the machine and from people who are simply not using their brain.

The economy is training mediocre people to look better and deliver better, and then there will be a day when access becomes too pricey and only tasteful/handful people stay while the rest become clerks again.

Also, the current age is the golden age of tech/internet because all the people who created it are existing alongside you at the same time.

My role model is someone who is deeply in love with nature, literature, creatures and cures, basically all the “ures,” but in the right form.

2. My room is now a storeroom, can you believe it?
   My own parents did that to me!!!

3. Reading Sigmund Freud’s book, “On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia”.

4. It’s officially been a month of being unemployed, or on sabbatical, I would say. Kinda enjoying it because I can read and experiment a lot and I am so happpyyyyyy omg.

5. I hate when I give so much energy and it doesn’t reflect back. I feel guilt and disgust for putting it out there, but then I feel like the one in love always wins, and it’s true, I win.

6. The more I am writing, the more I am realising that switching from Notion to Obsidian will be very alarming for my brain. I gave so much effort and thought to it when it was in Notion, but the visual linking feels tougher there.

7. Suddenly, I am again becoming someone who is listening to/reading papers and lectures.

8. I haven’t stepped out of my room for the past 1 week, like literally.

9. Articulating and performance of vocab is going on.

10. I don’t like the idea of how people can’t just shut up.

11. I’m thinking of opting out of cloud and it’s very serious, I really mean it.

12. Thinking of removing my nose piercing this birthday. Don’t know why, but suddenly it feels like the end of an era.

13. I get constantly overwhelmed by the idea of my own goals and expectations from myself.

14. The niche of being perfect, sometimes letting the work speak for itself, and doing something without sorting it first is slowly getting extinct from real life and workspaces.

15. When an idea that was monetised and campaigned on the internet doesn’t work the way it should have, or when the altered image of the core product/person/creator starts getting mismatched, it suddenly becomes the offline experience.

16. I am at a place of constant headaches [internally].

17. Anything that’s not important to me anymore goes unheard, almost without my brain even knowing it. Now I wanna know, is this a longer effect of trying not to listen to something when someone is speaking if they don’t include your name, and then it slowly becomes a pattern?

18. I have reel fatigue. I wanna create reels, but the longer they sit in my lobby of creation, the sooner they stop feeling relevant to me, and it creates this boredom in me to make them very poppy and like the original vision again. It kinda loses the charm sitting there for too long.

19. I would hate the fact that content becomes about making content and all our lives somehow have to become content, from interviews to literally whatever.

20. I don’t like any government until they work like Mamdani, and yes, I understand he comes from a place where his mom worked creatively, yet too much towards poverty porn, and yet I am all for people making comebacks and creating change. Maybe his campaign is working anyways keeping the city clean.

21. I planted a lil new tree recently in my garage [it looks like an abandoned plot/land from an older Gali Gali Sim Sim movie].

    

22. Incompetence in men is really an issue and everything that’s a women’s immune issue somehow becomes the disease. It’s framed like that.

23. I’m listening to rain and smelling it.

24. I have started using LinkedIn and omg people with good connections go faster, smoother and better than you always, and it’s good to “know a guy” always. Invest in humans deeply, not for the sake of networking.

25. Networking events are the fakest dopamine people try to get on. Everyone’s a network, but if it’s not useful, is it really a network?

26. 25 at the moment and I’m not concerned about my age, but I saw my 16-year-old goals where I wrote, “65kgs gold is minimum,” and I thought wow, I was brilliant back then.

    

27. The more I am visiting govt offices, the more I am realising they are exactly like that when you actually observe them.

28. I hate the fact that I have so many good things to say but I don’t have a rewarding audience and I don’t get a media hit like other people do.

29. I hate people with bad Hindi even when they spent their whole life in a state where Hindi is the primary language, and then I question myself, am I becoming a person who judges people based on their literacy?
    [I mean I will if I see you had good education and a good/humble background, yet you never tried to improvise or exercise the benefits of education.]

30. I hate people who try to make things about their age.

31. This is the first time in my life I am in a position where I wasn’t able to do any physical activity, not even minimal yoga/walking.

32. It hurts to see your parents age. Mine were doing it gracefully, they just suddenly started looking bad the moment I left. [I mean yeah you miss your fav kid but chill.]

33. Life is not just about your rules, it’s observation and following a good chunk of things too.

34. I am going to my kaar [Kaggle - Arena - Reddit - Archive].
    Back at it.

35. The owners of Bangalore really need a threatening amount of loss because wtf is wrong with you for not giving my mentioned deposit back. Spineless. I already had the conversation and she agreed and I showed the flat and all, but I mean whattt, she deducted 40k and she’s so idk.

    

36. I hate people who can’t take action clearly or communicate clearly, especially when things are already straightforward. Above point for that.

37. The spiral of me taking notes in notebooks but wanting to preserve every bit of it is making me think like a shopkeeper.

38. Music is at an all-time low at this very moment. Even I wasn’t prepared for something like this.

39. I truly believe randomness with happiness is the real emotion that keeps you alive, because who are you without hope and love?

40. The more you mask, the more you crave an identity.

41. All my life, I denied myself so many things in the name of shyness.

42. I read so much, my brain is sleeping now.

43. I love making lists, my house is A1 in the lister economy. This was literally our routine when we were kids because my parents used to shop on weekends and we all had to give our list, which used to get verified with “why do I want this?” if something unnecessary was there, and then there used to be a good waiting period before getting it. The waiting got ruined by 10-minute delivery apps. I mean especially for this moment. I love this core memory because I was the one who used to pen down the final list, hehehhee.

44. The friction is necessary, or maybe created once it’s gone for too long. Look at the carrom board and the above point to find answers to this point.

45. I think I like pretty people and pretty privilege is real but nothing can beat my nanis generation. I love the way they look. Distinctive.

46. My grandfather used to write and research a lot and I think I’m the one who is gonna keep this alive.

47. I hate the fact that you are no longer someone who can give people downloaded movies because me and my friend Ahil used to do this, and we were like the coolest in tuition. Very famous guys.

    

48. The tiniest thing I know [ant] surprises me with how it sustained and evolved over the years.

49. The highest form of compliments, I think, are “this is fresh,” a smile, and a genuine mind-blowing wow, with a double chocolate cookie and an Americano on the side to take it to the next level, followed by complimenting me and then sitting across the table discussing the truths of life.

50. Religion is the most advanced and dangerous pill.

Yes this is enough, very random series of thoughts.

Love,
Gauri

I was writing a 2 liner quirky tweet but guess what, not at it.

Bull Shark Carcharhinus leucas | Zambezi shark. Ground shark. The one already in your river.

Most people picture a dangerous shark in deep blue water, far from shore, very dramatically lit. The bull shark did not get that memo. It lives in the shallows, in rivers, in flooded golf courses after Queensland storms, and it has been doing this since before trees existed.

Fossil teeth found in Egypt dated to the Early Miocene (a geological period roughly 5 to 23 million years ago) confirm how far back this animal goes. But even that is recent history. Bull sharks belong to a lineage that is 440 million years old. Forests as we understand them evolved around 350 million years ago. Dinosaurs showed up around 230 million years ago. The bull shark was already here for both of those events, already hunting, already refined. We are, in the most literal sense, the newcomers.

The 2,000 Costa Rican colones banknote features a bull shark. An animal so embedded in regional culture and ecological history that it ended up on currency. That does not happen by accident.

It is not the biggest shark. It does not need to be.

Who is this animal

Bull sharks sit within Carcharhinidae (the requiem shark family), a group that includes lemon sharks, nurse sharks, and nervous sharks across 43 species, 4 families, and 10 genera. They are grey on top, white below, stocky, blunt-snouted, and built for shallow coastal water rather than open ocean hunting. The first dorsal fin (the fin on the back closest to the head) is noticeably larger than the second. That detail alone is one of the cleaner ways to identify them in the water.

Females grow up to 11.5 feet and can weigh up to 450 kg when pregnant. Males top out around 7 to 8 feet. That size difference is called sexual dimorphism (when males and females of the same species are physically distinct from each other), and in bull sharks it is one of the more pronounced examples in the shark world. Females are simply bigger. This is the norm across most shark species, not the exception.

They mature slowly. Females reach sexual maturity (the biological point at which reproduction becomes possible) around 18 years old. Males at 14 to 15. Gestation runs 10 to 11 months. Pups are born between 22 and 32 inches and weigh around 2.8 kg at birth. Litters range from 1 to 13, averaging 4 to 6. Females reproduce once every two years. Maximum recorded lifespan sits above 25 years.

Put those numbers together. A female bull shark spends nearly two decades growing before she can reproduce, then produces a small litter every other year. That is not a species that bounces back quickly from sustained pressure. That is a species that needs to be largely left alone to maintain its numbers, which is not what is happening.

They prefer warm, shallow water between 150 and 490 feet depth, thrive in murky low-visibility environments, and appear in the Pacific during warmer months. Their distribution covers 75 countries and every continent except Antarctica.

The freshwater question

So why are bull sharks in rivers at all? The ocean has more food. Prey density in freshwater is considerably lower. The body has to work significantly harder just to stay alive in there. By almost every ecological measure, a river is a worse place for a large marine predator than the sea.

The answer is not food. It is safety. But we will get there.

First, why this should not even be biologically possible.

Sharks are osmoconformers (animals whose internal salt concentration is calibrated to match the surrounding water). They maintain this balance through high concentrations of urea and trimethylamine oxide (organic compounds that help cells retain water and stay chemically stable) in their blood and tissues. When a shark enters freshwater, that equilibrium collapses. Water floods into their cells through osmosis (the movement of water across a membrane from low to high salt concentration), sodium and chloride ions leak out, and the animal deteriorates. For almost every shark species, freshwater is a hard biological wall.

Bull sharks are euryhaline (capable of tolerating a wide range of salinity) and technically diadromous (able to move freely between fresh and saltwater environments). Their osmoregulation (the process of actively maintaining internal salt and water balance) is managed through three organs working in coordination: the kidney, the rectal gland (a small organ near the intestine responsible for excreting excess salt), and the liver, all adjusting continuously as external salinity shifts.

In freshwater, they reduce excretion and actively hold onto sodium and chloride rather than losing it. So many body systems require sodium that without active retention the animal simply cannot function. Their plasma osmolarity (the concentration of dissolved particles in the blood) sits at around 595 mOsm per litre in freshwater, well above the near-zero salinity of the surrounding water. In seawater that rises to around 940 mOsm per litre. The body is doing active, metabolically expensive work the entire time, in both directions.

When researchers compared gene expression (which genes are actively switched on inside a cell) in the kidneys of freshwater versus saltwater bull sharks, one gene stood out: the Na-Cl cotransporter (a protein that reclaims sodium and chloride from urine before it is excreted, preventing the body from losing its own ions). In freshwater-acclimated bull sharks this gene runs at ten times the expression level compared to saltwater animals. Most sharks simply do not have this running anywhere near that level. Research has also found that bull sharks in freshwater have lower liver density than saltwater individuals, which helps with buoyancy (the ability to stay at a particular depth without sinking or rising) in less dense water.

There are limits. A bull shark living exclusively in freshwater can sustain that for around 4 years before the physiological cost becomes too high. They are not river animals. They are animals that can use rivers strategically, when it serves them. That distinction matters.

Where they actually show up

The confirmed river records read like someone made them up.

2,500 miles up the Amazon. 1,100 miles into the Mississippi reaching Illinois. 500 miles up the Zambezi in southern Africa. The Ganges and Brahmaputra river systems in Assam. The Brisbane River in Queensland. Flooded golf courses in Australia after cyclones. They stay in the lower reaches of rivers where partial salinity is still present, which reduces the osmoregulatory load on the body.

Lake Nicaragua is the case that took the longest to accept. The lake sits 108 feet above sea level, connected to the Caribbean only through 119 miles of the San Juan River and its rapids. Scientists assumed for decades that the sharks living in the lake were a separate landlocked species. Tagging confirmed in 1966 that they were bull sharks navigating those rapids in both directions. The same individuals appeared in both the lake and the Caribbean Sea. The journey takes approximately 11 days.

Worth being very clear about: bull sharks found in Indian river systems are entirely different from the Ganges shark, Glyphis gangeticus, which is a separate, much rarer, and nearly blind species. The two have been historically confused, which has complicated conservation data for both.

Intelligence and how they hunt

Here is something that does not get said enough about bull sharks: they are smart. Not in a vague, gestural way. In a measurable, behavioural way.

They actively seek out murky, low-visibility water when hunting. This is deliberate. Murky water advantages the bull shark and disadvantages everything else. They have essentially adapted their hunting grounds to maximise their own edge. They are also drawn to the colour yellow specifically, known to approach yellow fishing nets in commercial fishing contexts, a preference consistent enough to be a documented practical concern. They can perceive colour, which given how refined they are as predators, tracks completely.

Bull sharks are opportunistic apex predators (hunters at the top of the food chain that eat whatever is available rather than specialising in one prey type). Bony fish make up roughly 60 to 70 percent of their diet. Rays, smaller sharks including juveniles of their own species, sea turtles, dolphins, birds, and terrestrial mammals when available complete the picture. They are not selective.

They are active primarily at dawn and dusk. Their hunting method is called bump and bite: initial contact is made with the snout, which reads the size and movement of the target, followed immediately by a bite. They hunt in short bursts rather than sustained chases, which suits their slower digestion. What separates them from species like the great white is what happens after first contact. Bull sharks do not retreat to observe. They come back.

When threatened by a larger predator they will regurgitate (expel stomach contents back through the mouth) to reduce body weight and increase escape speed. It is not elegant. It works.

Testosterone

In 2012, researchers measuring androgens (hormones including testosterone that govern development and behaviour) in captive bull sharks found levels that exceeded those of male elephants in musth (a periodic hormonal state in male elephants already known for producing testosterone spikes up to 60 times normal human male levels). Female bull sharks registered androgen levels higher than most male mammals across species.

The function is not fully established. It correlates with territorial aggression during feeding and competition between males during mating. The causal line has not been drawn cleanly. It remains active research.

Mating happens in late summer and early autumn and is physically rough. Females carry visible, deep scratches and bite marks on their bodies from males during courtship. These marks are distinct enough that researchers use them to track individual animals across seasons and years. Whether there is a gentler version of this process somewhere in their biology: the research does not suggest one.

Attacks on humans

The raw count from the International Shark Attack File puts great whites higher in total confirmed unprovoked attacks. But bull shark attacks happen in an average of 1 to 3 feet of water, in rivers, harbour entrances, estuaries, and beaches near populated coastlines. Multiple bites. Exactly where people actually swim.

The 1916 New Jersey attack series killed four people and injured one over 12 days. Two of those attacks happened inside a tidal creek, two miles from the sea, in substantially freshwater. For decades the events were attributed to a great white. Modern analysis of the bite patterns, the locations, and the water conditions points to a single bull shark working through connected waterways.

Here is the one thing that genuinely reframes the bull shark’s position in the world: in river systems where bull sharks and saltwater crocodiles share territory, the crocodile is dominant. Not occasionally. Consistently. A bull shark in a river is not at the top of every food chain it enters. For an animal that is an apex predator in virtually every other environment it occupies, that is significant. The river, the very place the bull shark evolved to access, is also the one place where something else outranks it.

Why rivers: the actual answer

This is what the freshwater adaptation is actually for.

Female bull sharks travel up to 900 miles to reach nursery sites before giving birth. They select flat, protected, low-salinity locations with salinity (concentration of dissolved salt in water) between 0.5 and 15 parts per thousand, far below open ocean levels of 35 parts per thousand. These are estuaries (transitional zones where rivers meet the sea, mixing fresh and saltwater) and sheltered river mouths. The flat geography is deliberate. Shallow, protected, low-salinity water that large marine predators cannot comfortably enter.

Pups spend their first two to three years in these environments, developing their own salt tolerance in the brackish buffer zone before gradually transitioning to open water. The newborn develops its saltiness in this in-between space, neither fully freshwater nor fully marine, before it is ready for the ocean.

The reason is predator avoidance. Most large marine predators cannot follow into low-salinity water. The estuary is a protected nursery that the species earned specifically through its unusual biology. The same adaptation that lets adults travel thousands of miles inland exists, at least partly, so that pups can survive their most vulnerable years in water that nothing else will enter.

A 2024 study tracking nursery dynamics along the Texas coast found that migration timing is already shifting with warming temperatures. From 1982 to 2021, estuaries in the western Gulf of Mexico saw a mean autumn temperature increase of 1.55 degrees Celsius. Bull shark departures from nursery estuaries moved 25 to 36 days later over that period. Researchers project that if current trends continue, bull sharks in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico could forgo winter migrations entirely within the next 50 to 100 years, altering their ecological roles in estuarine food webs in ways not yet fully understood.

The range is already expanding. Juvenile bull sharks were essentially absent from Pamlico Sound in North Carolina between 1965 and 2011. From 2011 to 2016 they were present every year. In Sydney Harbour, acoustic telemetry data spanning 15 years showed sharks delaying departure by an average of one day per year, arriving earlier and leaving later as water temperatures climb.

Conservation

In November 2023, bull sharks received their first binding international protection when all Carcharhinidae species were added to CITES Appendix II, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (an international agreement that regulates wildlife trade to prevent extinction through overexploitation). The listing requires that international trade in bull shark meat or fins be accompanied by documentation proving legal acquisition and that the trade does not threaten the species’ survival.

The listing matters. But research published in 2025 found that far more shark fins are appearing in trade than are reported to CITES databases. 73 countries reported zero exports while data showed they were actively trading. For some species, fin volumes in markets did not decline at all after protections came into effect. Appendix II regulates trade. It does not prohibit it. Enforcement varies enormously across the 75 countries where bull sharks are found.

The underlying biology makes recovery slow regardless of what is on paper. Females that take 18 years to mature, reproduce every two years, and average 4 to 6 pups per litter cannot absorb sustained commercial pressure the way faster-reproducing species can. The IUCN currently lists the species as Near Threatened, with population trend declining.

The CITES listing is the most significant formal protection bull sharks have ever received. Whether it translates into actual population recovery depends entirely on what happens after the paperwork.

Fun facts

Bull sharks are older than trees. Forests as we understand them evolved around 350 million years ago. This lineage predates them by 90 million years. They were here before the Amazon river they swim through even existed.

They can spy-hop, briefly lifting their heads above the water surface to observe what is happening above it. A behaviour more commonly associated with whales and dolphins. A shark that looks around. Perfectly normal.

The regurgitation escape strategy is well documented and deeply practical. When threatened by something larger, they expel stomach contents to reduce weight and move faster. Function over everything, every time.

They are viviparous (giving birth to fully developed live young rather than laying eggs). A bull shark pup enters the world as a complete, immediately functional predator. No adjustment period.

Female bull sharks carry mating scars visible enough that researchers use them as individual identification markers across seasons and years.

They have a two-chambered heart and are multicellular eukaryotes (organisms whose cells contain a nucleus and complex internal structures, the same basic cellular architecture as every complex organism on earth). 440 million years of refinement sitting inside a body plan that has barely needed to change.

The Na-Cl co-transporter gene runs at ten times the expression level in freshwater versus saltwater. One molecular switch. That is the entire biological difference between an animal that can enter a river and one that cannot.

Costa Rica put one on the 2,000 colones banknote. More institutional recognition than most apex predators ever receive.

Built and researched from:

Matich et al. (2024) · Journal of Animal Ecology Juvenile bull shark migration timing and climate change

Mullins et al. (2024) · Scientific Reports Warming waters and juvenile habitat suitability

Bangley et al. (2018) · Scientific Reports Nursery range expansion into Pamlico Sound, North Carolina

Imaseki et al. (2019) · Journal of Experimental Biology Na-Cl cotransporter mechanisms and euryhalinity in bull sharks

Pillans et al. (2005) · Journal of Comparative Physiology B Freshwater to seawater acclimation, plasma osmolytes and organ activity

Rodríguez-Cabello et al. (2011) · Journal of Experimental Biology Branchial osmoregulation and ion transporters in euryhaline elasmobranchs

CITES Secretariat (2023) Appendix II listing of requiem sharks, CoP19 Panama

International Shark Attack File · Florida Museum of Natural History Global unprovoked shark attack records and species attribution

Shark Stewards Bull Shark Science Sheet (2024) Species biology, conservation status and CITES update

Lara-Lizardi et al. (2024) · PeerJ Seasonal occurrence and individual variability, Cabo Pulmo, Gulf of California

After 25 years of being in this body, I have realised. I will start reading and writing about the one thing I love most in this world. Music. Anything and everything about music. I will not follow a syllabus, table of contents, or a course. I have a book from my 11th standard that I carry with me everywhere, but never had the courage to open and read. Because I kept thinking: what if it takes too long? What if I get too absorbed? What if I cannot complete it, or cannot follow and master it the way a musician would? What if I understand it differently from the rest of the world? Would it not be embarrassing that I do not hear the tunes the way others do?

All of these thoughts kept me from truly pursuing it. I am picking it up again. This time with a clearer mind and a more developed prefrontal cortex. I hope I survive. Starting with Indian classical music, and then seeing how the rest unfolds.

Let us begin.

I will write the blog. I arrived at another conclusion, not one but two actually. I love maps. I used to carry an atlas with me everywhere. And I love writing. Just writing things down. It is my absolute love and cure for everything my body and mind desire, once and for all. Pure admiration.

A small note or learning every day. I will try. Every day. And anything I am listening to, to deepen my understanding of it.

Hi, Gauri this side.

It has been more than three months since I last posted anything. In terms of actually writing something, it has been lesser than every year before this one. 2025 was just for me. I posted a few fragments here and there but mostly I took some time, exhaled, and waved back at everything else from a distance.

It feels almost surreal now because when I think about it, I nearly let an entire year pass without putting my thoughts out into the world.

I saw a dead rat one morning. It was at the corner of the road, right when I had just stepped out to get my regular idli from the Andhra Dosa Corner. It was alone. Still. Nobody around it, nobody even glancing at it. And yet somewhere, something must have been waiting for it.

Coincidentally, later that day, I spotted another mouse near the park. Same side of the road. Same build. The same quiet way it had been taken by the world.

And then a thought arrived, slow and certain. Maybe this one had come to find the first one. They were more than a kilometer apart but I held onto that. The idea that it had travelled all that way, only to discover its companion was already gone. And in that grief, it simply let go too.

I posted this on Twitter/X. Got a warm response. And I was glad, glad in a way that felt like it mattered.

I had been sitting with this piece for a while, not out of procrastination but out of care. I wanted it to carry the weight of what I received firsthand. Conveying something the way it arrived to you, that is the whole job.

I had been thinking about my grandfather. My Nanu.

I never imagined I would miss him this much. It has been nearly three years and yet, when I pass an old man with a similar build, something shifts inside me. When I see a small girl walking beside her grandparents, it strikes somewhere deep and I feel loved and ached in the same breath. The warmth grows more pronounced, not less, with every passing year.

Life moves quickly, especially when you are not measuring it. When it is not caught in the crosshairs of comparison or your habitual ways of accounting for things, it slips through. It lives in the in-between.

There are moments worth living scattered all through a life, but they arrive in disguise. There is no theory that fully explains what you feel for someone you love. That is yours alone, expressed only in the language of your own being. What moved me was seeing how willing people were to sit inside that feeling openly. How much empathy was still alive and breathing in them.

The greatest thing a human being can experience is emotion unfolding before their eyes, raw and without warning. And of all emotions, fear and death command the tightest grip. Any extreme feeling does. But those two especially.

I have had countless conversations about this, direct and indirect, since childhood. I grew up hearing about people others had loved and lost.

When I was young, I did not carry the fear that I might lose someone. I was not oblivious to the idea but I was certain, nah, not me. I had that much faith in my own life. I used to believe I would be composed enough when it came. Brave enough to understand that death is always present and to receive it without falling apart.

Guess what. I was not brave. And I am glad I was not, because I felt it. I expressed it. I still have photographs of myself crying for eight, nine hours straight about how I could have been a better grandchild. More attentive. More curious about his life. I could have called more. Asked more. He did not always have to nudge and check on me. I should have reached for him. I should have taken him to Bombay when I said I would, instead of telling myself, ah, next time.

He never asked for any of it. But I had it all inside me, the words, the gestures, and I held them back because I was 22 and quietly afraid of seeming like I was trying too hard. I look back at that now and I am ashamed.

It cost me more than I will ever recover from memory. I still remember calling him. Even on that call, I said nothing. And it cost me. He left us.

After that I fell into a depression that lasted a whole year. I got into an accident. And strangely, in that moment of physical wreckage, what I felt most acutely was internal. After the accident I realised something. When everything is intact, you do not revere it. The night before, I had been standing in front of a mirror thinking, ah, I am so heavy. 55 kilograms, broad shoulders, stubborn biceps. And when I woke up injured, all I wanted was exactly that body back. Exactly as it was. But nah, nothing reverses. Now you carry this version of yourself.

Before 2023, I was so reluctant to be photographed with the people I loved. Too guarded to let that side of me be visible. So I never did. And after losing him, after losing a cousin sister too, I understood what photographs actually are. Not vanity. Not performance. They are the only remaining doors into rooms that no longer exist. I was there. I felt it deeply. But I cannot touch it anymore. It lives like a dream now.

One of my closest people shared something with me that I have not stopped thinking about.

He misses his grandmother enormously. What he has left of her is a voice note. That was all she knew how to send, and she sent one almost every day. Asking about his day, whether everything was alright, the ordinary rhythms of a shared life. Have you eaten. How is the weather. Are you sleeping well.

That is all he has. And like me, he carries complaints against himself. He believes he could have done more, been more present, given more of himself. Because nobody in the world will ask after you the way she did. Nobody.

On his worst days, he goes back to that voice note. He settles into it, that particular tightening in the throat just before you surrender to tears. She used to call him by a nickname no one else uses anymore. It felt like a quiet choir to the ear, he said. He was not able to say goodbye to her in person. And somewhere in the quieter corners of his mind, she still exists. Still waiting to ask whether he has eaten, whether the cold has let up.

That is how grief works sometimes. You negotiate with your own mind. You tell it that something still exists. You allow it to believe. You use hope the way you use a small lamp in a very large room.

A hope.

Even in the face of death.

A hope.

One of my dearest told me his mornings became almost impossible after losing his grandmother. He had lived with her through college, three or four years of two unhurried minds coexisting, both full of hope, both unburdened by ambition or comparison. Just existing together. All the childhood memories sharpened themselves into vivid clarity in adulthood, the way old photographs do when you finally know how to look at them.

When you are loved by someone two generations older than you, not your parents but beyond them, there is a different texture to that love. It does not negotiate. It does not assess. It simply pours. And when it is gone, it leaves behind a void so precise and specific that nothing else fits inside its shape.

He became so hollowed out that he sought therapy. He is still recovering. He is healing. He is doing better. But the void is still there.

Losing someone and remembering them feels like a wind that has learned your particular silence.

My father is a man acquainted with profound loss from an early age. He lost his closest brother, then his mother, then his father. He was at a training camp when his mother passed and he missed the final rites. Even now he sometimes weeps without warning, when he sees an elderly woman with a familiar gentleness in her hands or her gait.

He lost his closest friend in 2013. And I lost mine in 2015. She was that man’s daughter. We all called him Dada. Her name was Ritu, which means season. Since the day I lost her, the seasons have felt less vivid than they once were. She died because she could not bear the weight of what grief and its consequences had placed on her. The ending was unjust and merciless and it makes you despise death in a way that feels entirely righteous.

My childhood began with her and ended with her.

There is nothing elegant about that sentence.

Someone I hold close told me he used to secretly record his grandfather while listening to his stories. Where he was born, the places he had walked through. Nobody will ever know their part of life if I do not hold it, he said. I cannot imagine a life that existed in front of me and dissolved without leaving its stories behind.

He was right. Those stories are the architecture underneath every decision, every instinct, every inherited way of being. Everyone has a story to tell, he said. The only requirement is the willingness to be curious enough to ask.

This is a memory of my favourite mutual, on how he misses his grandmother. She used to eat ice cream in secret. My Dadi made the finest tea. Even now, stepping into a kitchen, there is a fraction of a second where I half-expect her voice to drift in from somewhere behind me. I miss that voice. I miss that particular presence. Someone who means a great deal to me expressed exactly the same thing. He lives in the same house they grew up in, and it is tough, but it reminds you how beautifully a person exists within a space, and you find yourself daydreaming about every bit of it, all the time. The life you glimpsed in the in-between moments, because what you begin to miss, more than anything, is the presence itself.

I have also heard stories about people who were, by most accounts, difficult. Flawed. Even destructive. And yet they are still mourned. A soul does not carry its character beyond the body. What remains is memory, complex and contradictory and entirely human. Even those who were harsh parents, even those who caused harm, are sometimes grieved. Death has the strange power to surface the days you missed the person anyway.

Good inside the bad. Bad inside the good. And then, life.

I spoke with my mother not long ago. She has been a different person since she lost her father and her closest friend during COVID. I know her well enough to recognise where she was resewn.

A friend’s father passed in a hospital. He had told his son to wait outside. He did. Two minutes later, the man was gone. His last words were: we have a lot to talk about. Take care of your mother.

Some last words sit in you like open windows. The kind that let everything in and nothing out. You spend years standing at them, waiting for the rest of the conversation.

He still feels empty. Even today he wonders, what did he want to tell me. Was it something important. What did I miss. I should have stayed in the room.

A boy I have known for years lost his father while pursuing medicine, the dream they had built together, his father’s vision and his own simultaneously. He had given four years to it. And the moment his father died, the dream lost its entire reason. He tried to hold on for another year. He came close. But the question that kept surfacing was: what is the point now.

I looked into his eyes when he said it and I did not argue. He had arrived somewhere true. He eventually found a different direction. He is doing fine now. But what they had mapped together, the clinics, the plans, the shared anticipation of a future, that conversation will stay unfinished.

One of the gentlest people I know never spoke openly about his mother. The day he finally did, he could not stop. Food does not taste the same, he said, when you know you are not going home to tell someone how it was. When there is no one waiting for you. No moment of, look at me, how do I look, I am going to market, gonna buy you something. He said he never liked beans. But after she was gone, he kept ordering them. Just to taste the last thing she had made him one more time.

He misses her most when he visits Jammu. That place is her, in every corner. It is his nani’s house, and everything is still there, except her. He looks at his father and thinks, my dad lost his best friend. His partner. He was twelve when she left.

He is one of the kindest, calmest people I know. Talking to him is a quiet gift. Somehow, his mother’s warmth never really left. It just moved into him. He is the bright son, the gentle one. She lives on in the way he carries himself.

After he told me that I remembered a scene from The Big Bang Theory, Howard trying to preserve his mother’s last cooked meal, breaking down completely. I understood it differently this time.

A girl who is very dear to me recently lost her grandmother and said something that has not left me. She said people transform when they lose someone. For better and for worse. You begin to see the reality that their presence had always shielded you from. And when they go, that layer lifts. The shield they carried for you gets removed, and the world arrives closer and less filtered than you have ever known it.

That made complete sense. I am not the person I was before loss reached me. And every person I knew before they had experienced it, they are all altered now too. Some quietly fractured. Some quietly deepened. All of them rearranged.

A senior colleague once asked me something I have never been able to set down. He said: how are you working towards the person you lost? How are you keeping them alive?

Because the way you remember someone, if it is worthy, if it makes you feel everything and grow as a person, then they succeeded as a human being. Anytime I feel low and my Nanu surfaces in my mind, I return to that question. How am I keeping him alive in my world? By carrying the good he placed in me. By following it forward.

A girl I have known since we were young still keeps a toy her grandfather gave her. It is her doorway back. Something physical she can see and hold, evidence that it happened, that it was real.

In the winter of 2021, on Christmas, we lost Pluto. The dog of my mother’s closest friend. I never imagined I would grieve a dog who once tried to tear my trousers when I was five. But I did. In his last five years I had finally let him in, and he always knew when you were having a difficult day. He would simply appear beside you. No prompting, no performance. Just presence. His family never got another dog.

A mutual recently wrote to me about missing his own dog in the same way. There are patterns every living creature weaves into your daily life, and when those patterns no longer repeat, the silence they leave is its own distinct kind of mourning.

A childhood companion told me his grandfather died on his own terms, entirely peacefully. He completed his last religious offering, called everyone in the family, told his daughter he did not have enough time and needed to come immediately. He held his breath long enough to see his favourite person walk through the door. He looked at her. And then he released.

Everyone said he had been waiting for her. That he had chosen the moment himself.

Both my parents lost siblings when they were very young. Both carry a quiet, stubborn hope that somewhere they might encounter them again. My grandmother, in her paranoia and her rituals and her relentless acts of worship, was simply trying to find her way back to the child she lost.

She is the embodiment of what grief does to a mother. A ferocious, bloodied uncertainty. Pacing the perimeter of a wound that never fully seals.

I know a woman who stopped adorning herself after her husband died. Not because she lost pleasure in it but because her entire relationship with her own appearance had been constructed around his response to it. His gaze was her reflection. Without him, the ritual became hollow. It took her 20 years to understand that there was still a life demanding to be lived, and that she was the only one who could live it.

Last January, I lost one of my own. One day he was dancing to a Shah Rukh Khan song for what must have been the 678540th time, and then just like that, he was gone. All of us kept half-believing it. Kept laughing. Kept saying he was bluffing, the way you do when someone is so entirely themselves that the world does not feel like a place that could absorb them. And then we saw his family’s faces. We stopped laughing.

He is going to stay young forever now, in the most beautiful and most devastating sense of that.

Death takes a great deal from you. Even when you have not lost someone directly, when it is a neighbour or a familiar face from years ago or someone who existed at the edge of your life, that day dims. There is light still, but incomplete. Some of its particles are occupied elsewhere, attending to the person you have lost.

Adults conceal their grief when it surfaces. But when they finally rupture, when they find themselves in a room with people who carry the same weight, they flow. They weep without structure. Without apology.

It is shock and recognition and velocity all at once.

It is a spiral at the very centre of life.

I believe that every conversation still waiting to conclude, every question left suspended, every silence that was never explained, they are all pending. The people we lost are seated somewhere on a green bench in the clouds, unhurried. The day you arrive, they rise to welcome you. And you finally sit down together for the long conversation you never had.

I remember Ritu once said, that’s not it, what’s the point of giving an exam when your father is on his deathbed. I still have so many questions for him. I suppose he will answer them when I am truly close to him again. He loved me so much that I never feel like something is missing. He is not here physically, but I have his notebooks, his favourite bicycle, his shirts. I know why she loved her dad the way she did. She was a year younger than me, and yet the depth of what she felt for him made me feel like I had only just begun to understand love.

There are so many conversations living in my head right now that could make me cry, or pull me back to edit this piece one more time. I feel heavy writing this, and somehow lighter too, the way you do after saying something you have carried quietly for far too long.

Grief does not ask permission before it sits down beside you. It just does.

If this found you at a strange hour, I hope it also found you gently. You can step away whenever you need to.

To anyone reading this, you are important. You can always send a text or reach out. I am glad every single one of these conversations found its way to me. They taught me more than my own mistakes ever could. They made me more aware, more attentive, more tender toward this world and the people moving through it quietly, carrying what they carry.

Take care of yourself.
Love always, G.

People I spoke to, listened to, or whose stories found their way to me.

Noni, Vicky, Arin, Neeraj, Abhijeet, my parents and family, Abhishek, Sakshi, my auntie, Rov’s mom, Sahil, Parth, Sup, Debs, Rohit, Bao, Dams, Tanv, Ritu, Nanu, Matto, Sonam, Masterji, Pratyush, Vikas, Amrev, Rudy, Mohit, Anu, Aaru, Arman.

Childhood and early struggles

I have always been the weak, low-immunity kid in the house. Born a twin, underdeveloped. My twin died on the spot, and I was the weaker one. Maybe that was some strange message that someone with courage was born [hahaha].

My skin never fully developed. My family being vegetarian, they put me on fish skin for nutrition and skin development as the doctor suggested. Who was going to fight that?

I used to have asthma attacks. Winters were hell. Rainy season was worse. Every time I visited my nani’s house, pollen would knock me down and ruin my holidays. But I still went. I loved the small routines there — walking slowly under the courtyard trees, helping with small chores, listening to my grandparents’ stories, watching the sunlight fall on the floors, enjoying simple food, and the quiet comfort of being with family.

Diwali was always harsh on my lungs, but I liked the lights and the smell of sweets anyway.

8th standard: first turning point

I had a fever that lasted for days. Then it got better. I scored highest in maths. A small victory, fragile as it was, but it felt like a victory.

9th standard: tuberculosis

Then came 9th standard. I got too sick again. Tuberculosis. Those two years were brutal, but they taught me so much. I learned patience, endurance, and how fragile the body—and life—can be.

A few friends helped me with homework, but I was always childish. A teenage girl trying to hold on. I wanted to walk normally to school, to go out with friends, to feel the summer air on my skin. I wanted to have ordinary teenage days. But my lungs refused. My breath would fail me. My body would betray me. My mind would rage against it.

I spent the first five years of my life with my grandparents. Every long weekend, I would run under trees, wander in the courtyard, watch birds, sit under the mango tree, enjoy the summer afternoons, and feel free. Those moments were endless and lovely. Then illness hit, stealing those simple joys. I missed walking to school without stopping, laughing with friends, helping in small chores, even sitting quietly in the sun.

Being a tuberculosis patient was brutal. Constant weakness, fatigue, infections. My immunity score once was 174 out of 200, yet dust and pollen could knock me out. Every day, I learned what my body could take and where it would break. I learned what it meant to depend on younger siblings or friends and still feel not strong enough. Mental health hurt almost as much as my body. Frustration, loneliness, the sense of being trapped in a fragile shell—it left marks.

11th and 12th standard

Slowly, things got better in 11th standard. A few kids were kind enough to include me in small games or walks. Others stayed distant.

In 12th, because of all the medicine, I developed digestive problems. My marks suffered.

Then came college. Winter ‘19 brought another asthma attack that hurt my lungs again. I recovered in summer, only to fall ill once more.

Covid and loss

Then Covid hit. Twice. Both times worse. Helplessness returned. Lying in bed, missing life while the world moved outside.

This year, I lost a friend to a heart attack. The grief hit differently. All those losses—my uncle, childhood friend Ritu, my grandfather, and now this friend—they accumulate. You start noticing how fragile life feels. How fragile you feel.

2023: accident and inflammation

In 2023, I had an accident. Two years of recovery followed. It left me with inflammation issues, higher allergies, constant sickness. Even if I don’t want to, I have to take care of myself. A little dust in the air can ruin me.

That is why I am always the one with a mask, sanitizer, hanky, tissue paper, paper cutter, and meds.

The accident left marks. Not just on my body, but on my mind. The whole incident was hard to swallow.

Allergies, fishes, and strange spirals

Allergies have been a constant companion. Dust, pollen, even fish. Fun fact: fishes saved my life as a kid, but my reports say I am allergic to them. And yes, I have tattooed fishes.

It is funny, how strange life spirals sometimes. My body, my survival, my tattoos—it all feels like a looping story, cruel and beautiful at the same time.

What I learned

After all this, I learned a few things. I keep a diary, a digital log of all the medicines I take. I know which ones hit me harder. I track consumption, phlegm issues, blood tests here and there, just to make sure everything is under control. I note what to improve, what to avoid.

It is like a constant rebellion against overthinking. Trying to control this mirage called “my health.” I can skip care for a day or two, but the thought never leaves my mind. Inflammation is the real evil. It messes with my lips, my skin. Every antihistamine leaves its mark.

This journey is stitched inside me. I am not trying to sell it. It is not my story. It is just something that exists in me. The struggles. The losses. The illnesses. The longing for freedom. The frustration with my own body. It all loops. It all stays.

I try to add something, to make my body work for me, and for my dreams, and my potential misses—because of all of this.

Stay healthy,
Love, Gauri

as i put these words down, my lips are chapped and i’m just coming back from a fever.

the tweet that pushed me to put all of this into words
https://x.com/LoopHealthHQ/status/1966039324727591208

poster design for this essay :

hi, i hope you felt this january is your home for the next 12 months, and you are trying to build it with all the grit, compassion, and spirit it takes to be a better version of you. and even if it’s not good now, remember - it gets worse then better, that’s just how it flows.

the month started with me and my fellas vowing about all we’d do this year - shouting dreams into the night, wishing happy new year. this tweet echoes whenever i think about life.

lately, i am feeling very overwhelmed. there are multiple reasons - my actions not meeting my expectations, me judging myself too hard that even before things start, i feel like a cry baby. somedays i feel too worried about stupid things - maybe a stupid pen can keep me on the hook. and somedays i'm so free that even if i’m bleeding, it feels like a sequential pattern to me.

i am sleeping too much despite having a lot of work to do [only this week]. i understand hustle, work and everything, but i will never enjoy doing something that drains my mind. effectively speaking, i am a person who can sit for work more than 12+ hours [ffs breaks in between], but the work should bring me joy. see the para above, i'm so talking like a capitalist one-shotted by capitalism.

anyways, not the point.

i think the absence of explanation in your 20s makes it all messy, questionable, random, inquisitive, crafted yet sad at times. you follow a frame to achieve something and you’re way too calculative about your own moves because it’s okay if nothing works out but it should work out.

the struggle to balance discovery with hustle - that's the real magic. i hope i am getting better at it. i know i can do it all but not by guilt or pressure but by serene mind [a bit of stress] and love. less about the what ifs.

life is monotonous - working, waking up, doing things - but it's fine because each day holds something within that pain. and maybe that's good.

i believe you should never stop exploring new things at any age. never tried rock climbing? train for it - if you ignore what calls to you, you'll lose a bet with yourself [hard times]. don't ask permission for everything, sometimes just take the leap and learn your own way.

anyways, i journal to stay sane in this capitalist cycle - a junk journal tracking food and flavors, comparing every bite and brand. then there's my doodle journal where each page whispers its own story. making notes on my ipad too, finally getting it right. no real reason for any of this - just keeps my mind busy enough.

i'm reading [kim jiyoung born 1982] right now, halfway through and feeling her deeply in my bones. got tattoos recently and messed with my sleep - fixed it, broke it, fixed it again. there were days i was up at 4:30am, lasted about 4-5 days before falling back to old patterns. but now i know something - i can break a habit of 10 years if i want to. and that's how i know everything's gonna be fine.

got myself a cute pomodoro dino which i really like. the tick tick makes me puke though - watching each second fleeting away.

it was sister's bday this month - that's why the matching tattoos. did some room photoshoots i really like. my lady stayed over and got me my first bouquet. bought a frother, goodbye zepto cold coffee.

went to gurudwara and mandir same day, saw a dog praying. found this new cafe with my babe - from staff to the beetroot tacos and that special cheesecake, everything was perfect 10/10.

i cried a lot this month and i can’t express that too. i lost a friend due to a heart attack and i am trying to distract myself a lot because god knows how miserable i become when i start missing someone. the fact he was my friend from past 5 years - i used to meet him everyday now and then till 2023. then life got ahead, less contact, but i was aware he was doing fine. but this very january i got to know i lost him and it’s sad, unusual because i thought these experiences would come later in life, that i’d have time to linger in memories i created just years ago. i felt this year i could sit in the sun, grateful for everything i have, but now i don’t know what to say.

maybe january is inked differently and i am trying to move afar so i feel less, by keeping myself in this loop of trying different stuff. or maybe i cried so much and i have emptied my emotions to feel anything more. but it will hit me someday and i won’t stand my brain, will get shattered the way everything is in general but i really don’t know.

because all these things hit me and i forget the rhythm to live it all - all the pictures i had with him, us laughing and cringing over him, how he loved shahrukh khan, how this song makes me think of him everytime i miss him.

wherever he is, i hope he's fine because i remember the first conversation about him being this cute fuckboi with all the hickies on his neck, and the guy genuinely said “do you think it's noticeable,” or how he was so passionate about trying or doing something weird. i liked him. amazing punky fella.

i will miss him. we never bonded too much but he was there in the same environment. a nice fella. there’s a song by sufjan stevens “death with dignity” and i think that's who he was.

somehow things will feel unnatural, or somedays you might be so mature that you might stop feeling it all, and other days you will find yourself weeping like a fucking fox. i remember tweeting about how i will disappear in the year for some months, but i missed my friends so much i wasn’t able to do. and then i went back to thinking about this.

it’s weird and vulnerable. winters are hard yet softer when you’re crying because this cold weather tests us all. i cried so many times this month and disturbed my lady and friends that i feel empty, yet i don't have any solution - i can’t fix it.

i am okay with playing this game and suddenly this weather feels like this very song every damn year [about you by the 1975], the times i heard that song are resentful. cinema finds reality in life and reality becomes cinematic sometimes - the emotions were similar to the normal people scene where one of connell and marianne’s friends dies and they all meet and get to know each other.

someway similar yet very different.

anyways, the thing is i am trying my best to keep and do better. i might have skipped a lot of training days this month, but i ran like a tigress that one day with tears, and i think it’s draining enough for this whole month. and i will do better next month and i might just make a youtube video - nothing fancy, just me and the camera. had a cousins meetup too, all the girls together, it was fun.

it’s never the one who leaves, it’s harder for the people in the same space missing the presence of that one human. and anyday i feel wired out, i think how his parents are holding up and will live now onwards. prayers and strength to them. it’s outrageous to feel these many emotions at once but once again, i am a human, and to craft ourselves better i need to be here and there to understand it all.

i will be meeting one of my friends this next week, and i know it will be great and we will share something unhinged yet monotonous that will be worth listening to and knowing about. [met this friend already, posting this blog a bit late]

and that's all i think.

this is my january to you, and i hope you are doing fine as well. just live, never lose hope. this month's playlist and few more images. i don't know how to end this one but it's okay i guess - somedays are unanswered because you need to nibble down the numbness of silence that is there for you.

love, gauri.

hi love,

anytime i write here i feel like im in the 90s with my new internet connection and the world's a bit weird yet lovely place to listen to what i say.

i am a very confused person somedays. i go over the details like should i write a tweet or turn it into my carousel of blog and then i think what brings peace to me. it surely is the blog.

it might be a long one but its filled with so many emotions and i dont want them to fade away somehow so im gonna express them beautifully.

completed one year by getting into one accident and recovering from it. i understand you have heard about it a million times but guess what - it was a lot for me and it changed a lot of me, took so much from me.

considering last year's winters - i was a very low, less confident kid who really didn't want to step outside of the house, just wanted to live in their own misery because misery is contagious and repulsive. i wanted to be alone at that moment because the explanation takes a lot.

here's my year, month by month:

january

- met my college friends when nobody was around

- mostly in the house

- visiting doctors a lot, on medications

- one doctor messed up, my whole body got inflamed

- chapped lips, bloated body, couldn't move properly

february

- kinda same but met this amazing friend who helped me be fine with myself

- reassurance helps so much

- met incredible people through twitter, can't express how grateful i am

- talked to one of the most influential architects in gurgaon - had this long chat about how he helped build mgf’s pvr and ansal's projects from scratch at such a young age. we talked about what if i wanted to do something like that too, all the challenges and what it would take. also met two college friends who are part of the same world now - they've been working with these big projects since 2021. seeing people your age doing such massive things, it's kind of wild and inspiring.

- helped a business grow this year, put down every penny i owned

fan of people who are deeply in love with their little passions and their devotion to their lives and quests

march

- met a physicist working in quantum simulations (amazing guy, completely off the internet)

-got my 2nd client [design^stuff]

- got my nose and ears pierced

- went to marshmellow's concert (first crowded event in a while)

- had the worst bangs ever

- read "the lamp of memory" by john ruskin

i realized something this year - i can't live without structure in my work. need those deadlines and schedules, something planned to get me started [not applicable for my side quests btw]

april & may

- learned some 3d (still not a master)

- bits of leetcode

- contributed to opensource

- joined mma, bought my gloves

- visited college once

- met twitter folks

- read "how do you live" by genzaburo yoshino

june

- spent time in bangalore

- wrote blogs

- met bangalore folks

- read "the man who loved the numbers"

- lots of doodles and art

july

- made a video about maria pyrmechenko

- watched crime documentaries

- started swimming

- began quantum mathematics course with a friend

- lots of evening drives with mom for chai and ice cream

august

- interviews with big tech

- swimming & a lot of pimples

- failed the interview but that's okay

- started learning german

- made these sites planetgauri.com & photosbyg.vercel.app

september

- slow days, just swimming and enjoying life

- learned about marketing and content

- experimenting and failing (which feels right)

- weekend brunches new cafes

october

- cut my hair short [this time i looked better]

- diwali with family

november

- joined gym again

- attended jsconfig conference w my babe

december

- interviews and assignments

- went to pcrc concert

- met more twitter folks

- visited taj mahal with friends

- read 2 more books

- made a comic for him

- visited another doc & its kinda better now

looking back, i had a streak of daily 6-10km runs for 4 months. saw doctors for final checks on these marks. started loving those impromptu late night drives with mom, the way she'd randomly decide we needed ice cream at 10pm, or how we'd spend hours just wandering through markets together.

looking at myself from january to now, its like watching a completely different person emerge. can't believe its the same me who started 2024 barely wanting to step out, and now here i am, swimming, running, making things happen.

its wild how time changes you without you even noticing.

this whole year has been about doing things i never thought i could do. failed at some, sure, but at least i tried. they're proof i was brave/cool enough to try and you should do that too.

sitting here with my laptop, making endless playlists and dreaming bigger dreams - feels right somehow. different. better. ready.

to next year - we're just getting started.

few images

i bought a skateboard in august btw - might be the year to finally try it out. hoping this year brings a lot of changes and mindfulness.

i am grateful for the better times.

happy new year. take care.

love, gauri.

lately i’ve been making some big life decisions thinking about the person i want to become. i remind myself not to sacrifice today’s happiness for future goals because the joy we feel now is what makes memories worth revisiting

if you’re reading this play baby blue by cindy lee. it fits these thoughts

i’ve been meaning to write about love passion and fulfillment but life has kept me busy. today is a slow sunday the kind where your eyes don’t fully wake up

my current update is i have so many plans but i’ve learned to embrace the occasional pause. sometimes those breaks bring the most meaningful realizations

i love hearing honest perspectives about myself ones that spark growth and feel genuine

recently i gave my mom a dictionary. she mentioned forgetting some english words and it bothered her so i thought it might help. she hasn’t opened it yet but i know she will when it feels right

time always feels abundant until you notice how much has already slipped by

one habit i’m working on is breaking my late-night routine. it’s been a decade of staying up working through the night and dragging through the day. i’ve started running again and while the treadmill is convenient running outdoors feels better

this month i’ve been observing myself more listening and learning. it’s a quiet process but grounding

there’s a dream in my mind of a simple life where i read rest and find joy in little things. maybe run a business that’s understated and quietly fulfilling

i’ve also started drawing every day a little sketch for myself or for someone i love. it feels like a good life when you explore music make art and take bold decisions

delhi-gurgaon winters are here and all i can say is go after what matters to you. holding back only leaves room for regret

i write these thoughts as reminders for myself and maybe for you

bye for now; take care

let me answer the question i keep getting in my dms—“what’s that mark on your face or shoulders?” i had an accident. i’m fine, but still can’t do a handstand. my face is healing, but smiling from the heart still reminds me—"hey, lil chipmunk, don't laugh too hard, you're not there yet."

it’s okay. the scars will fade. i’m off meds, less inflammation, and grateful for that. i’ve been nicer to myself lately. i cried every day after the accident, cursing everything that led to it. but now i’m feeling good. i was just being dramatic, maybe because i was alone.

i’ve since met amazing friends who love me. as for my elbow, it’s still healing. got a bumpy scar, but it's fine. i’ve even been deadlifting again—took a break for a while. knees are good too; i can run a solid 10k.

the real reason i’m writing this is so on bad days, i can look back and remind myself that i’m doing better. truly, i’m happy—dancing, writing, reading, crying when confused, but loving life. trying new haircuts, being calm, and louder when needed. no more hiding from people, which is a win. i’m back, more than ever.

i think things happen to show you the worst, so you can savor the sweetness of small moments. maybe the accident happened because i was obsessed with perfection, unable to finish what i started. now i accept things more—acceptance takes courage, and that’s worth it.

you can’t always plan or control life. sometimes things just happen, and that's fine. i’ve learned to reduce the noise in my mind, to stop judging myself so harshly. that stubborn kid in me used to say, "why am i not this or that?" but now i say, "wow, they really tried."

i hope this helps anyone reading feel better about what’s not going right. things will get better, but you have to do the work. keep going. life is constantly unfolding. you can rediscover it anytime, anywhere—even buying gum from a local shop, not just on mountaintops. there are no rules—adulthood is about making your own plot, storyboard and direction.

take care of yourselves. love yourself, appreciate the good days, and cry when you feel wasted. wishing you all good health.

i’m a big girl now, yes and bye.

love, gauri

It's like when you do something too much; you either desensitize your brain or start to get the ick. I concluded that if you're me, you can be desensitized but still get the ick.

This isn't just about the icks; it's about how often I can detach from people, but hobbies are harder. When I start to listen to a band, read an author, or watch a series, I feel it might last forever. But then comes a thought, wake up, your mind has surrendered to something else. Learn about it, or you won’t be able to sleep. Which makes sense, because the most astonishing line I heard in 8th grade—don’t laugh—was "change is the only constant." I still get my stimulus hit by this one.

Then I think I might not go back to what I was doing, which is wrong and stupid. Because you do go back and realize either it was cringe, don’t touch it again, or you can make changes and it can become an underrated personality trait.

Here I am, back in my room, reading about ants. I’m thinking of writing an essay about relationships in 2024 because I have a lot on my mind.

I hate strategising. Some days I know exactly what to write, and I keep writing on different topics, then nothing. But then my social media friends who are managers say, don’t put it all out at once.

But don’t you think it shouldn’t be that way? If I’m feeling it now, it should be out now. If it goes out later, the interaction and conversation won’t be as interesting for me.

I’ll do what feels right because when fewer people are paying attention, liberty is like an expensive ornament/orgasm you own, which can’t be traded but should be enjoyed at this moment.

take care, love gauri

it’s the end of the year and i’m glad i read this book. this pure fiction documents every part of 20s-30s life's existential crisis, with some patches that remain unhealed. how she confidently expresses love for someone but never her own misery.

the book is filled with amazing graphics, love, care, discussions over lovers, those eyes, rejection, death, the eyes of people on someone dying, how it’s all layers, nothing on skin, the tension between judgments and truth, truth bombs, city and sewer.

i read this book last year in december but always wanted to revisit it as it holds a strong, captivating comic style with great narration. a door to ultimate imagination. a love story based on lesbian love and the struggle to make it work.

kari and its resonance with fleabag

kari’s story resonates strongly with fleabag.

leading a life alone in a city where everyone is busy with their own lives, she faces troubles here and there, with intrusive thoughts and intuition talking.

she has a roommate like fleabag’s sister, and their conversations echo those between fleabag and her sister.

an old lady, blunt and bold enough to say anything she wants, opens kari to the reality of the world.

kari knows a few guys who school her for being in her 20s, figuring out men and dating. that character is very similar to fleabag’s sister’s husband.

kari revisits old places, schedules calls with family, and follows a similar trajectory but with different emotions. one loved it, the other always felt weird. the book delves into doubts, thoughts about dying, and missing that one person forever.

it captures the essence of living through life's struggles with a mix of depth, drive, and display, making it a compelling read that resonates deeply.

most important the hairstyle

and i feel this particular series Julienne Dadivas also blends with the theme.

thanks for reading.

love, gauri.

we do things we find cool.

we love the cool community.

we appreciate little risks and thunders because they’re cool.

but honestly, anything can be cool; it just needs a blend of three elements:

depth: the love for details, everything from bits and pieces. it’s about diving into the intricacies, understanding the essence, and cherishing the nuances.

drive: the craziness behind it. the passion that fuels your endeavors, the relentless pursuit of what excites you.

display: how you present it, reaching your small community. the way you share your passion, making it resonate with others.

it's like the simplest formula i can give you.

to make anything cool, you need to believe in it, and that belief will only work if you follow depth, drive, and display.

a few brands or instagram pages often cross my mind.

think about a guy who cares about the design of chairs. you wouldn’t believe it, but the design of chairs is one of the most unchanged, which doesn’t even perform its cycle. yet, some guys are obsessed over it. their obsession is about how this can be changed without affecting more users. their passion drives innovation in a seemingly static domain.

so, there’s one more thing: coolness is only acceptable when you break the mould without breaking anyone else's habits

think about any product. you can’t just introduce anything absurd. it can be absurd, but it will only be accepted and appreciated by people if they think it’s something they already know and follow.

people love to pick different but within the same frame. remember that puzzle we used to get in our daily newspaper? it was different every day but always familiar.

now, this might be a handy example of what we consume or the objects we use daily.

i know someone who is obsessed with how rain sounds on anything natural. they have all the equipment, recording the exact frequency, prepared for any time it rains. their dedication to capturing the purest sounds is inspiring.

a person in a niche is cooler than anyone else, at least for me. their focus and passion set them apart.

there’s someone i know who believes that satellite launches and comic releases are related. their theory, though unconventional, stems from a unique blend of interests.

you cannot be cool if the art doesn’t humble you. true coolness comes from a place of humility, where your passion and creativity meet respect for the craft.

and remember thats you being cool. a cuteass strawberry.

take care, gauri.

It's already the fifth month of the year, and I find myself diving deep into the invisible cage of routine and the spiral of life. It's amusing, and I learn something new every day, but the insights from within are sometimes beyond me.

Recently, I realized that I wanted to produce meaningful work with undivided attention. Instead, I found myself as a mere consumer of media. I used to feel guilty about it, but now it’s better—perhaps I’m more resilient to the constant stimuli.

I have a habit of assigning elements or characteristics to people I meet. It's not about defining them rigidly, but rather forming an initial impression. For example, based on someone’s movie recommendations or habits, I might associate them with a character from a film I’ve watched. This image remains until I spend more time with them in real life. It’s a curious psychological quirk.

Fitness Journey

Another thing I’ve noticed is my desire for a sculpted body. I used to work out for two hours a day with a good run and diet. Now, I do it in bits and pieces but still long for that discipline. I need to either commit fully or accept it as a past accomplishment.

Optimizing Life

I try to optimize everything, but recently I’ve made peace with not overdoing it. I don’t want to waste any effort, but this often steals the thunder from my actions. For instance, I spent hours debating whether to use my iPad or pen and paper, caught in a spiral of overthinking. I’ve decided to use my iPad for studying and pen and paper for general tasks.

Forgiveness in Relationships

I forgive friends easily but struggle to do so in relationships. I’m working on that—so, be a good friend to me.

Welcoming People with Tokens

When I welcome people into my life, I often give them a token, like buying something for them if we’ve shared meaningful conversations.

Collecting for Pleasure

I also have a habit of buying random things for my simple pleasures. I love collecting items, which I used to deny but now embrace. It creates patterns in my life.

Lastly, I’m a person who adds everything to a to-do list. I’ve always known this about myself, but now I fully acknowledge it.

Take care, Gauri.

Hello there folks,

It's been a while since I've written a blog post, and today I wanted to share my thoughts on a recent read. Writers often speak more to the reader than to those in front of them. As someone in my 20s, I often grapple with life's complexities. This book resonated with me because the plot speaks directly to the reader.

The book follows a boy in his second year of junior high school as he navigates friendship, bullying, and the wisdom of his uncle's essays on life, sense, and ethics. It's a touching story that I believe is a must-read for children.

It also makes you wonder about the countryside of Tokyo, its streets, the kids there, and life in Staples.

I initially picked up this book because I'm a fan of Ghibli films, and Miyazaki mentioned that their next film would be based on it. However, the movie, though named after the book, takes a different direction.

Notable Aspects

I love how the writer emphasizes the different lives that exist in a classroom. Some kids will never know the hardship of other kids. They wake up around 5, leave their house, and then come to school, reducing social boundaries. The most important aspect is letting the kids know about the world and letting them choose how they should handle it with care. Embracing the creators, there's one instance in the book where they discuss that even if you are a consumer at heart, you should know where your cheese is coming from. Make sure you understand the hardships and embrace everyone who is putting effort at the very beginning of the chain.

"A habit of thinking honestly."

"If you always try to follow the rules, you will never become your own man."

"If your regrets help you to learn an essential thing about being human, that experience won’t have been wasted on you."

"If we were not born with the ability to conduct ourselves with morality, there would be no reason for bitter tears."

There are a few conversations where his Uncle and the boy Copper ask about life, and they are going to stay in my mind forever.

About Napoleon, Newton, looking at the Ginza city from the rooftop, the rich and poor lifestyle, and how to be a better person, expressed beautifully through writing.

Conclusion

I think it is a smooth, calming read, of around 250 pages, which doesn’t feel like it. A lighter form of pocket wisdom in each lesson. I like books where two people are having a conversation about life, and somewhere, it is on the edge of being in that category. Early teenagers should read it, to feel something, and it is sort of a lighter version of "Tuesdays with Morrie." Yes, I'm obsessed with that book because I love old people advising their experiences about life.

Sometimes, I think they aren’t aware of what’s happening around the globe, tech, and how humans are interacting, but somewhere, their experience lands on very precise detail that leads us to wonder how it is even relatable and closer to the current experience.

In conclusion, this book has been a profound read for me. It encapsulates the essence of life's lessons in a gentle, insightful manner that resonates deeply. It's a gem, especially for those seeking a reflective and meaningful read.

Keep reading and drop your recommendations here. I'm mostly active on Twitter.

Take care,

Gauri

As you read this, I might be dancing in my room to some tacky songs, but amidst the rhythm, there's a mournful cry for the man I loved the most. Through the ability to time travel, I witness my evolution every month, growing wiser and calmer than before. Just two years ago, I wrote about my impatience, loudness, and rudeness at various points. Perhaps I was occasionally mean in jest, adopting habits from him.

He exemplified the importance of caring for one's body, engaging in random adventures, staying active, and reading incessantly—a true embodiment of calm creativity, in bits and pieces.

Our schedules define us, and while we may forget the days, the way we spend each minute imparts meaning.

Money is important but merely an asset. If you encounter someone consumed by it, leading and controlling every detail, flee, for it will corrupt your soul.

Ask questions.

Be brave—even if it haunts you. Bravery with honesty paves the path to peaceful sleep.

Never remain stuck, and never fear feeling lost. Being stuck is a part of the process.

Admire everything—the way water flows, savour slow moments.

The pursuit is to become someone you aspire to be, something that realizes your potential.

Keep your circle short; it's lovely. Don't adhere to rules that defy your understanding.

Connect with energy within yourself or in the universe, where decisions are made through hours of conversation.

He used to say, "I will teach you addition, but first, do a headstand."

"If I come home next time, I want to see you reading a book by a different author."

Don’t marry out of duty; it should be because you admire someone's presence, their glow brightening your day rather than just reflecting it. During our word games, he despised my shortcuts, insisting, "You're not playing for me, but I don't want you to lose in front of me."

He suggested wearing grey when sad or crying. Have colour preference for your emotions.

Stay hydrated; drink warm water after the meal. A big fan of small habits, health-conscious. Always reading something.

His knowledge of herbs and the body was so profound that I struggled to articulate it. He used to visit my school and pick me up—those core memories are cherished deeply. Each passing day intensifies my longing for him, as I navigate through the world without his voice to guide me.

The idea of creating a podcast with him once crossed my mind—an exploration of life spanning generations, delving into topics like herbs, plants, books, mythology, life, death, and habits.

I recall a moment when I recommended a patriotic movie to him; his response reflected his insightful understanding, "Do you think I'm unaware? I've been involved in politics, and it's better not to get entangled." These conversations often whisked me back to the time when he, a mere 8th grader, witnessed the unfolding of the entire independence movement. This fact adds a profound personal connection to his stories, deepening my appreciation for his firsthand experience and perspective on the historical events that shaped our nation.

The image of him preparing for an event, adorned in a dhoti and kurta, or sometimes even his PT uniform, remains etched in my memory, a poignant reminder of his presence. He used to attend my Parent-Teacher Meetings (PTMs) dressed in this distinctive attire, leaving a lasting impression on everyone he encountered.

He was always overjoyed when he got to know I achieved milestones in my life, like getting my first job. On those occasions, he would call me and say, "You're going to be the best chubby-cheeked girl in the world, Gauri beta. It's time to move to a different city."

I miss and think about him every day, longing for the opportunity to talk more, share more stories, and learn more from each other.

I miss his voice.
Today, I mourn his loss, longing for his presence. This digital note serves as my stamp in the vast world of digitalization—a tribute to a curious, wonderful man. I consider myself fortunate to have experienced his wisdom, and growing alongside him. I'm certain he misses our conversations, delving into the complexities of our orthodox world.

Love him always, always.