i. Nida Fazli’s Hindi poem ‘Man Bairagi Tan Anuragi, Kadam Kadam Dushvari Hai’ (loose translation: The Mind is Ascetic, the Body is Materialistic; We Face Challenges Every Step of the Way). I found it as the epilogue of this movie called ‘Ayyari’, loved how it sounds and decided to dig up the entire poem. It’s about the unspoken hardships of being human, and how we find (or don’t find) joy in it.

ii. Animals are Passing from Our Lives by Philip Levine - it is recited in first person by a pig that is on its way to the slaughter house, but I also think it’s a metaphor for someone that the system grinds to death on account of their gender, race, class or religion. I found this poem in Ross Gay’s Book of Delights and had been on my to read list for a while.

2. I read three very different kinds of books

i. The Farthest Field by Raghu Karnad. I have been meaning to read Raghu Karnad for many years now, since the first time I came across The Wire (where one of my articles was published in 2020) and finally made it happen. And it is such a delight to read him. In this book, he bases his characters on his maternal grandmother’s family (who are Parsis living in Calicut) and traces their story across the second world war, exploring what it was like to be an Indian soldier in the British army right before India attained independence (post which their stories were forgotten because they didn’t serve the nationalistic narrative of either Britain or India/Pakistan). It is a bold narrative arc to attempt, the intensity of the research comes through very clearly (and in places gets to deep into military jargon), and it has been done with a lot of empathy. While the title of his book can be taken literally as a far field where soldiers go during the second world war, the metaphorical meaning, where the far field refers to death and the farthest field refers to the state of being forgotten because everyone who knew you is dead, is powerful. I totally recommend that you pick it up.

ii. The Real Deal by Karishma Kaushik. I picked this book up because I have been following Karishma’s journey for a few years now on social media

It is a part memoir, part informative non-fiction on being an Indian woman in STEM. It is a first of its kind book to be written for the Indian audience, I love how Karishma is honest about a lot of the challenges she faced (and identifies the systemic issues that led to those challenges, as opposed to tending towards the ‘you should push through challenges’ jingoism). However, the book in some parts tends to fall prey to the same gender norms that the author is attempting to dismantle (eg: where she glorifies her mother’s career as a physician while also being a great homemaker), and towards the end just ends up being info dump that can be gathered on the internet. It’s a great starting point, and I look forward to Karishma’s future works.

iii. I re-read Malayalam actor Innocent’s memoir ‘Cancer Wardile Chiri’ (transl: Laughter in the Cancer Ward’) where he opens up about his (and his wife’s) battle with cancer, how that changed his worldviews, and brings in his characteristic humour to help himself tide over the hard times (and now help anyone reading to do the same). Its brevity is its most potent quality.

3. I have been listening to a bunch of diverse stuff lately (mostly because doing the dishes is a boring piece of work).

i. An episode of the Gone to Timbuktu podcast with Taran Khan (author of Shadow City": A Woman Walks Kabul that I have written about before) where she talks about her trips to Kabul, what drove her to using writing as the thread bringing the book together, and how that book evolved over time in her mind before it got into the form factor that it is in. I love the kind of questions that the host Sophy Roberts brought to the conversation.

ii. An episode of the ‘Bad People’ podcast, co-produced by BBC Sounds, where hosts Julia Shaw (a criminal psychologist) and Amber Haque (a journalist) address the question whether parents of school shooters should be held liable for their children’s crimes. They pick up the specific case of Ethan Crumbley, a school shooter in Detroit, and break it down to identify the role of his parents in this crime. While the topic was pretty interesting, I felt that the episode didn’t really live up to my expectations.

iii. I am a fan of actor Roshan Mathew, and when I chanced upon an interview that Pink Lungi (independent entertainment platform for Keralites) did with him, I pounced on it. While Roshan was as charming and authentic as ever, I felt that the interviewer kept jumping from one topic to another without going deep into any of them, and that he kept trying to prove to Roshan how much he knows about the former.

iv. Lenny Ratchitsky interviewing Canva founder Melanie Perkins. This is the first time I am listening to Melanie speak, I was captivated by how she articulates Canva’s vision, how she is proving that you can do good in the world while being one of the most profitable private companies, and what her journey has looked like so far.

v. A 2016 lecture by feminist political theorist Cynthia Enloe on what militarization looks like as a process and what beliefs that many of us strongly hold often lead us towards it (eg: the belief that the world is a dangerous place, that people are selfish). Cynthia is a wonderful orator and a delight to listen to in spite of the not-so-pleasant stuff is she talking about.

vi. A Big Think episode on the open questions in the field of consciousness hosted by Kmele Foster. I love this episode because of the diversity of guests who speak in it (all the way from a physicist turned neuroscientist to a Hindu monk to a tech entrerpreneur) and who offer different perspectives on tackling the fundamental question.

vii. An ARPO episode on a temple restoration project in Kerala (i.e. Kunnamangalam temple) that won the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Award for Cultural Heritage Conservation, how they brought in local artisans and craftspeople to implement it and funded it through community-centric initiatives. It flips the script on how heritage conservation is typically viewed (as a state-funded effort). This is the first time I am hearing of conservation architects as a real job (check out Ezha Heritage) and the impact they are making in the field, and on the sustainability front.

4. Some Articles that caught my attention

i. I discovered the Work Bravely substack by Kristan Lowe quite by accident. I chanced upon an article she had co-written with Lenny Ratchitsky on founder branding, loved how she had broken down the concept with clear examples, and decided to check out Kristen’s own blogs.

I absolutely love this series of blog posts she is doing on identifying AI writing. I have been trying to formulate by own frustration with encountering LLM-generated slop on the web into words, she does that beautifully in the first blog of the series. I also appreciate her mental model around identifying LLM-generated content and I am now actively leveraging that to decide what content I should read and what I should skip. While LLMs will evolve over time, I am sure this is a great starting point to continue to be able to distinguish human writing from machine generated ones.

ii. This New York Times article written by a Peruvian journalist about how poverty and the conversation around drug abuse looks very different in the US compared to their home country

iii. This article by Anish Gawande about the role of women like Usha Mehta during the Quit India Movement. This has prompted me to put the book ‘Congress Radio: Usha Mehta and the Underground Radio Station of 1942’ on my to read list.

iv. A quote that I found pretty intriguing
”Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I came across this in the prologue of the Malayalam movie Unmadham, which talks about a cop investigating a case that is tied to supernatural elements.

v. This Works in Progress article by Saloni Dattani about how far we have come in terms of expanding healthy lifespans (and how underappreciated that is), and what bottlenecks there are to enabling lifesaving drugs to come into the market today. I love how she touches on innovative funding mechanisms that have enabled drugs like the ebola vaccine to be widely accessible.

vi. The article titled ‘How to Talk to God’ by former a16z partner Vijay Pande. The TLDR of the article is that there is inherent knowledge that we can tap into when we quieten our nervous system and that is what makes us stand out in the world of AI. Written with AI and overall poor choice of words (to be honest, I picked it up because the title was intriguing).

vii. An article by biotech investor Chloe Lambert about long read DNA sequencing, and why it is struggling to go mainstream. Again an AI written article, but is an interesting breakdown of the tech and the unit economics.

viii. Intriguing investigative piece by Jasmine Sun on how data centers are being viewed in the Mid West1 of the United States, and how they are slated to influence election outcomes. I love how Jasmine goes on the ground, talks to people, paints a picture of the towns she visits before giving us opinions aired by the residents. I look forward to the next pieces in this series.

ix. An article by neuroscientist Anil Seth in Noema Magazine about how conscious AI is not coming anytime soon. It’s a pretty jargon heavy article (took me a good 3.5 hours to finish reading) but has interesting points of view. And I learnt a bunch of interesting things from it - the oldest known analog computer is an ancient Greek mechanical device called Antikythera mechanism; the brain's tendency to see familiar shapes, patterns, or faces in random, empty objects or plain surfaces (eg: seeing a horse in the clouds) actually has a name and is called pareidolia.

5. Some movies I watched

i. Devil Wears Prada (the original and the sequel). The first one tends towards being honest towards oneself, and picking the lane that you really want as opposed to what you think you should want. But seems pretty basic to me. I honestly don’t get the hype.

ii. Sudani from Nigeria - It is about a young man from Nigeria who comes to Kerala in India to participate in a football league; he faces an accident and the manager of his football team ends up bringing the injured player to his home, and the movie shows how the manager’s mother and her neighbour (who are the primary caretakers) develop a fondness for the young Nigerian boy and how he reciprocates, in spite of them not being able to communicate with one another due to language barriers.

iii. Tourist Family - It is about a family from Jaffna who migrate to Tamil Nadu in India (during the civil unrest in Srilanka), how they end up developing deep human relationships with their neighbours, and how the neighbours end up rescuing them from law enforcement when the time comes. It is a reminder that belonging does not come from markers like nationality, but through everyday interactions (the movie tends to have some random sequences of long emotional conversations between the characters, but is otherwise a great watch).

iv. Unmadham - It is a story rooted in magical realism, where a police officer (who is an aspiring scriptwriter) begins investigating a crime that the others in the force refuse to engage with due to fear of the supernatural. I love how the lizard is used as the motif to bridge the material and supernatural worlds; the thin border between sanity and insanity. It also engages with how members of the police force interact with each other across ranks, and how they in turn engage with their family members.

v. Ronth - another story centered on the police force in Kerala, this one attacks the intricate interactions of caste, class, religion and privilege affect how crimes happen, how they are perceived, and who is persecuted for these crimes. I believe that this is a theme that can be extended across police forces in different parts of the world, and engages with instances of militarization (that Cynthia talks about in her lecture linked above). It is nuanced, layered and deeply moving.

Subscribe now

1. Books

   i. A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif. It’s a satirical story about the state of Pakistan during General Zia’s regime and conspiracy theories surrounding his assassination, told in first person from the perspective of a young air force recruit. The story felt fresh, and kept me turning the pages to find out what the exploding mangoes refers to. It has some incredibly funny phrases which I thought would have been a great fit for a stand up comedy performance, but not necessarily a coherent novel-like narrative.
   

   ii. English August by Upamanyu Chatterjee tells the story of a young man in the 80s who clears the Indian Civil Services exam, gets posted in a rural town and how he goes about reckoning with the absence of purpose in his life. While the premise is interesting, the writing is downright disgusting and disturbing. One could perhaps argue that disgust is a feeling that the writer intended to invoke in the reader to drive home his point, but I totally wouldn’t recommend picking it up.

   
   iii. Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul by Taran Khan is a travel memoir. It’s deeply personal and yet universal; incredibly poetic, and makes the reader feel like she is in Kabul along with the narrator. It takes you through the history of Kabul through a woman’s lens, humanizing the people in a country that is often only in the news for violence. I loved reading it because I could relate to parts of it in the way she describes how South Asian society responds to women who travel solo, through unchartered territory.

   
   iv. Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy. It is a part memoir, part ode to the legacy of her mother, Mary Roy. I love this phrase in the book where she describes her mother as ‘she was my shelter and my storm’. Incredibly captivating writing, but I thought it was too stretched out for no good reason, and that she glorifies her inability to commit to anything.

   
   v. Starter Villain by John Scalzi. It is a science fiction satire (think typing cats and dolphins that unionize), I love the world building and the humour, but ends up without a clear plot.

   
   vi. It’s About Damn Time by Arlan Hamilton. It is a memoir of a black woman who starts a VC fund to back underrepresented founders, I love how authentic and optimistic her writing is. However, it steps into the preachy self-help territory at some point.

   
   vii. Rashomon Gate by I.J. Parker. This is the first time I am reading a mystery novel with a 11th century Japanese detective. The world building is great, but the narrative arc breaks down as the detective investigates multiple unrelated mysteries at the same time, and ends up getting the reader very confused.
   

2. Short Stories
   i. The Bet by Anton Chekhov. It’s an interesting story of a 15 year long bet on capital punishment, and how both the betters lose in the process. It holds a mirror to the foibles of human society, and shows again that Chekhov has observed people like no other writer.
   
   ii. I re-read ‘The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse’ by William Saroyan. I love the world building, the way the characters are depicted and how the writer finds humour in everyday life of immigrants.
   

3. Articles/Blogs
   i. ‘Joy’ by Zadie Smith. I found this article through Ross Gay’s Book of Delights. It’s a primer on the difference between pleasure and joy, and how joyous things are not necessarily pleasurable. It’s a modern day take on the questions that we have been asking since Aristotle’s time in the form of eudamonia and hedonia, and how we pick between these. The interesting piece about this article is that it’s told in a memoir style, and doesn’t try to put either joy or pleasure on a moral high ground over the other.
   
   ii. Two articles on Pudding, I love their visual storytelling pieces.
   - Happy map - it breaks down a 2017 study done on 10,000 people in the United States about what makes them happy. It breaks down the factors and how different these are across different parts of the country. It would be interesting to do something on these lines in India, including differences across caste, class, religion and gender.
   - Women’s Sizing - it talks about how the lack of standardization in the sizes of women’s clothes across brands, the history of how existing sizes came to be, and how the current system is skewed towards a certain body type. Again would be interesting to do a comparative study like this across India brands.
   

   iii. Will You Sit in Discomfort with Me by Ariela. I love the premise about how sitting in discomfort is a strong signal of a good relationship, but ironically it felt very AI generated.

   
   iv. An interesting piece in Asimov Press about how the first vortex mixer (an equipment that is a staple in biology labs) came to be, and how it went commercial

   
   v. A provocative New Yorker piece on whether Sam Altman of OpenAI can be trusted; felt a little like anti-Altman propaganda, but interesting read nevertheless

   
   vi. This article by Jake Wintermute talks about an interesting approach to collecting more biology data to build self driven labs. I am concerned about this falling into the perpetual motion machine territory (and hence becoming thermodynamically impossible) but perhaps worth a shot.
   
   vii. This piece by Matt Dileo talks about three keys practices that can help a biotech (wet lab driven) startup move faster. While I believe these are great insights, I would have loved to see some case studies/examples for each of these practices.

   
   viii. Antimatter transported in a truck by CERN earlier this year. An article on that in Nature, and a video explainer. This BLEW my mind.

   
   ix. Two Indian express articles:
   - An op-ed on VD Satheesan becoming the newest chief minister of Keralam, and how he broke the hegemony of the Congress old guard through grassroot level support
   - A satirical take on how death is dealt with in India. Interesting premise, but the writing could have been better
   
   x. An article by Na’ama Moran on why women founders are typically underfunded and what could help bridge the gap. I am looking forward to testing some of these tips out and sharing how it went.

   
   xi. An article by Jacques Fataccioli (professor at Sorbonne University in Paris) on the seminal work that launched the field of microfluidics. I learnt something new from it, but the writing reads very AI generated.
   
   xii. Let it Crash by Vijay Pande (former partner at a16z) about how the imminent market crash is perhaps great for the economy if coupled with factors like state capacity.
   

4. Podcasts

   i. The Catalyst episode on ‘The Rise of Flexible Data Centers’ talks about how energy distribution is becoming dynamic between grids and data centers powered by multiple operators through multi-stakeholder partnerships.
   
   ii. Techcrunch episode on nuclear fusion and the investments going into it in spite of the long timelines; it’s an interesting piece to listen to but the hosts try really hard to take a middle ground here perhaps because of how fusion is a technology of national interest across the world

   
   iii. Dwarkesh Podcast episode titled ‘Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird’ with historian Ada Palmer is such a delight to listen to, partly because Ada is incredible storyteller who is able to break down complex historical nuances into easy to understand bits by correlating to contemporary examples. I am excited to pick up Ada’s books soon.
   

5. Social Media Posts that made me stop scrolling
   
   i. Why Gemini’s nano banana is called nano banana?

   ii. How computer programs came from the patterns in weaving

6. A question I have been grappling with for a bit:
   Should I get through a hard and dreary book or leave it for later when I am better prepared? How do other readers get through this dilemma?
   
   

   Subscribe now

   
   
   

A. Fiction

i. I read ‘The Secret History’ by Donna Tartt. The writing is gorgeous, the setting incredible, the way the writer goes into the minds of the characters is gripping to the core, the first half is an absolute delight to read. But the second half went down-mountain (it’s a steeper fall than a hill xD) and left me disappointed.

ii. Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq is a translated collection of short stories revolving around the Kannada Muslim community who live in parts of Hassan. It draws from Mushtaq’s years of experience advocating for women in these communities, and retains a lot of local slang without confusing the reader too much (like Arundhati Roy does in ‘The God of Small Things’). I love how Mushtaq is able to address and often ruthlessly critique power derived from an intersection of caste, class and religious privilege in a humorous and light-hearted way, without making light of the situation. While I can feel that a lot of the original essence has been lost in translation, I definitely recommend this one.

iii. A standalone short story called ‘You Disappearing’ by Alexandra Kleeman which takes an interesting world building approach to the apocalypse, and how people respond to it. While I love the premise, I wish the story was better fleshed out.

B. Interesting mishmash of non-fiction content

i. An op-ed by civil servant Rajitha Chandrasekar on the North Block of the Rashtrapati Bhavan (the official residence of the President of India) which is being vacated and converted to a museum, as offices relocate to the newly built Kartawya Bhawan complex. I love how keenly Rajitha observes her surroundings and how she manages to put them into words in a way that makes you chuckle even if you have very little context about the North Block. It feels like you are being let in on a little secret by a friend, definitely worth reading.

ii. I have always been wary of the narrative around optionality in career choices. In high school, you are told that a science stream with biology and mathematics keeps maximum choices open, in college you are encouraged to sit for placements across different sectors (and perhaps do a finance or a data science minor) to keep your options open. But I have seen people from across backgrounds do their life’s best work in spite of never having started out with optionality, for instance the founder of one of the fastest moving alternate-polymer tech companies in Bangalore studied history in college (I have many more examples but this should clarify the point). That’s precisely why I loved this op-ed by Simon van Teutem on the trap of optionality, and how institutions looking to cultivate moral ambition can step up to untangle this trap.

iii. This episode on the ‘99% Invisible’ podcast about how customer service is designed to be inefficient as a way to boost company bottom lines. Definitely worth a listen.

iv. This episode on the ‘Ideas of India’ podcast where the host Shruti Rajagopalan chats with historian and foreign policy analyst Narayani Basu on the role of K.M. Panikkar in India’s freedom movement, and the making of the republic in the following decade. I am tempted to get my hands on Narayani’s new biography of Panikkar.

v. I read from a bunch of sources about the story of Jim Simons, how he went from being a mathematician and physicist to starting his own hedge fund and making it one of the most profitable funds in the world.

vi. Came across the Journal of Irreproducible Science, which is a humorous science magazine for scientists. I am yet to go beyond a cursory read, will definitely share more as I binge read on it.

C. On startups

1. I read ‘Creativity Inc’ by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace about how the animation studio Pixar was founded, and how they worked on building and enabling good company culture while they were also zooming into their make-or-break feature films. I love the honesty and transparency with which the narrative is shaped, I hope to meet Ed in person some day!

2. An interesting article by Erica Wanger, General Partner at Park Rangers Capital, about how the next generation of companies will be elephant companies and not unicorns. Apart from the fact that elephants are my favourite animals, the article touches on an important shift happening in the startup world, on picking people (employees, advisors, investors) who are aligned with the values of the founder, as opposed to moving (and crashing) as fast as possible.

3. An article on the beer brand Bira and its recent downfall. It’s an interesting read. As usual, Finshots writes in a surface level manner about complex economics and finance topics like these, so if you are a nerd in those subjects this will feel very shallow to you. But if you are just trying to grasp stuff at a basic level, this article is a good primer.

4. An episode of ‘Free Radicals’ podcast with Celine Halioua, founder of the dog longevity company Loyal. It’s a delight to hear Celine speak about her journey and the interesting trajectory with Loyal. A good companion read to this would be Celine’s blog post on her 5th year of building the startup.

   Here are a few themes I am hoping to write about in the next few months:

   1. The legacy of Malayalam actor Srinivasan and what it means for me as a part of the audience fraternity

   2. The concept of the supernatural (or paranormal) in Malayalam cinema, and how the portrayal has evolved over time

   3. Thoughts on how biology is gate-kept, how to shatter those gates and leave them open for it to become as ubiquitous as coding

As usual, if you have reading recommendations, do send them along.

Subscribe now

1. We Solve Murders by Richard Osman. I love the way Osman writes, this is perhaps the first time I have laughed out loud while reading a murder mystery. But the plot was poorly constructed, there were too many characters, too many backstories and many forced happy endings.

2. Short speculative fiction piece ‘How to See the Dead’ by Spencer Nitkey is brilliant. It dives deep into the question of what being able to see the dead through a technology integrated into your retina would mean for the world at large. It felt very much like the stories in Ted Chiang’s collection called Exhalation.

3. I read two articles by Cosmos Institute.
   The first one titled ‘What You Want to Want’ by Harry Law is a shallow description of how desires operate in the world, and ends with an even shallower thought about how we can modulate our desires, especially with elements like social media. There are too many assertions with very little reasoning.

   
   The second one titled ‘What does AI mean for virtue?’ by Kevin Vallier is definitely better than the first article, but tries to engage with a complex theme through very simplistic frames. It raises interesting questions about contestability, but doesn’t delve into how contestability operates in society pre-internet, pre-social media and pre-AI. I would love to read a deeper piece on the subject, if you have any do send them across.

4. This article on beautiful experiments by Ulkar Aghayeva dives into what makes a scientific experiment beautiful. With poignant examples, the author is able to tell us what separates a good experiment from a great one, and how the distinction is between brute forcing and arriving at a conclusion through a conceptual insight that sounds simple but is practically game changing.
   

5. This short piece by Akash on the possibility of a billion dollar healthcare alliance in India is interesting. Given India’s success with UPI, he asks what it would take to build a similar infrastructure for health. I hope we someday live into the answer.

6. Two pieces of content by Jasmine Sun.
   First, an essay on AI friends, how it is becoming more prevalent (across socio-cultural identities, unlike what major media outlets would like you to think), how it touches some very human nerves and a nuanced take on what it would mean to engage with AI as a companion. I love how it’s not a doomsday narrative, and how data driven it is, while also being about the author talking about her personal experiences with different AI interfaces.
   
   Second, a podcast with Kelsey Piper about US politics. I love how nuanced it is, how Kelsey and Jasmine are able to critique systems while acknowledging what those systems do well, how they are honest and nice and fun. It’s such a delight to listen to them talk.

7. Pioneer Labs is a non-profit that researches terraforming of mars. I loved reading this introductory piece about how they are building a new field of research, the variables, and how they are looking to distinguish between them.

8. This piece titled ‘Boring Parts of Bell Labs’ caught my attention because I am trying to build a Bell Labs like culture at my company BioCompute. It’s an interview with a former Bell Labs scientist about his everyday life at the lab, opens up some insights into how the boring stuff lays the foundation for exciting tech.

9. I have been looking for good analogies for culture fit in a company. This Linkedin piece by Harnidh lays the foundation for that.

10. This article by Aishwarya Khanduja (at Analog) critiques the current funding systems for breakthrough science and technology with interesting anecdotes. Some of these criticisms really stand out given how much time and energy I spend these days on figuring out access to capital for the work I do. I also love how she puts forth some foundations to discuss what the next generation of funding models would look like.

11. This Instagram carousel by brownhistory tells the story of Jayaben Desai who started a protest for the rights of South Asian workers in 1970s London. I learnt about Desai for the first time from this piece, and thought it would be amazing to share.

12. Two pieces by Eric Gilliam on FreakTakes on a new category of organizations called BBNs. They are similar to FROs but are funded through incremental research contracts rather than through philanthropic funding gathered right when the organization is set up.
    The first piece is a primer on BBNs, and the second piece an interview with the founder of Topos Institute that is building models to enable cross-discipline collaborations to accelerate human progress.

13. A short article by Delian Asparouhov on the process of hiring great talent. Need to test some of these things out.

14. A Linkedin piece by Keenan Johnson on building hardware, these are things I wish I knew when I started BioCompute. I love how he distills his ideas clearly and in a way that anyone can understand.

15. A piece on how human blood albumin became mainstream during the second world war thanks to an initiative by Edwin Cohn. I loved reading about how the project was funded, organized and how people were hired to work in the team.

Subscribe now

When I was 14, and was first learning French history, there was a girl in my class who said ‘I hope I end up at the Eiffel Tower for my honeymoon’; I pointed out that she could go to the tower herself if she booked a flight ticket. When asked where I would get the money for it (she knew my family didn’t travel much beyond going from UAE to India for summer vacations), I told her ‘I will have my company and the company will pay for it’. She retorted with solid conviction (the kind that you develop through years of social conditioning) that that isn’t possible, and I could try and fail if I wanted to.

And I remember writing down in my ‘secret’ diary about going to the Eiffel Tower solo before I turn 25 (and prove her wrong). And the reason I couldn’t stop crying looking at the engineering marvel was because I had made the dream come true, two years before I turn 25.

I haven’t spoken to this girl for more than 7 years now, and I had almost forgotten the bet. But the goal became deeply rooted, I began to frantically optimize for it. For better or for worse, I spent all my time either on academics or extra curriculars, with a singular goal of getting into a top university, that would enable me to access the capital and the liberty to realize my teenage feminist dream.

And when you have spent so much time and energy sub-consciously focused on manifesting something, and you actually manifest it, you are at the pinnacle and something in you cracks open. That cracking open is so surreal, beautiful, painful and exciting all at once, so much so that you skip a few breaths and a group of girls who watch this happen hand over a water bottle to you and ask you if a hug could help.

While the fact that a steel structure that looks so fragile can actually operate elevators of such massive capacity and has stood the test of the last two centuries is awe-inspiring, I was more caught up in wondering how the long march to getting there had shaped me; what I had gained and what I had lost (this is an essay for later); and what the future beholds.

*******

A bunch of other things I explored/thought of while in France:

1. Took a train from Paris to Marseille; an overnight ferry from there to Ajaccio and a shuttle from Ajaccio to Cargese, where my conference was being hosted. Cargese is a beautiful village, the wooden cabin where I was staying had a balcony that offered me a front row seat to the confluence of the mountains and the bay, with a sunrise that stole my heart; and a starry sky (unadulterated by the city lights) that made me want to sit down in the middle of the road and gape at until the chill of the weather caught up. I made tons of new friends as we gathered in the community kitchen, shared food, taught each other languages, and played games.

2. The island where Alexandre Dumas’ ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ is set. This is right next to the port city of Marseille (which is also famous for its soap industry), whose protectress is Notre Dame De La Garde, whose church is placed on top of a hill much like a lighthouse is. Devotees offer miniature boats and ships to seek her blessings, much like we offer little miniature houses/cradles in Indian temples. Expression of faith is raw and primitive across cultural divides.

3. Ajaccio. The home where Napoleon Bonaparte was born and raised until he was 9, the church in which he was baptized.

   

   Bar du Marché is the most happening cafe in Ajaccio, run by two amazing women, make the world’s best apple pie and who offered to keep my luggage for a few hours. If you are ever in Ajaccio, don’t miss it.

   Right in front of the cafe was the Sunday market, where a few school girls were selling home made cookies. When asked what they would do with the money, they told me they were raising funds to attend a ballet dance training program in London, and they were so passionate about it, so much so that the youngest girl in the group almost showed me a little performance. I bought their cookies for 2 euros (paying forward the kind of trust that programs like emergent ventures has placed on me), and they were so happy because I was the first person to back their dream (after their families of course). P.S. All of this conversation was happening via Google Translate.

4. After getting back from Cargese, Paris felt distant and cold, almost like you are trying to reach out to someone and they have their back to you. I walked around following the course of the River Seine, exploring different sites of the French revolution. I saw the house that Victor Hugo lived in, and Ernest Hemmingway spent four years in. I didn’t get to see a guillotine (somehow they haven’t preserved any of it).

   

   Image Description: The site where the guillotine once stood (featured in the Tale of Two Cities that Madame Defarge knits while watching executions)

5. Foucault’s pendulum at the Pantheon (yup the one we use to understand the relationship between time period and length).

   
   

   Image Description: Foucault’s pendulum at the Pantheon
   
   The pantheon also houses the mortal remains of the most illustrious people in French history including Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Marie and Pierre Curie, Louis Braille (and more). They had an interactive exhibition about Robert Batinder, an immigrant who became a lawyer and then Minister of Justice, who fought to and succeeded in abolishing the death penalty in France. This is significant given the tumultous history of France.
   
   They also had an exhibition by Ansielm Kiefer, who had set up installations highlighting the futility of war; simple, direct object based references to violence.

6. 80, Rue Mouffetard is a nice street to walk along, and is pretty close to the nearest metro station. I stayed at the Young and Happy hostel there.

   

7. The glass paintings in the Notre Dame cathedral are gorgeous. It is a calming experience in spite of the crowds that throng the site. I wonder how these folks painted the inner part of the dome, what technology did they use?

8. The Louvre is an architectural delight (it used to be a royal residence before). It’s funny how people gather around Mona Lisa more than the other better looking (and more complete) paintings in the gallery, and then judge themselves on the incomplete works of art they make. I should have gotten the audio guide at the Louvre, but I will definitely go back for the remaining galleries sometime.

9. Musée d’Orsay. Many of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings are here. I learnt that the Starry Night has multiple versions and one of them is at this museum (while the more famous one is at a museum in New York).

   

   
   I discovered the works of Edgar Degas and absolutely loved it because of the attention to detail of moments that are often viewed as insignificant (for example, his painting titled The Dance Class shows young dancers getting ready for a performance by stretching, talking to the person right next to them, and in a state of chaos, as opposed to demonstrating a well coordinated performance).

   

   I also discovered women artists Berthe Morisot and Camille Pissaro, and how their works challenged existing depictions of women (for instance, unlike portraits by male painters where the mother looks at the infant with a benign smile, Berthe’s portrait shows a tired mother waiting for her little one to fall asleep).

   

10. Palace of Versaille. The first thought that came to mind when I saw the grandeur of the palace was that I would feel like initiating a rebellion if I were a working class person in that era. But why did this happen in France first and not England (or other European monarchies)? I found this article on the subject that I am yet to read.

    

    Image Description: The desk where the treaty of Versaille was signed indicating the end of World War I
    
    On a side note, I also wonder how the king/queen got onto their beds given the height of the bed.

11. Curie museum. I saw the lab in which Marie and Pierre Curie (and then later Irene Joliot Curie and her husband) carried out their experiments. It’s interesting to see how some of the most life changing experiments in scientific history took place in a lab that was initially a part of a house, and then built into the Curie Institute after their Nobel fame. It was also intriguing to note the advertisements around radioactive products, including face creams and body lotions (which were later withdrawn from the market as the carcinogenic activity of radioactive materials was studied).

12. Sorbonne University and ESPCI, state funded research centers in Paris. Unlike the universities in India or the United States, these research centers don’t enable student communities to form, as they are not residential campuses. I wonder why they designed it that way.

    

    Image Description: Marie Curie painting on the wall next to ESPCI

13. It’s exciting to be in a space where some of the most fundamental political and scientific ideas of our times emerged. France is definitely a country where a lot of action happened in the 19th and 20th centuries, but you can sense a dying civilization there. There is growing opposition to the president Emmanuel Macron. They somehow seem to ignore the fact that most of the rest of the world speaks English, and they need to plug into it. People seem hostile, unwelcoming and perpetually agitated (which is not to say there were kind people on the street who helped me out in spite of the language barrier).

    

    Image Description: The River Seine

Subscribe now

Here is a mishmash of everything that I observed/thought of/felt over the last two months:

1. When I stepped into San Francisco, I felt a wave of nervous-and-proud excitement, the feeling you feel when you are the first person in your family to step foot somewhere or into something. I felt this when I took early morning walks in the BITS campus, almost like I have earned something that was denied to my family across generations. This is perhaps what my grandfather experienced when he moved from the little hamlet called Sreebhoothapuram, where generations of ancestors had practiced subsistence farming, to the bustling town of Thrissur, where he mastered typewriting, the technology that was in vogue back in the day, and worked in the district collector’s office. This is also perhaps what my father felt in his bones, as he moved from Thrissur to work in Bombay and then landed on the shores of Dubai a few years later to work in IT (which had just started booming then). It’s surreal that you get to feel that feeling, and even better when you know that you can touch the shores of a distant land and come back, and not be forced by circumstance to stay there.
   Again, if there is a word for this feeling, I would love to find out.

   

2. I got on the wrong Muni (which is a tram/bus equivalent in SF), which took me to a pre-dominantly black neighbourhood in the city. While the houses and roads looked pretty good (by Indian standards), the place smelled of poverty. The people and the cigarettes they smoke feel different in black and non-black neighbourhoods. Poverty and homelessness looks and feels very different in the US and in India. Drug addiction (especially fentenyl) is a massive issue in San Francisco.

3. Tobacco companies are the companies with the best kinds of advertisement and product stickiness. It’s considered socially inappropriate to tell someone not to smoke in public, in spite of how much environmental and public health damage they are causing, because smoking is a ‘personal choice’, and somehow in the case of smoking personal choice trumps public good. Hiding away from elders in the family and smoking is considered a hallmark of a ‘well spent teenage’ (re: pop culture movies and books). In spite of how much I know about and oppose the agenda and lobbying of tobacco industries, I sometimes feel FOMO (or GOMO, whatever you want to call it, G for grief here) for not having snuck in a cigarette when I was 14; or for not having smoked up when I lived in Goa for fourish years. This continues in spite of the fact that tobacco companies cannot advertise on public platforms, and they are required to write ‘smoking is injurious to health’ on their products. That’s how strong their narrative building is. If you can build a company with such sticky storytelling, you will easily win.

4. I loved how Berkeley and Stanford universities have an open-door policy - anyone can walk into their lectures, look through the books in their libraries, and hang out with the students. This is in sharp contrast to how Indian universities have stringent security measures, timings for entry and exit and strict guidelines around what one should and shouldn’t do.

5. Watching a movie under the stars (without mosquitoes biting you) is a delight, especially if the movie is Ratatouille, and if the people watching the movie with you don’t judge you for not having watched it before.

6. Filling noble gases in glass containers and exposing them to a flame, gives you beautiful patterns, they are a delight to watch on a cold summer night in a Californian forest.

7. Stepping into places that legendary companies started at almost feels like a pilgrim reaching the scared site she has been wanting to be at for a long time

8. The average white American knows very little about the rest of the world

9. There are some remnants of the counter culture remaining in SF, hidden between the B2B SaaS ads.

   

10. There are two kinds of people I met in SF - the doomers and the doers. Within a 24 hour period, I met (i) an Afghani cab driver who moved to the US a year ago, picked up English, bought a car and an apartment for himself and (ii) A white man born in the American suburbs who was complaining about how he ‘had to ask his dad for help to avoid being homeless’ after he didn’t get into Stanford. The contrast in privilege is hard to ignore.

11. The data storage industry doesn’t have it all figured out. Everyone is figuring it out as they go.

12. I really should check out the works of Marshall McLuhan, Douglas Englebart and the book The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler

13. The Golden Gate park is an absolute delight. I wish there were more public spaces like these in India and the UAE.

    

14. The folks who hosted me across my time in the US made me feel right at home. Home is a lot of warmth, and great people (even if you are meeting them for the first time).

15. What does it feel like to be 70 and have your birthday celebrated for the first time in your life, with some 400 odd people show up? I wish my muttassi would articulate better.

Fake candids do be good looking (also it’s a rare photo where my grandmom is smiling wide)

15. There are perhaps some advantages to being complicit in enforcing patriarchal systems. My grandmother’s meteoric social mobility makes me wonder what the individual loses by opposing systems, and whether it is more profitable at the individual level to play by the rules. I am collecting more evidence.

16. My uncle suffers from schizophrenia, so he is typically included from most social circles. This time when I met him, I figured out that he has made new friends at the gym and has joined a music troupe (they actually came to grandmom’s birthday to perform for free). It is a delight when people are inclusive, let him in and accept him for who he is.

17. Why are cab drivers in the US more friendly and fun than those in India? Is there a systemic reason?

18. It’s safer to walk around in Bangalore at night than in SF. This is ironic.

    

19. People use separate washers and dryers in the US, instead of a single machine with an integrated dryer. I don’t know how the efficacy compares.

20. The pipe next to the washroom closet is called a bidet. Portable bidets are a thing. If you are travelling from India to anywhere else in the world, carry one.

21. Marshmallows roasted in a camp fire are called smores. It’s short for some more. They are eaten with biscuits (called crackers), with melted chocolate. It’s a thing.

22. Coming back to office after a long trip feels like coming home. 99.9% of people in the world wouldn’t be able to claim that for themselves.

23. Showing up to celebrate a fellow founder’s milestones can be super rewarding; it’s a time to reflect on what his journey has been like, how hard it has been, and how he managed to keep going. It’s an incredible feeling to know people who dream their dreams and make them happen, especially if you have also seen the messiness of the process.

24. Showing up to a Diwali celebration in pajamas can be fun. Celebrating Diwali with a four year old kid is even more fun (thanks Praveen and Guhika for inviting me to your Diwali party xD).

    Subscribe now

    
    

1. When I think of spiralling, I always think of downward spirals. This article published by Behavioral Scientist introduced me to the concept of upward spirals, and how they can be created.

2. This article by Nikunj Kothari about quiet folks in the workspace got me thinking about what it’s like to build a company culture that rewards the non-obvious but valuable contributions of teammates

3. Deepti Chopra’s recent essay on things that makes one feel at home in a city. I have followed Deepti’s writing ever since I found her writing, she is a poignant writer, and her stuff is super relatable.

4. I started reading a lot of Joan Westenberg’s writing online. Interesting takes on things, but I genuinely wish they were more nuanced. For instance, in this article that talks about why you should stop playing cameo in your friends’ lives, feels very problematically individual-centric. There have been times in my life when I didn’t respond to a lot of people, but they still showed up for me and that made a difference in the positive sense. I try to pass that on as much as I can.
   
   In another article she talks about how cynicism is moral cowardice, as much as I want to agree I also want to argue that it’s often the only self-defense mechanism that people have to deal with all the complexity around them. Assuming a position of self-importance as a non-cynic probably doesn’t mean much.

5. This Lex Friedman podcast with Neil Gershenfeld on self replicating robots and the future of production is super interesting. I am wondering what it would take to build this stuff, and how BioCompute can enable it

6. This Linkedin post by a woman about her 82 year old mother who got a discount at an Apple store because she was enrolled in a learning program that only admits folks who are 50 or older was such a delight to read

7. A critique on the individual-centric approach to PhDs, when knowledge creation is and has historically been a collective endeavour

8. An interesting account of a young person who is self-learning biology. This is fascinating because wet lab biology has been a domain closed off to people who have access to academic/big industry ecosystems, and it’s exciting to see that change. Computer science came into the mainstream when people got access to personal computers. The era of personal labs in biology is already here.

Two of my friends just started their own substacks.

9. Debamita writes about side quests in her first substack post. Debamita is the queen of side quests, you should definitely read this one.

10. Sachit writes about the intricacies of momentum in the quantum world.

11. Now that I am highlighting my friends’ substacks, check out Govind’s substack where he rambles in public about stuff across literature and philosophy that will blow your mind.

12. I read Paper Belt on Fire by Michael Gibson (who is one of our investors at BioCompute through 1517). It’s interesting how he ties in his personal quest to find his biological father, with his philosophical quests, and now his quest to change how people learn by getting people out of academic institutions through access to capital to pursue questions they care about. I especially love the chapter where he talks about how clocks and universities emerged around the same period in history, and how measuring time has shaped how we view our academic journeys (reminded me of the times when my parents or grandparents would refer to gap years as ‘wasted years’, almost as if one’s academic clock has an expiry date). The book evolves into a somewhat unrelated ramble towards the last two chapters, but until then it’s a pretty great read.

13. I read ‘Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology’ by Chris Miller. It’s perhaps the only non-fiction work that has kept me awake till the wee hours of the morning, simply because of how intriguing it is. It tells us the story of the semi-conductor industry, how it started, the complexity of its supply chains, and how that shapes our geopolitics today. It offers some exciting insights into how companies like Micron emerged from the most unlikely regions with their lead investor being a rich potato-chip manufacturer in Idaho. Apart from the fact that the book is written from an America-centric perspective and that it glorifies war, it’s a great read.

14. Courtney Martin’s (as usual tender and nuanced) piece about anger, what causes it, how she expresses it, and how she is figuring out how to engage with it

15. This article examines in detail San Francisco’s crisis surrounding unhinged use of peptides for ‘bio-hacking. I wouldn’t have believed this if I hadn’t met folks in the city who purchase ozempic and other derivates of it from Chinese vendors in the black market. I am worried about how this is going to be the next big crisis that is exported from SF to the world.

A few things I am thinking about:

1. When I call someone, and that person is also calling me at the same time (on a mobile phone), why don’t these calls just connect to each other instead of both people finding the other ‘busy on another call’?

2. How are non-tech roles in deep tech startups typically structured, and evaluated?

3. What parts of our brain make the grass feel greener on the other side of the fence?

Subscribe now

1. I read this fascinating CNBC article about how Judy Faulkner built the largest healthcare management system in the US; it’s interesting that I have never heard of Faulkner before, and she has been running a profitable company for twice as long as I have been alive

2. Rob Carlon’s article about how Moore’s Law is not a technical law, but a business model invented by Intel to keep pushing employees internally + push the industry forward; it’s fascinating how powerful narratives can be especially in the context of cutting edge tech

3. I binge-read White House advisor and ex-a16z partner Sriram Krishnan’s blog. I found this article about how investors rejected some of the world’s most successful companies very early on; the reasons seem silly to us today, but might have been reflective of the prevalent mental models back in the day

4. I read Yuri Milner’s Eureka Manifesto. I don’t think it’s worth the hype at all; seemed very obvious to me, the writing was pretty nice though

5. I read about the Delhi High Court banning Sci-Hub in India.
I remember I was super excited when I discovered SciHub for the first time; in fact the popularity of SciHub is what pushed a lot of academic journals to start open access features. I find it extremely disheartening that this ban happens before the government has put together a credible and universally accessible alternative. Most journal subscription fees are a lot more than what the average student in India can afford + most Indian universities don’t subscribe to these journals either. Banning SciHub makes access to information significantly harder for academics from marginalized communities.

6. I read the MIT Tech Review debate on immortality that happened in 2005. I love the sarcastic-humorous take that the article shave.

7. I read this Asimov Press article on how the weight of a cell is measured. The premise is pretty cool but I wish it was a lot more comprehensive.

8. a16z article on how to hire a strong founding team. Some interesting insights here.

9. A deeply concerning article about how interaction with AI can implant false memories. It’s fascinating how malleable the human brain is and how much we rely on it for decision making both in the personal and public spheres.

10. This video about how much it costs to run UPI on the backend, how banks are pushing costs onto the aggregators, and how it’s likely to fall on the end consumer. The advent of UPI revolutionized fin-tech; I hope someone works out a way to enable the vast majority to keep using UPI, because of how convenient it is.

11. This substack called Velvet Noise. I binge read a lot of articles on the platform. A lot of the writing literally feels like velvet - soft, warm and yet leaving a little sting in its wake.

12. Karley Weinberg reels. They are about a woman talking to her therapist (both sides played by Karley herself), and being so hilariously relatable. Especially her recent ones on how she wants to be ambitious, but her ambition makes her feel terrible, and it’s a weird loop.

13. I came across the term isomorphic mimicry recently. I FINALLY found a way to explain how a lot of institutions borrow ideas/practices from other institutions without imbibing them in spirit, which leads to a poor imitation without any contextual awareness.

14. I had a long(ish) chat with a marine roboticist friend who just wrapped up his masters program as a part of the Erasmus Mundus scholarship program. I learnt the meaning of fjord in Norway, how hard it is to detect things underwater because electromagnetic waves get scattered way too much and pressure waves are the few things that can be relied upon. He explained to me how he built an ML model to direct robots underwater in a way that enables him to increase confidence in voxels based on the data from two cameras positioned at a certain angle to each other.

15. I had another long(ish) chat with a recent awardee of the gradCapital Atomic fellowship about how he is developing a domain specific language for physics diagrams to make it easier to use AI for niche scientific applications. The conversation also took me into the rabbit hole of how going to college for undergrad was valuable for me (TLDR: serendipity + learning how to engage with people with diverse lived experiences); and how it has shaped how I move about in the world.

16. I had yet another long(ish) chat with a guy building a safe browser for kids, and getting there by doing mini projects. I was really fascinated by the fact that he had already developed a tool to track the metrics he considered valuable for his mini projects.
He found me through the BioCompute substack, so I guess there is some intrinsic value to putting my thoughts out into the world, regardless of how imperfect they are.

Subscribe now

1. Tiya by Samarpan
This isn’t the kind of book I would pick of my own volition. But a friend’s mother gave it to me with a lot of love, and I thought I should definitely give it a shot. It’s a first person narrative of a parrot who leaves his nest in search of better lands, the trials and tribulations of the journey and the return home; it’s definitely a beautiful metaphor, but felt a little too simplistic, perhaps because a lot of the substance was lost in translation from Hindi.

2. Pelican Brief by John Grisham
I have read too much Grisham, I am an absolute fan. This isn’t Grisham’s best (nothing beats the Runaway Jury in my opinion), but has an interesting character arc for the protagonist Darby (although romantic involvement with the journalist towards the end was straight up unnecessary for the plot) and gives an interesting sneak peak into the environmental litigation in the US. Given that the book was originally published in 1992 before sustainability became a buzz word, it’s a book whose time has really come now.

3. Orbital by Samantha Harvey
It’s existential, philosophical, poetic, scientific and just hands-down gorgeous. It’s perhaps the first time that someone has attempted a piece of fiction about astronauts in space with such nuance, and grace (and not the ‘oh it’s the pinnacle of human achievement’ lens).

The last time I read such incredible writing was in Call me Esteban, the English translation of a Bosnian collection of stories by Lejla Kalamujic (forever grateful to Abu for introducing me to this one!). While both the books engage with the themes of love, loss and grief, especially in relation to the protagonist’s mother, Orbital is a mirror image of Call Me Esteban, in the sense that the former looks at everything a lens of generative hope while despair drips from the latter.

It’s hard not to fall into the narrative of despair when engaging with themes that make you feel so powerless in the grand scheme of the universe, and I think that’s where Samantha Harvey does a great job; she engages with the hardest of questions and emotions from a space of compassionate optimism. Towards the end of the book, we get to know the six astronauts in orbit so intimately that you can close your eyes and imagine Anton eating a Korovka, Chie running up a hill after her mother, Shaun looking at the postcard that his high-school sweetheart (and now wife) gave him 15 years ago, Nell lighting candles for dead astronauts as a 7 year old, Pietro at the fisherman’s place in Philippines, and Roman trying to cover up the bulge in his neck.

I can’t recommend this one enough.

Articles:

1. This article in The Point, writes about the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981 and how the shooter was thrown into the spotlight, and how that influenced American perception of shooters.

2. In this edition of her newsletter, Courtney Martin interviews Carla Fernandez who studies about and writes about grief. It’s an interesting interview, I hope to be able to pick up Carla’s book someday.

3. I stumbled upon this article with the beautiful title ‘Basking in the Grace of Others’ by chance on Twitter, and loved the theme. It got me thinking about how a sense of agency is crafted in relation with others, as much as it is an individual effort.

4. The previous article led me to another article on agency by Cate Hall, who has an interesting trajectory of being a Supreme Court lawyer in the US, then a number 1 poker player, and now the head of the non-profit Astera Institute pioneering breakthroughs in biotech. I love this blog called ‘Useful Fictions’, and have binged on a bunch of other articles here.

5. Asimov Press is a blog that I have the maximum number of bookmarks for. I somehow keep falling behind their rate of publishing (trying hard not to beat myself up for this), but the content is insane. Recently, I read this piece about scaling proteomics, which is basically the study of the structure, function and interactions of the proteins in an entire organism.

6. I came across this substack called Construction Physics on the Emergent Ventures group. I was blown away by the fact that someone had looked at construction so deeply, this is a subject I am thinking more and more of as I spend more time in the most urban parts of Bangalore, wondering why this city is built so inefficiently.

7. Started reading about Bell Labs on the Freaktakes blog and how their R&D was not all rosy serendipity. Now starting to think deeply about how these kinds of systems can be implemented at BioCompute.

I am wondering if there are any book clubs that meet regularly in Koramangala in Bangalore. If not, can we get one started? Do reach out to me if you want to get involved

Subscribe now

1. The Golden Road by William Dalrymple
   I was super hyped about this book not least because I got a signed copy from Dalrymple at the last Bangalore Lit Fest. This book is about how India was at the center of the ancient world in terms of ideas, commerce and more. Interesting them, introduced me to a bunch of fascinating historical figures I haven’t heard of before, like Wu Zetian, Dandin, Mahendravarman and more.
   
   But this one was very hard to read (I finally finished it this week after two and a half months of grinding through it). It had too much information packed into too few pages, and I really missed the characteristic Dalrymple storytelling. I felt that the narrative could have been split across two or three parts because of the richness and variety of it.
   

2. Gods, Guns and Missionaries by Manu S. Pillai
   As usual I am awed by his depth of research and grace of storytelling (I am a fangirl and am super biased). The theme is super broad - the interaction between Hinduism and colonial Christianity, and how both of these evolved in relation to each other.
   This is unlike anything Manu has attempted in the past, most of his past works being laser focused (for instance, the Ivory Throne focuses on the rulers of the Travancore state within a specific time period). As a result it felt less specific, in spite of how he zooms in to specific characters like de Nobili or Raja Ram Mohan Roy. This is not necessarily a drawback, but a feature different from what Pillai usually does, and it definitely takes great courage to even attempt a book like this, given the complexity of the history, and the nuance needed to present something like this in the current political climate.
   

   These are a few things that stood out to me in the book:

   1. Hinduism, Christianity and the British Raj had one thing in common - none of these was/is a monolith

   2. Monotheism and Polytheism are subjective, today’s ideal of Hindutva nationalism derived from Protestant Christianity, as much as it arose in opposition to it

   3. The first chapter around the spread of Brahminical Hinduism reminded me of Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time - the idea of assimilation as a marker of progress across civilizations

   4. Caste within Hinduism, and how folks from the non-upper castes often think of themselves as non-Hindu (like Ambedkar did) - it reminded me of an anecdote from Urvashi Butalia’s Other Side of Silence about a Dalit woman who spoke of her community surviving a brutal Hindu-Muslim riot during the post-partition period, relatively unscathed (and in fact richer in terms of material possessions) as neither group considered them a part of the other side
      

3. Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward
   I randomly picked this up because it had thought experiments in the title. It’s a book unlike anything I have read before, it’s brilliant, beautiful, unexpectedly sci-fi. This is my first time reading a lesbian author, got me digging into Sophie Ward’s personal life on the web and found that interesting as well.
   

4. Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
   The writing is hauntingly terrific, goes very deep into the minds of the protagonist across different ages, it’s written with empathy and compassion for anybody who has been at the wrong end of abuse (not sure if there is a right end, but you get what I mean). It also looks at the juxtaposition of indigenous cultures with the modern world through the lens of a 7 year old. However, the book by itself was super disappointing, I wished the ending was a lot more coherent.
   

5. Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

   It’s hard to write a review for this one without giving away the plot. Brilliantly imagined, poetically written, it makes you feel very deeply for the three characters that form the center of the plot. It’s about the fragility of human lives and relationships in an era governed by advanced technologies, I urge you to pick this one up.
   

6. There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak
   The book is incredibly well researched and gorgeously written in the characteristic Shafak style but it felt more like a first draft, a collage of different plot lines than a single coherent narrative. It tries to bind different eras and wildly different characters through the same drop of water, but definitely nowhere close to The Forty Rules of Love or 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.
   

7. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
   Classic sci-fi, I loved the world building around the future of the human race, and a race that develops completely agnostic of humans but ends up being space-faring as well. The writing is warm, and endearing and keeps you hooked. I especially loved how it ends (there are sequels to this which I will hopefully pick up sometime soon).

8. Exhalation by Ted Chiang
   It’s a beautiful collection of short stories that imagines worlds based on new technology. While it does look at the technology to some extent, the focus is on how the human race responds to newer technology, and how that shapes relationships between people across space and time. My favourite story in the collection is The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling where different memory recording tools are contrasted to each other, across societies with different cultural beliefs about the preservation of memory.
   

9. The Lion and the Lily by Ira Mukhoty
   I wrapped this book up somewhere at the beginning of this year but a lot of it is still fresh in my mind. I loved the storytelling, the research-backed attempt at decolonizing how we think of the nawabs of Awadh, and especially how the footnotes are a part of the main narrative (as opposed to it being pushed to the end of the book, where readers are less likely to look at it). I was blown away by the description of the women Nawab Begum and Bahu Begum, the kind of autonomy and authority they had, and how each of these folks was fundamentally human. I will definitely be reading more of Ira’s work in the coming months and years (the more intriguing piece is that Mukhoty was never trained as a historian, she in fact majored in natural sciences at Cambridge).
   
   I have also been reading a lot of essays, newsletter articles etc, which I somehow keep forgetting to save and review. I hope to be able to do that over the next few months, for readings related to work and otherwise.

   

   I am hoping to read more about Bell Labs (Idea Factory, Dream Machine, and FreakTakes are on the list), semiconductor chips (The Chip Wars is on the list) and some good fiction, and non-mainstream literature in English, Hindi, Malayalam and translations from other languages. I am also hoping to read a lot more of Kierkegaard, and the four women philosophers from Oxford - Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgley.

   
   Do share your readings lists and send your recommendations my way!
   
   
   

   Subscribe now

Can folks try these out and perhaps build projects/companies/initiatives within existing companies for these? I am sure I would have spent some time on these if I wasn't building BioCompute.

1. Finding rental property in Bangalore, commercial and residential, is a pain.
   
   Trust me, I spent a good part of the last two months on this. Part of the problem is discovery of property.

   In most cases, this has to happen through a broker, especially if you are new to town and don't have a lot of property owning friends/family here. Many a time, brokers don't have proper photos of places and their surroundings to show you. So a lot of time is wasted looking at properties that are totally out of scope for us (eg: neighourhoods that look unsafe/places that are on the second floor without a lift which you know you don't want to take).

   
   What if we could build a community centric platform where regular citizens are clicking photos of TO LET boards that they see along the way and posting it in a repository? This repository could keep getting updated based on people's interactions with that property, either through an owner or a broker. This way brokers aren't necessarily eliminated, like what NoBroker is trying to do, and also the onus is now not fully on an owner or broker to give visibility to a place that is being offered for rent. It gives people like you and me an opportunity to review brokers/landlords and ensure that people operate fairly.

   

   Image Description: Random to let board I found on my hunt xD
   
   It is very similar to how Google improves the efficacy of maps and how wikipedia gets folks to contribute to the world’s knowledge repository. Would incentive structures work the same way? Someone would have to find out.
   

2. Customer experience at airports in India is terrible.
   
   (a) Firstly, there is an expectation to take out all electronics from the hand bag during security check. And if the airport is crowded, this increases chaos, wastes time and puts an unfair burden on the airport officials

   
   This isn't the case in airports in other parts of the world. Why can't electronics be scanned while it's inside a bag? Is it because India doesn't have the necessary computer tomography (CT) imaging equipment? Or is this simply a solvable regulatory hassle? It would be interesting to find out.

   
   (b) Secondly, it’s very hard to keep track of the right gates for boarding a flight. Flight gates can change multiple times and announcements are often inaudible. There is a need to stay constantly vigilant about gate change announcements/delays. One way to deal with this is for the airline to send text/email messages to all passengers involved. But is there a way to bring all of this on a single platform that is easy to track? Can we also bring things like requesting a refund/other assistance also on a singular platform? Can we then convince all airlines to opt into this and connect their backend systems to a platform like this?
   

3. Customer service with a lot of companies is really painful.
   
   There are long wait times for an executive to pick up a call, often they put you on hold for long periods of time and they sometimes don't even get you the information you need.
   
   Can we build AI agents that do the customer service calling for us? Can we get them to ask the right questions, get relevant information and then act on the information? For instance, Jio makes it really hard for you to cancel your subscription. There is no information about that on the website/app, and it’s very hard to get hold of a customer service executive to initiate this action. I would love for an agent to do all the follow ups and just let me know what the final outcome is, and when I need to be available to carry out some physical activity like handing over the settop box to the Jio representative.
   
   There are a bunch of startups building this on the enterprise end, but is anyone building the reverse thing yet, where individual consumers can use their agent to call customer care at multiple different companies and in different contexts? This perhaps doesn’t make sense from a VC-funded startup perspective, but are the other kinds of entities that can make this happen?
   

4. I have an AI notetaker (Fathom is the best so far), a to do list and a calendar. Can all of these be linked so that I don't have to keep going back to the notes to update my to do list/calendar? Basically an integration of fathom, calendly and notion.

5. Can delivery companies like Swiggy/zomato/Zepto or ride sharing companies like Uber/Ola/Namma Yatri help build public toilet infrastructure in India?
   
   I have often seen delivery men/drivers urinate/defecate on the roadside, and obviously this isn't a criticism of them, how else do they relieve themselves given the absence of public toilets in the country? Would companies that employ these folks take responsibility to build networks of toilets like they build networks of warehouses?
   
   Can the government incentivize this and then build on that infrastructure to make it accessible to the general public? Can we then track the nearest public toilet like we track the nearest petrol pump when we are on the road? Who are other organisations that could potentially do this, outside of NGOs focusing on sanitation?

Curious to know if there are folks tackling these issues/thinking about these questions. Happy to test out alpha/beta versions.

Subscribe now

A small town in Bangalore tucked neatly between the hustle of Hebbal and the bustle of Tata Nagar where the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) campus is located - the word Kodige means “gift” in Kannada, Kodigehalli started out as a village gifted by King Veera Ballala III to his loyal brothers sometime in the late thirteenth century.

I have lived in this little town (at least 20 km away from what Bangaloreans consider ‘real Bangalore’) for the last year as I was building my company. And believe me, Kodigehalli is a gift that keeps on giving.

Now that it’s time to pack my bags, and make a move, I am feeling nostalgic about the little joys of this town and thought I would put them down as a list poem (I first found out about list poems from Riya Roy’s lovely newsletter called The Nook).

1. The streets feel as familiar as the back of my hand - every twist and turn, the colour of the house in any given corner, I can perhaps draw the map of my little microcosm in Kodigehalli with my eyes closed, which is a big deal given how much I struggle with directions in general

2. Vinayaka Bakery where a lot of tea and stories are spilled every evening (not that I ever drank their tea). Interestingly, the bakery is at walking distance from a little Vinayaka temple nested within a park that is the lifeline of the neighbourhood

3. Breakfast with the view of a lily pond (where I once spotted a bright blue kingfisher) in the National Center for Biological Science campus

4. The Chiris bakery, with the smell of fresh cookies and cakes wafting towards you as you walk down the street; I have had to hold myself back on many a day

5. The little boy next door who is just learning to walk; there are days when I wish he knew how much his amma, nanna and nanamma love him

6. The woman who owns multiple grocery stores in the locality, and rushes around on her scooter to ensure everything is running smoothly

7. Shetty’s store. Shetty is the broker who found me my house when I first came to Kodigehalli; if you want anything at all in the neighbourhood from selling your furniture, to finding a plumber; or figuring out how to feed the dogs on your street, he is the man you go to. You can see his plump and ever cheerful figure move about the neighbourhood on his scooter, waving enthusiastically at you whenever you run into him

8. The food court around Prateeth, where you can find nearly all kinds of food, and all kinds of people.

9. The book buddies store run by a family of three; I still remember how relieved I was when they helped me find a shop to repair my mobile during my initial days in Kodigehalli (my phone kept running out of charge, and I knew no one around)

10. The xerox shop next door to book buddies. The lassitude with which the old man runs the store is cute to observe as long as you don’t need an urgent print out (I have called him in a state of panic multiple times before I got my printer)

11. The landscape of fruit sellers across the locality.

12. The corner store that I often rushed to for milk, curd and tomatoes (the store owner who has now become a friend)

13. Long walks in the wee hours of the morning and dead of the night; and dogs that have become unofficial guardians during these walks

14. The place I called home for a year. It’s an old(ish) not-so-well-constructed house, with two rooms and a ro (half a room); the grill I could keep open for fresh air for most part of the day; the familiar footsteps of the landlord, her niece, nephew and brother

15. The tiffin service lady who made sure I ate three meals a day

16. The Tabebueia rosea trees at the height of the spring (thanks Ajay for telling me what they are called)

17. Home being office and office being home

18. The hummus and pita at Olive Drops in Sahakar Nagar

19. Wise Owl library

20. Dayanand home, whose address I borrowed many a time to find my way home

21. Observing kids in the nursery on my way back from the NCBS campus. Long walks in the GKVK campus next door to NCBS.

    

22. And tons of intangibles that would have slipped through the cracks because I didn’t notice them; but things that would pull me back to my first adult home

Subscribe now

Note: All of this is from the context of an early stage startup. Companies at different stages require different kinds of team members, and different work styles, and this is by no means meant to be all-encompassing. Also, I understand that it’s not easy to work at an early stage company, and just because one is not a good fit for the early stage doesn’t mean they are unemployable.

The last month was tough.

We interviewed 100+ candidates and ended up making messy hiring decisions.

Here are a few learnings from this experience.

1. Proactiveness does not always lead to successful outcomes
   
   The folks we hired were buzzing around in constant action - asking questions, coming up with ideas, tapping into their network for solutions.
   
   But the outcomes were the ultimate determinants. They could not get the most basic things done without running into some or the other issue, largely caused by a lack of understanding of fundamental principles.
   
   So our big learning is not to hinge too much on proactiveness unless it is coupled with strong fundamentals.
   

2. Inability to take accountability is perhaps the biggest red flag
   
   If you mess up, you own up to it, figure out why you messed up and course correct. Instead of owning up, if folks on the team come up with excuses (or worse, empty apologies mixed with justifications) for why they messed up, they already become un-coachable.
   
   It’s nearly impossible for un-coachable people to solve hard problems because they are either unaware of what they don’t know, or are covering up what they need to learn. Being open to learning (not just saying you want to learn, but showing you can learn) is a pre-requisite to solve hard problems, and in turn thriving at an early stage startup.
   

3. Response to failure is often a good marker for success in a startup
   
   I understand that a lot of these responses are shaped by what kinds of environments someone grew up in. Fear and shame are often natural responses to failure if you grew up in a family or society that valued you only when you succeeded.
   
   However, an individual’s ability to succeed in uncertain environments is determined by how conscious they are about these patterns, and how they are working on reframing their failures within their own minds. I know this is hard hard work. But if people are not willing to/able to work on themselves, then perhaps it’s hard to expect them to commit meaningfully to a long term vision.
   
   I am cognizant of the fact that a lot of these responses are skewed based on the condition of the job market, the kind of privilege you have or don’t. But we are all trying to succeed in a capitalist world (which unfortunately rewards and amplifies privilege), and as a startup we need to maximize our odds of success by hiring the best folks.
   
   Ideally don’t hire people who have a propensity to panic in the face of failure; they need more work on their nervous system before they can be a good fit for an early stage startup. We are figuring out how to determine a candidate’s response to failure during the interview process - would love to get thoughts from other founders/hiring managers who have cracked this to some extent.
   

4. Ability to leverage available resources is an underrated skill
   
   Testing for whether someone is resourceful enough, i.e. when they run into a problem do they just assume that nothing can be done, or do they find their way into plausible and feasible solutions, using whatever is available to them (including google/chatgpt/reddit), is an important aspect. So now we have started testing for this in our technical rounds.
   

5. Don’t hire people who just want a job.
   
   This is so hard to say out loud because there is such systemic inequity within the candidate pool. However, an early stage startup cannot afford to hire people who don’t have an innate hunger to solve a problem (I am not referring to a societal problem here, but a problem in the sense that it is intellectually challenging to get to a solution).
   
   Just because someone has the skillsets or experience required to solve a problem, they need not be able to solve it, because they don’t spend enough time worrying about it, and thinking about it from the right first principles framework. It’s hard to determine why a candidate applies to your company. The obvious answer is that they are looking for a job that pays. But we believe there are ancillary markers for what matters to them (like why they picked the projects they picked in the past). If they are only looking for something that gives them a monthly salary and nothing else (which is not wrong on any level at the candidate’s end; it’s probably the most peaceful way to operate in the world), they are perhaps a terrible fit for an early stage company.
   

6. Hire people who invest time in activities outside of work
   
   This perhaps sounds counter-intuitive. But we have grown to realize that to bring your fullest creative self to work, you need to have healthy avenues for delight. You don’t need to be an expert at things that give you joy, but the fact that you invest time in diverse things enables your neurons to fire differently, and these can in the long-run translate into connecting dots that others haven’t connected before. Folks who can do that are a valuable asset.

   

   This list is definitely going to be work in progress (as a mentor in the biotech space who has been hiring for the last two decades told us, his success rate is still 70%) but I think it is definitely worth putting it out here to track the evolution of our hiring process.
   
   I would love to connect and chat with founders building in deep tech and figure out how you are setting up hiring pipelines and what metrics you use for decision making.

   
   

   Subscribe now

I am not a fan of gyms. But on this day, three months ago I started gymming.

Two things to unpack here:

Why am I not a fan of gyms?

Gyms look at individual parts of the body as if they are separate entities - you have dedicated days for biceps, triceps, shoulders and legs. That feels like a huge disconnect to me. I believe the human body is more than the sum of its parts and needs to be treated holistically.

More importantly, gyms are inherently masculine spaces with (almost) all exercises and targets fine tuned to the average male body. A lot of exercises that women’s bodies need (eg: pelvic floor exercises) are often ignored, sometimes at very significant costs. This also shapes the pop-culture narrative around gyms, and what goals at the gym should look like. All of this combined makes me super uncomfortable about gymming.

But then why did I choose to show up?

I realized that my body needed to move and be pushed to move, and that I needed to create a sense of discipline around it. Gymming is the path of least resistance for physical exercise to me, because there is a gym 300 meters from my home (so no travel excuses).

I showed up for 42 days in 3 months. Is that impressive?

An older version of me would have said an emphatic no. There is no way I could have fallen short of a 100% success rate.

“I quickly revised my position to regard the occasional lack of discipline—let me call it failure; no, let me call it blowing it off —into a delight…… I decide, despite all the disciplinarians breaststroking the slick and gooey folds of my noggin, double-fisting sickles, swinging at anything that looks too glad, to just blow it off”
- Ross Gay, The Book of Delights

But the current version of me thinks it’s a great start. For someone who hasn’t done intense physical movements in nearly 5 years (even before that, the only form of exercise I did was classical dance, and never sports and the likes), this is incredible.

Waking up at 5:45 a.m. after a tiring day at work (and as a founder I am almost always working) to head out to the gym, and getting to do the day’s work in spite of all the aches and pains is very hard. And I still stuck to it, listened to my body when she said no (and when she said yes, push a little more), and did not give up. And I think that’s fantastic!

I can now do a full 30 second plank (I started with 0 seconds); squats with 10 kg dumbells; and leg press with an additional 5kgs (I was terrified of the leg press on day 1). After I started gymming, I managed to get through a 2.5 km run (with Sisters in Sweat, Bangalore) without running out of breath. I have never run so far in my life before. It feels liberating.

There have also been ancillary benefits. I am sick less often, my body is able to travel better without getting splitting headaches or nausea (if you know the kind of travel sickness that followed me, you would be so surprised with the change), I am able to bring a more present self to work and I feel so much better in my body.

These are not conventional success metrics at the gym; this doesn’t put me in the top 1% of gym-goers in the world. But I don’t even want to be top 1% of gym-goers in the world. So this works fine.

And maybe there is also a sense of delight in skipping the gym and sleeping in on some days, with the warmth of the sun filtering in through the windows and wishing me good morning as I slowly rub my eyes awake, guilt-free.

P.S. Super grateful to Harnidh from WTFund for emphasizing so much on founders getting their daily dose of exercise, her personal health journey that she documents with a lot of honesty on her social media (in spite of how hard it can be to talk about personal struggles in public, in a world that is obsessed with never failing) is an inspiration

Description: With my favourit(est) gym bro xD

One when he is rubbing his eyes open as he slowly wakes up, and the other when his eyelids are drooping in anticipation for bedtime. But when you do look him in the eye, he embraces you in the warmth of his smile and then you wonder why you don’t spend more days seeking that smile.

Spending the last weekend in Mysore was perhaps one of the best decisions I have made in a while.

On day one, I caught the Sun God unaware on the early morning train from Bangalore to Mysore. I leaned out from the door, wind in my hair (just like in the movies, wishing there was someone to film me right then), feasting on the fields that stretch to infinity and watching the canvas of the sky come alive in myriad shades.

There is a weird intimacy about trains that is hard to put into words. Unlike the sanitized shoving-around of flights (plus the guilt and fear-driven mechanisms of airports) and the claustrophobia-inducing compartments of long distance buses, trains are a delight. It is spacious and airy (provided you don’t do AC compartments), and brings with it a lot of liberties.

If the place is empty enough, you can pick a berth of your choice and loiter around. You feel like you belong, and don’t have to feel apologetic about taking up space (your own or someone else’s). You can eat whatever you want, talk as much as you want to the folks around, play loud music and not worry about ‘safety instructions’.

On our ride back, a middle aged lady in a gorgeous blue saree squeezed her way onto our seat. She didn’t speak English and I don’t get Kannada. And yet when she heard me ask out loud, she pitched in to tell me that the crops we were speeding past were sugarcane ones (the effort she had put in to come up with the English word was very evident) and she picked up the bookmark that fell out of the book I was reading (in spite of it being a worn out tidbit of a canteen bill) and handed it back to me in an attempt to be helpful, while I was half-playing with a little girl who had a bunch of balloons.

These one-off, human instances rarely play out in flights, where everyone seems to be in a hurry to either get into or out of the metal box; the cramped seats escalating the average person’s dissatisfaction with their life. There is a lot of companionship and community on a train, a lot of holding space for each other and little expectation of template behaviours. And it’s beautiful to look at the sunrise or the sunset in the midst of all this colourful chaos. I am glad I looked.

On another one of the mornings, I was at the Kukralli lake in the wee hours of the morning, and watched with delight the gold spangled ripples slowly emerge in the waters, while listening to some good old songs. A pelican was wading impatiently through this delicate golden web worried about her breakfast catch, totally unaware of how gorgeous she looked right then. Perhaps, there are aliens somewhere in the cosmos looking at our lives from a distance, convinced that they would give up anything to just be where we are right now. Perhaps, we need to zoom out a little more.

As I stepped out of the premises of the lake, I ran into a woman selling healthy juices packed in such homely looking containers that you just can’t stop yourself from draining a glass of amla (gooseberry) juice on the spot, while somewhat questioning your choice as the bitterness hits you hard, but convincing yourself that it’s good for your body regardless. If you are ever at the Kukralli lake, do look out for this woman and her concoctions. They are such a delight.

That reminds of how often I ran into women entrepreneurs in Mysore, building out their businesses slowly and sustainably, far removed from the obsession of 100Xing everything.

I met Neeta, a stay-at-home mum-turned baker-turned-entrepreneur who runs Crumbs and Cookies, a delightful little cafe on Gokulam street. Her desserts and milk shakes taste so fresh and melt in your mouth, making you wonder what poor imitations you have been consuming in bigger cities.

Image Description: At Crumbs and Cookies in Mysore

A little further down the same road, I walked into ‘Books and Brews’ - a quiet little library cafe (without a door) that lets you lie down on their comfy sofa and read, while looking up at the world once in a while to marvel at the song of a bird or some such delight. The woman running this cafe is always buzzing with energy, while also making sure her little ones don’t embroil themselves in a lot of mischief. I spent a good few hours there reading the Lion and the Lily, which is an incredibly intriguing account of Awadh written by Ira Mukhoty (more on this book in another article).

It’s funny how I discovered this street because my footwear came apart and I ended up on this street by mistake looking for Roambay, the travel hostel I was staying at, not realizing that there are three different Roambays in the same city. There are some accidents I am grateful for.

Roambay is an incredible place to stay at. It is a quaint ancient home with wooden floorboards and creaky (and hard to climb) stairs turned into a community hostel. It’s endearingly comfortable - with the manager open to a quick friendly chat at all times (and he had great recommendations for food places), a little shelf with books and games, and a comfy bed. I got to chat with folks from different cities and countries, it made me feel like a real traveller (like Charlie from the Malayalam movie with the same name) and that was a new and delightful feeling.

I spent a good deal of time walking in and out of museums in Mysore, the Roambay I was staying at being pretty close to the Mysore Palace. The palace was a frustrating affair because there was no curation of artifacts or even an attempt at cohesive storytelling. It was just a collection of curiosities with obvious descriptions (for instance one painting with a man sitting on an elephant literally had a plaque that read ‘Man on Elephant’), almost as if the state wants all of us to look at our history through the orientalist lens. Most parts of the palace were cordoned off, perhaps to ward off vandals, but makes the experience very restrictive for the curious ones.

Image Description: Perhaps the most beautiful part of the Mysore Palace, is it coincidental that it looks like a DNA molecule?

In stark contrast to the palace is the newly inaugurated Payana museum, that is endowed by a local politician, exhibits vintage vehicles, and in this way attempts to construct a narrative around how travel has evolved over the years. It is interesting to note the trend of privately owned or philanthropically funded museums emerging in India in the recent years and how that is shaping our perception of time, both past and present.

I could not have left Mysore without making a trip to Srirangapatanam, the city of the most incredible ruler to have lived and ruled in the eighteenth century. I visited Tipu Sultan’s summer palace situated on the banks of the Kaveri (where a tour guide enthusiastically showed us paintings on the wall, one of which is a begum smoking a hookah in her zenana; the tour guide also showed us the squirrels that he feeds daily and how this palace is as much theirs now as it was of the Sultan); the Shri Ranganathaswami Temple that Tipu commisioned; the Bailey dungeons where he imprisoned British prisoners, the most famous of them all being Colonel Bailey who was defeated in the second Anglo-Mysore war; the fort that he commanded; and his final resting place, which is a surprisingly humble tombstone constructed by Governor General Wellesley after having forced the Sultan into a deceitful defeat and an unhonourable death.

Image Description: Painting on the wall of the Dariya Daulat Bagh (Tipu’s Summer Palace)

It was a deeply moving experience to look at the paths that the Sultan probably walked (or rode on) millions of times. This is perhaps the closest I will get to a pilgrimage.

Image Description: Colonel Bailey’s Dungeon

However, I wish all of these places were maintained better. The fort is in ruins; the summer palace although significantly better maintained than the Mysore Palace of the Wodeyar kings, still lacks a coherent narrative; I would have certainly missed the tombstone if my driver-cum-guide didn’t specifically stop at the spot and point it out to me.

Image Description: Shri Renganathaswamy Temple commissioned by Tipu Sultan

There is only one Asad Allah-ul-Ghalib (The Victorious Lion of God) and that can never be the British, in spite of the fact that the latter gave out medals with this title right after the Fall of Seringapatanam, given how the only way they could have won the final battle against Tipu was through plain deceit. If France had not plunged into a civil war, Tipu’s future would have been different. The Sultan’s saga is one of intelligence and courageous resistance, regardless of the prevalent narratives that shun him (and some for good reason because Tipu also has his fair share of ghosts in his closet).

Image Description: This is where Tipu Sultan was buried

And of course, I looked the Sun God in the eye as I headed back, just as Tipu would have more than two centuries ago. There are some things that don’t change, and many more that do. Perhaps it’s wise to live for the former.

Tangential Thought:
Mysore is a clear example of how Indian rulers, regardless of their religion, commissioned places of worship that did not conform to their religious ideals. Tipu Sultan, a Muslim ruler, built the Renganathaswamy Temple; Krishnaraja Wodeyar, a Hindu king, built the beautiful St.Philomena’s church.

Image Description: Procession at the Inauguration of the St. Philomena’s Church - note the banner says God Bless our Maharajah

Battles between rulers was rarely about religion as much as it was about territorial ambitions. It is good to be reminded that the prevalent narrative that pitches battles between Indian princely states as religious wars are often just figments of the imagination, although dangerous ones at that.

Subscribe now

The goal is not to sensationalize, or garner views, likes or other fleeting metrics that journalists often have to care about. I am no journalist. It’s about putting out a bunch of facts and thoughts the way I have perceived them, from first and second hand sources. In situations like these there are more often than not different perspectives, biases, additions and omissions. I have tried to account for them as much as possible. 

TW: mentions of sexual assault, drug abuse

Laying out some facts

A second year student (who is a woman) was sexually assaulted by a third year student (a man) a few months ago. She reports this to the Institutional Complaints Committee (ICC), they investigate the case and determine that there is reasonable evidence to validate the victim’s complaint and is about to mete out a punishment.

There are also some other unverified claims about how the accused influenced the victim’s friends to give fake testimonies and texts and confuse the ICC to the extent where the validity of the complaint was questionable towards the end of the ICC hearing, but in spite of this the ICC had decided to suspend the accused for at least a semester.

At the same time, the accused’s friends (some of them who are also members of the current and former Council of Student Affairs) approach the complainant and threaten her to withdraw the complaint from the ICC. The accused comes from a fairly well-off family and his friends are politically well connected. He leverages this power imbalance to bring in family members, lawyers and so on to intimidate the victim.

They bring up the fact that she has used drugs at some point in time, paint her as an unreliable person (read slut shaming and so on that is so pervasive in cases like these) and convince the administration that her complaint cannot be trusted. They also circulate rumours about her; her identity is compromised.

Reeling under this pressure, the victim withdraws her complaint.

The accused who is now scot-free is appointed as the new treasurer of the council for student affairs.

The Protest

The department of journalism and media affairs (DOJMA)  on campus goes on to investigate and report this incident. During DOJMA’s investigation, the CSA president tells them that the ICC case is still ongoing and no decision has been made regarding the appointment of the accused as the treasurer. The president then also goes on to threaten the DOJMA folks with disciplinary action if they continue to investigate and publish information about the case. 

At 9 p.m. when a big chunk of the student body was at the auditorium for a movie screening, the President of the CSA comes in and makes a public statement wherein he contradicts what he had initially told DOJMA, and goes on to confirm that the ICC complaint has been closed and that the accused was now being instated as treasurer. 

All of the above combined leads to collective rage. 

Around 11 p.m., as the movie screening drew to a close, students started gathering in large numbers at B dome (i.e. a central spot on campus) shouting slogans and demanding action from the administration.

Image Description: Students gathered at the B-dome to protest the appointment of a student accused of sexual assault as the treasurer of the Council of Student Affairs

At the same time, the coordinators of different clubs were having a closed door meeting with the administration officials; with the latter asking the coordinators to help disperse the crowd at B-dome and promising that necessary action will be taken in the upcoming days. The coordinators refused to do that, and some of the protesters made it clear that they would not disperse unless the dean addressed the issue herself. 

The dean is now forced to address the protesters at the B-dome. However, given the magnitude of the crowd, admin and the protestors are unable to hear each other.

As the clock struck the midnight hour, the admin and the protestors moved to the auditorium. Once there, the protesters started chanting slogans demanding that the accused be impeached from the post of the treasurer, and action be taken against all those involved in coercing the victim to withdraw her complaint.

Image Description: Protesters gathered in the auditorium

The dean of administration addresses the student body pointing out that there is no standing ICC complaint against the accused, and that the victim was not coerced but acted on her free will while withdrawing the complaint.

In a surprising turn of events, the victim stood up in the auditorium and opened up about what she went through, and how she was threatened to withdraw the complaint. She pointed out how the former president of the CSA approached her offering to support, then went on to breach confidentiality, and convince the administration that she is a serial drug abuser.

The former CSA president also used his institutional power to get the security advisor and his staff to raid the hostel rooms of the victim and her friends. No evidence of drug abuse was found in any of their hostel rooms. The victim alleges that these kinds of measures were taken to mix up her occasional drug use and sexual assault in a manner that enables systemic oppression. 

I understand that drug use is a punishable offense under the Indian legal system, and that possession, usage and sale of these merits punishment (I have arguments for how the legalization of these drugs and access to rehab is the best way to prevent drug abuse, but I think that is beyond the scope of this article).

A student representative to the ICC points out that if a complainant was under the influence of alcohol or drugs the ICC is mandated to report this to the disciplinary committee and they take action parallelly for substance abuse while the ICC complaint goes on. This not only places an unfair burden on the victim, but also complicates cases where the perpetrator drugs the victim and then assaults her. There has to be some degree of separation between these two cases.

However, in this case no disciplinary action (for drug use) was taken after the victim withdrew her complaint from the ICC (if both of these were independent of each other, the victim should have been punished for drug use regardless of whether she withdrew her ICC complaint or not). Moreover, there have been instances of the accused also being under the influence of substances on campus, and no one threatened him with disciplinary action. 

But the fact that a victim of sexual assault can be punished for drug use is not grounds for discounting the trauma and violation she has undergone; and that one of these is being used as a bargaining chip for the other is particularly disgusting. I would extend this to say that access to mental health support and rehabilitation is a must for those involved in both drug use and sexual assault cases.

Meanwhile, the accused never showed up in the auditorium, perhaps because of the fear of retaliation. The admin continued to point out clauses from a rule book and state that everyone who commits crimes needs to be ‘punished equally’ and that she cannot claim an amnesty (paraphrased, not exact words). The CSA also kept defending the new treasurer saying that there is no legal conviction.

The funniest bit is that in this university, students who were caught cheating in exams have been given stricter punishments than those accused of sexual harassment or assault. And this angered the crowd.

The protesters chanted slogans and demanded immediate action. And finally the admin and the council for student affairs had to relent and impeach the treasurer (aka the accused in the sexual assault) on the spot in his absence. They also promised to hold a general body meeting to determine the course of action and reopen the ICC complaint. This is a huge win.

This also reminds me of the recent victory of the Women in Cinema Collective (WCC) in Kerala, which gave me a lot of hope.

Why does it matter so much?

STEM universities (especially top tier engineering and medical colleges) in India are usually considered apolitical spaces - public demonstration of political beliefs is actively discouraged, and students are expected to focus on becoming technocrats. Somehow there is this absolute need to separate the sciences and the practice of it from the political, when in the real world the outcomes of science are so closely tied to policy decisions and political environments. I am witnessing this first-hand as I build out a deep tech company.

From the four years I spent at the BITS Goa campus, I have seen how proud most students are of their apolitical stance; how unconscious they are of their privilege; and how unwilling most of them are to engage in socio-political discourse. The poor gender, caste and religious diversity imply that a lot of these views are homogenized across the board (including misogyny, homophobia and Islamophobia). There were few liberal spaces on campus, and I am also guilty of shrouding my political opinions while engaging with the broader crowd.

And yet, this issue moved this (mostly) apolitical crowd to action. They went out of their way to protest for a cause that matters to them, to stand up for the survivor of a sexual assault, and demand reforms to ensure a safer campus. This is probably the first time in their lives that they are seeing the real world impact of collective action; the power of the masses to drive some degree of change, regardless of how small (but again a lot of social reforms have happened as a series of small incomplete wins as opposed to huge sweeping reform). This is probably the first time that many of them are discovering their personal agency as a part of a broader societal demand; perhaps they now have an inkling more of self belief than they did before.

In spite of how stacked the system was against them, and how politics is looked down upon as a dirty word in the tech world - these future engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists and business managers (of some of the most powerful companies in the world) stood up to it and demanded justice. And that’s remarkable.

And given the rise of authoritarian governments across the world, this is a sensibility that needs to be held dear - the fundamental belief in the power of collective action in the face of systemic oppression; and the willingness to step into collective action even when careers and futures are at stake (like the characters in Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize winning novel Prophet Song).

The most admirable part of this protest is that it was non-violent - nobody was physically hurt, no public property damaged. It was pretty much a decentralized strategy, such that there was no singular leader that everyone rallied around. This was largely coordinated through multiple disparate Whatsapp groups, and some folks tell me that they were so surprised by the turnout because there was no clear organizing committee for the protest. 

Perhaps the waves of this protest will peter out in the coming days as everyone plunges into the mood of end-semester comprehensive exams, but I believe that a spark has been lit. Students on campus tell me that many professors have become cognizant of students losing trust in the system, and are open to having conversations about reform. There was a genuine coming together that this campus has not seen in years.

And that’s meaningful in its own right.

How does this affect me?

I recently graduated from this campus - this is a place that feels like home. It’s a place that taught me to stand on my feet, explore a lot of new experiences and gave me the confidence to build a company. And yet when I know that some of the places that my friends and I hung out at have been the sites of sexual assault, it’s deeply traumatic. It feels like my house is on fire and I have no power to diffuse the flames.

The most powerful people on campus are silent, or even actively enabling oppression; brushing assault under the carpet under the guise of protecting the ‘future prospects’ of a man when the bodily autonomy of a woman has been violated and she will carry the scars of that for life regardless of how successful she is in her career.

Of course, the administration can claim that they are going by the books, but I believe that justice often lies outside the boundaries of these books; it requires empathetic and courageous leadership to take the right action. This sets a terrible precedent on campus - it is likely to deter a lot of women from coming out and seeking support from the ICC (I have been through the ICC myself and I know that it takes a lot of courage to even file a complaint regardless of how bad the situation is).

More importantly, juniors who are nearly family are still on campus and I worry for their safety. I am concerned whether the demand for safety will lead to women on campus being locked up and denied the liberty to occupy public spaces post a certain time of the day, which is how educational institutions in India and beyond have historically attempted to address women’s safety while shirking the responsibility of making public spaces safe in the first place.

It’s on campus that for the first time I experienced the joy of walking unfettered under the starry sky (and the Goa skies were amazing) and it’s a pleasure that I hold very dear especially on days when I feel like the world is falling apart. And that emboldened me in a profound sense. I believe that the only way to make public spaces for women safer is to have more women step up and occupy these spaces (sometimes even taking risks that cause their loved ones to be concerned and worried) and I try to do that in my own right whenever and wherever I can.

I have been told by well meaning friends that it is perhaps dangerous to write about this on a public platform given how much support I get from the BITSian ecosystem for the work I do (and will continue to do to advance tech). But I think this is not in opposition to BITS or the ecosystem at large who I am extraordinarily grateful to; BITS has been a pioneering institution in India in its own right, and this is a reminder that it’s time to be a pioneer in ensuring a safe space for all of its students; a pioneer in showing what deterrence for sexual assault (and related crimes) looks like regardless of the socio-political stature of the accused; a pioneer in displaying empathy and supporting victims of systemic oppression. It does not have to shield sexual assaulters in order to boost its placement statistics or look good in the eyes of the world (the alumni have succeeded in making a mark in the world, and we don’t need this veneer anymore).

I know the standard arguments against this. What if the woman is making a fake complaint? What if she just wants to destroy a man’s career for her own pleasure? What if this gives women the power to do whatever she wants to innocent men?

Several feminist scholars have addressed these questions in depth over the years - but a quick response would be to say that if you are a man who respects women’s boundaries and consent (in the real sense, not manufactured or coerced consent) you don’t have anything to fear. And I know men like these and value them for who they are.

Those who are afraid are those who are insecure about their relationships with the women in their lives - I empathize with you, this insecurity is also a product of the patriarchal system (and not necessarily your fault alone) and I urge you to take meaningful steps to grow out of that insecurity (through open-minded reading, honest conversations, therapy and neural system work). And this is not to say that there are no problematic women, there are. They also need help as much as you do. Also arguments like maintaining the structure of families, societies etc doesn’t hold because the fundamental tenet is that these institutions are built to favour men in a lot of ways, and women are equally complicit in enabling this oppression (for instance, in the case of the protests, the dean defending the administration is also a woman).

BITS has the resources and the power to enforce and normalize these equitable structures. And this is an open call to leverage that power. I hope BITS gets to doing that; and even if the safety and social equity arguments don’t necessarily factor into decision-making, I would go one step further to argue that these reforms are necessary for BITS to maintain its stature as the top destination for the most innovative and empathetic young people for their undergrad, and I believe this matters.

What are instances like these at your universities? How are you coping with them?
I am genuinely curious to learn more, if you trust me enough to share. 

P.S. Thanks to a lot of protestors on campus for helping me put together the facts, and to a dear mentor Sangheetha (BITSian alumnus) for helping me cope by addressing my emotions and where it hits me the hardest in my body

P.S.S. If you want to access more information or speak to folks on ground, it would be useful to connect to the DOJMA at BITS Goa. There is a rebel page called The Kanda that went viral during the protests. There are also some reddit threads under /rBitsPilani but I cannot confirm the validity of everything in those threads.

Subscribe now

This was a hard train of thought, because it required that I dig deep and challenge some of the core assumptions on which a big chunk of my belief system had been built. I leaned on the strong and warm shoulder of literature to attempt to answer a few of these questions, starting with the Robert Louis Stevenson classic ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’.

Image Description: Cover Page of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Telling the story of a well-mannered doctor who synthesized a chemical that enabled him to transform into one Mr. Hyde who cared less about societal restraints and allowed his inner animal to dominate, this Robinson classic shows us how we often switch between the different personalities we have, and how none of these alone defines who we really are.

“I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

As intriguing as this book is, it is easy to dismiss Dr. Jekyll as a maniac with a pathological condition that causes him to swing between the extremes of virtue and vice, although Stevenson is believed to have used this as an allegory for what human beings are truly capable of.

And that is when I stumbled upon ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ by Chimamanda Adichie - a poignant piece of fiction set in the midst of the Nigerian separatist movement that led to the creation of a short-lived state called Bafna. Amidst the horrors of war, each of the characters did things they would not do otherwise, things they would regret for the rest of their lives.

Image Description: Cover Page of Half of the Yellow Sun

Adichie helped me think very deeply about what it means to be a hero or a villain, and what happens when heroes depict villainous traits and when villains display extraordinary heroism. And in the process, I started looking at myself from a new lens as a complex person with the good, the bad and the neutral intertwined in myriads of ways, often based on factors that were not directly under my control.

***********
This train of thought about heroes and villains came back to me in the last few weeks as I watched two incredible films - Ullozhukku and Paradise, and read ‘The Last Mughal’ by William Dalrymple. Each of these stories is set in a different city, features different kinds of characters navigating their individual dilemmas. And yet there is a persistent common thread.

Ullozhukku (translating to undercurrents in Malayalam) tells the story of a young pregnant widow Anju in Alappuzha, a district in Kerala characterized by its scenic backwaters, and as of late its propensity to get flooded during the monsoon. Her life is deeply intertwined with that of her mother-in-law Leelamma (who also happens to be a widow but of a different generation). Leelamma wants to force Anju to stay back with her after the funeral and raise her child in the ancestral home, while the latter wants to leave and start a new life with her lover.

Image Description: Poster of the movie Ullozhukku

Seems straightforward until the undercurrents begin to surface. Anju emerges an adulteress, her mother a liar, her mother-in-law a cheat, her dead husband Thomaskutty a marital rapist and her current lover Rajiv a money-minded patriarch.

But thankfully it doesn’t end there - Anju was seeking companionship, her mother wanted to ensure that Anju had a financially stable future, the mother-in-law was fighting her own loneliness, and Rajiv has been struggling to make ends meet in his jobs and cannot see a path to supporting a family. There is no justification for rape but I think it is attributable to the value systems that Thomaskutty grew up around, the ideas of right and wrong that shaped his worldview, and perhaps the desperation of a dying man to ensure that his family line survives.

And all of these identities are juxtaposed against each other, with each character being viewed very differently by every other character. The silences, absences and lifeless objects speak volumes, and their voices intercalate with what the characters say (and refuse to say) to each other. And that is what makes this movie an absolute gem. Ullozhukku also got me to think very deeply about how none of us have a singular identity, we are all heroes or villains or passive sidekicks in somebody’s story. We are rarely one-dimensional. And that’s probably what makes us human.

Image Description: Poster of the movie Paradise

Paradise on the other hand takes a jibe at the monolithic version of Ramayana that we (in India) are so used to; where the evil king Ravana kidnaps Sita, and her husband Rama fights a battle to defeat Ravana and bring back Sita, post which Sita undergoes a test by fire to prove her chastity. This narrative has captured the political imagination to an extent that we have had full-fledged riots wherein Muslim communities were villanised and attacked; women equated to powerless Sitas who always needs a saviour and hence the ‘Lakshman rekhas’ drawn in the form of curfews and dress codes.

When a malayali couple’s anniversary trip to Sri Lanka coincides with the latter slipping into an abyss of an economic and political crisis, their world is turned upside down. They are now called upon to reckon with notions of privilege. Keshav and Amrita respond very differently to this, causing them to look at themselves and each other in a new light.

The pressing question that runs through the film is this - to what extent can you be held accountable for the outcomes of your actions?

If a man you call out as a suspect for crime (again what really constitutes a crime, and how does it vary across space and time) is taken into police custody and he dies as a result of police brutality, are you responsible for it? If you are a neutral bystander who claims to not have seen something (in a way that saves your skin and that of your family) are you in the wrong? If someone you love leverages their privilege to perpetuate oppression should you stand up against them or trust that their actions are for a greater good in the long run?

And a parallel question of whether, in a culture where Ravana is looked upon as a hero who will wake up from his slumber and save the country, is the Indian mainstream version of Ramayana equally valid? And what about the 299 other versions of Ramayana, one of which is the Jain Ramayana where Ravana dies at the hands of Sita with Rama serving as her charioteer? Who then are the real heroes and villains?

The best part about the film is that it does not try to find a right answers, but instead leaves the audience pondering about these questions for long time after they have left the theatre, in turn pushing them to evaluate the nexus of privilege they navigate on a daily basis.

Image Description: Cover of the book The Last Mughal

My first tryst with The Revolt of 1857 was in my fifth standard social science lesson - the idea that it all started with a single sepoy Mangal Pandey refusing to use the ‘Enfield bullets’ smeared with the fat of cows and pigs, and that the war spread across parts of India with Bahadur Shah Zafar leading it from Delhi was a fascinating story. And I believe that is how most of us think of the first war of independence.

The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple challenged my assumptions on that. With chunks of evidence drawn from the national archives of India and Britain, he pieces together the story of Delhi in the early 1800s from the lens of the Mughals as well as the East India Company officials, and how it all led to the outcomes we know of.

With a compelling writing style, coupled with his penchant for the seemingly ordinary things, Dalrymple manages to call out the hypocrisy of the British and the Indians. For instance, Bahadur Shah Zafar (and his Mughal clan) that the Indian right wing often calls out for being anti-Hindu, were actually the first folks to ban cow slaughter in India during the Muslim festival of Eid to prevent radical groups from committing mass cow slaughter. And this despite the precariousness of the situation made me chuckle.

“It was, all in all, a very odd sort of religious war, where a Muslim emperor was pushed into rebellion against his Christian oppressors by a mutinous army of overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, who came to him of their own free will (and initially against his) to ask for the barakat of a Muslim blessing and the leadership of the Mughal they regarded as their legitimate ruler.

It is even odder that one of the greatest threats to the cohesiveness and unity of the Mughal’s new forces was the arrival of groups of Muslim jihadis who eventually came to make up at least half of the rebel army in Delhi; and that when the British counter-attacked against those forces they did so by raising against the Mughal a new army that consisted largely of Pathan and Punjabi Muslim irregulars.

As the casualty figures on the Delhi Mutiny memorial show, no less than a third of the ‘British’ casualties among officers, and fully 82 per cent among other ranks, were classified as ‘native’. By the very end of the siege, by the time the last reinforcements reached the Ridge from the Punjab, the ‘British’ force was probably around four-fifths Indian. If the Uprising in Delhi started as a contest between the British and a largely Hindu sepoy army drawn mainly from Avadh, it ended as a fight between a mixed rebel force, at least half of which were civilian jihadis, taking on an army of British-paid Sikh and Muslim mercenaries from the North West Frontier and the Punjab”
- William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal

Then who counts as heroes of this rebellion, and who counts as villains? Who gained and who lost? We don’t know. The survivors suffered as much as those who died; people on both sides of the equation often extended a radical sense of kindness and friendship to the ‘enemy’; traitors cropped up on both sides; there were women who were kidnapped, women who eloped, women who negotiated and women who fought back; everyone’s story had heroes and villains, and more often than not one person’s hero was another’s villain.

***********
Is this dichotomy of heroes and villains confined to socio-cultural and political settings? Is this a complexity that arises as organisms ‘graduate’ from the biological lens to the sociological lens?

Perhaps not.

Let’s consider the case of the biological villain that is the most prominent in popular imagination - cancer. Cancer arises when the cells in a human body turn rogue, due to some genetic modifications it undergoes as a result of a cascade of random probabilistic cellular events. Cancer then is a villainous version of our innate biological selves.

“That this seemingly simple mechanism—cell growth without barriers—can lie at the heart of this grotesque and multifaceted illness is a testament to the unfathomable power of cell growth. Cell division allows us as organisms to grow, to adapt, to recover, to repair—to live. And distorted and unleashed, it allows cancer cells to grow, to flourish, to adapt, to recover, and to repair—to live at the cost of our living.

Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves. It lives desperately, inventively, fiercely, territorially, cannily, and defensively—at times, as if teaching us how to survive. Its quest for immortality mirrors our own quest, a quest buried in our embryos and in the renewal of our organs.

Cancer is a flaw in our growth, but this flaw is deeply entrenched in ourselves. We can rid ourselves of cancer, then, only as much as we can rid ourselves of the processes in our physiology that depend on growth — aging, regeneration, healing, reproduction.”
- Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

***********

Given what we now know how blurry the binaries are between heroes and villains, should we continue to tell these hero vs villain stories, when we have the scope to be more expansive, empathetic and compassionate? Would that then enable us to forgive ourselves and each other better?

Perhaps it might break down a bunch of narrow political agendas and divisive policies, and lead to a new social order. But what would that look like? It’s time for some collective imagination.

The best (and often the worst) part of being an entrepreneur is the exponential learning curve. It’s thrilling, tiring, meaningful and messy all at once.

Here are some of the most significant learnings from the last month:

1. My time is my most valuable asset.
   I spent countless hours engaging with folks who were neither adding direct value to my company, nor making me feel seen or heard. This made me feel very tired and burnt out. I realized that raising money is easier than optimizing for time. I am now very selective about who I am engaging with and for how long, and also how I am leveraging other people’s time.
   

2. Ask and you shall receive.

   House-hunting was genuinely hard. I could not communicate with most people properly because of language barriers, and many of them told me that no one rents out to single folks. I kept walking around the neighbourhood where I wanted to find a place and asking, and finally ended up finding a safe and affordable accommodation right next door to my lab.
   
   It is very hard to put yourself out there as a first-time early stage entrepreneur building in deep tech, without socially validatable credentials. But I have managed to do that, and the outcome is incredible - folks from all walks of life have come in to support me and accelerate the journey of my company.
   

3. More often than not, uncertainty in decision-making comes from an innate desire to be liked by others.
   And the worst bit is that likability doesn’t propel startups forward - onboarding the right people, getting to technical milestones, and raising money does. So the idea is to optimize for these aspects, and if the person on the other end is reasonable enough they will understand why you are making the decisions you make. If they are salty, it’s on them not you.
   

4. Stay close to friends and family
   The entrepreneurial journey is hard, you need folks outside of your company to act as sounding boards, offer emotional support and enable you to spend some time out of work, relaxing.
   
   But this is easier said than done. Once you have moved out of the home you grew up in, it becomes hard to navigate relationships with family because they often don’t ‘get’ what you are doing despite their best intentions. Same goes with a lot of friends from college who have very different career trajectories. I am still figuring out how to do this.

   

5. There are no right or wrong decisions.
   Ideas of right and wrong vary across time, space and individual circumstances. This is what makes life so complex, beautiful and exciting all at once.
   

6. 1 crore is not a lot of money.
   I acknowledge that it takes a reasonable degree of privilege to say this. But growing up watching ‘Ningalkkum Aakam Kodeeswaran’ (the Malayalam version of the reality TV show ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’), I had this general sense that 1 crore is a lot. But when it comes down to startup expenditure, you realize that it runs out pretty quickly even if you are a really lean team. That’s because there are so many miscellaneous expenses that come up when you try to do something new.

This is just the beginning, can’t wait to see where the journey takes me and what I make of it.

“If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”
- Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

16 May 2024 was my last day at BITS Goa (of course, I will go back whenever I crave a fried maggi from FK). The OLT (one last time) lighting struck me a week before I was set to leave, and since then I have been wondering how to put my college life into words.

I didn’t want to chronicle it as a timeline with dates and events, because then the small and beautiful tend to slip through the cracks terrified of the big and more momentous. I also didn’t want to jump into social media and do random sign offing, pretend to be feeling just a single emotion, when what I was feeling was a cocktail and I couldn’t even figure out what the cocktail was made of.

It has taken me two whole weeks to come to terms with the transition - from being a student (which has been my primary identity throughout my life so far) to being a full-time something else (in my case an entrepreneur). Honestly I love being a student - I was never the kid who waited for weekends or vacations because I hated school; I showed up to most lectures in college and pestered professors with questions; although my college CGPA doesn’t reflect it, the nights before exams have been the times that I gobbled up the most knowledge (even if it is unrelated to the subject at hand). It’s hard to acknowledge that I will not go back to a conventional classroom anytime soon (of course, I will keep learning and discussing nerdy things with folks around me).

But this is an essential transition, one that I have made after hours of cost-benefit analysis, discussions with people I trust and most importantly listening to my inner voice. I need some time away from established educational institutions to build a moonshot idea that can change the world. And I am going to carry everything I have learnt at school (in the classroom and otherwise) to make this happen.

What are my biggest learnings (and unlearnings) from the four years I spent at BITS?

1. College life isn’t what movies make it look like.
Less than 10% of people stick to the friends they made on day 1 or find the love of their life on campus. I was constantly afraid of being a loser because I don’t have a constant group of friends or haven’t found someone worth dating on campus, and of course, I never had the courage to say this out loud to anyone. Towards the end of college, I figured out that these aren’t standards I should hold myself (or anyone else) to.

2. No one really knows what they want in life. If someone is 100% sure, either they are lying (to you or themselves or both) or they are not open to exploring the world.
I spent a lot of time in the first two years of college worrying all the time, first about not getting the economics major I had wanted so badly and then about what I really wanted to do in life. By the fourth year I realized that everyone is constantly figuring it out as they go, including professors and ‘successful professionals’. This realization empowers me to explore and do what I really want at any given point in time.

3. Sleep>> but there are some people worth sacrificing your sleep for.

Unlike most folks on campus, I preferred going to bed early. That gives me a sense of wellbeing, and enables me to show up more mindfully for people and projects I care about. But there are times when I stayed up till 3 or 4 a.m. talking to a friend, watching a movie, listening to music or playing lit(erary) games with them - and although I woke up the next day with a bad headache I wouldn’t give up these late nights for anything in the world.

4. Don’t make someone your friend just because they don’t have other friends (or because you feel sorry for them).
I learnt this the hard way. Often, if someone doesn’t have friends, it’s probably because there are red flags about them. These toxic traits could be the result of trauma that they have accumulated over the years. But that doesn’t mean that I need to put up with their behaviours and sacrifice my wellbeing just to make them feel better. I learnt to identify red flags in friendships, and set clear boundaries in a way that maximizes my wellbeing.

5. If you want to hang out with someone, make the first move.
This is such an underrated learning. At the beginning of my college life, I spent a lot of time worrying about how no one reached out to me asking me to go on a trip with them. And I equated that to not having any real friends.

That’s when out of desperation, I started reaching out to folks and asking them if they would join me over the weekend for some fun stuff. And more often than not, people said yes, showed up, and thanked me later for asking them to come along. It’s often mentally taxing to plan outings (especially if you are a woman because of the added layer of safety concerns) and that’s why folks don’t ask, not because they are uninterested in spending time with you. This realization changed how I see myself in relation to others.

6. Say and do what you feel like, and you will attract ‘your kind of’ people
I spent a reasonable amount of time in college trying to hide my real personality, and pretend to be someone I was not because that looked like a sure shot way to find friends. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. It just made me despondent.

Things changed when I shortlisted as a finalist for the Global Student Prize and Times of India put out a front page article about my achievements. The facade fell, and everyone now knew who I really am. I was forced to stop pretending.

I started bringing a book with me to the mess everyday to read while I ate, wore mismatched clothes because they were comfortable and avoided people whose presence drained me of my energy. And surprisingly, that brought me closer to people whose company I enjoy and also freed up so much mind space for me to do more valuable things.

7. Intuitive decisions are often the best
From going on impulsive solo trips to picking random electives ‘for the vibes’, most intuitive decisions have given me a sense of joy. Of course, I have made some decisions which led to bad outcomes but the learnings that came from these decisions are so worth it that I would not ever want to go back and undo it. TLDR: when in doubt, trust your gut.

8. Make no assumptions about men, money and morning weather

Having studied in an all-girls school my entire life, I had some pre-conceived notions about men. College shattered those for me. Thanks to the poor gender ratio, I met all kinds of men on campus - feminists and anti-feminists; religious and non-religious; political and apolitical; those who love to travel and those who are happy to stay back in their hostel rooms; those who spend, and those who save; those who think and those who don’t; those who dream and those who go along with the flow; those who value me for who I am and those who value me for my ‘success’; those who love to talk and those who would rather listen, and listen well; those who make you feel safe and those whose presence signals danger. Men comes in all forms, and there is no archetype of a man. Seems simple enough, but took me a while to grasp.

Same goes for money - if you are unsure ask how much you will be paid for an internship, ask how much something would cost, ask how much money the others are willing to bet on an idea when they are convincing you to put in yours.

And the unpredictability of morning weather is self explanatory.

9. The binary between liberals and conservatives is an illusion.

I took two courses ‘Modern Political Concepts’ and ‘Introduction to Development Studies’ with Dr. Solano. It showed me how political ideologies are on a spectrum and how no one can ever be defined by compartmentalized identities; there are conservative governments that have adopted liberal economic policies, and liberal governments that embrace social conservatism in a way that serves their interest.

Adam Smith and Karl Marx are not born enemies - they were observant men, writing about their times based on their lived experiences. If Marx was born in Smith’s era and vice versa they could have easily exchanged roles. Marxism could have been Smithism. The broader learning is that everyone is a product of their circumstances more than they would like to accept.

Most importantly, these classes showed me that studying mainstream economics is not something that aligns with my value system, and that freed me from the regret of not being able to major in economics at college.

10. Scientific innovation is not some grand thing that happens in a day, it is often the result of incremental things that compound over the years enabling someone to make a breakthrough today.

Interacting with Prof. Sunil Bhand (who taught Bio and Chemical sensors) made me believe that scientists are just ordinary people like you and me, who act on their creative ideas. I remember sitting in one of his classes, and feeling this sense of wonder, because someone believes that folks like me would one day win the Nobel Prize.

Prof. Meenal Kowshik (who taught Nanobiotechnology) brought so much excitement about the latest discoveries into class, that I began to see science and technology as a story that we write across generations, building on stuff that people long ago did and enabling the next generation to build on what we did.

11. Everyone who does a PhD is not smart, all smart people don’t aspire to PhDs

I grew up believing that PhD is a recognition handed out to the smartest people. I met enough PhD scholars to know that this is false. Most of them don’t even think, they just follow instructions and churn out research papers. That is not to say that I did not find an elder brother figure in a PhD student on campus. A lot of smart folks I met (peers, alumni) chose to leverage their intelligence to do other things that mattered. PhD is just another degree, why you do a PhD is what matters.

12. Value the journey more than the destination
Beyond the obvious advantages, this is the philosophy that folks with a healthy work-life balance live by. You now value yourself for the work you do as opposed to the output you produce (which is often what the rest of the world sees), and that gives you a degree of satisfaction as you keep aiming higher (or wider).

13. Alcohol means different things to different people
For some it’s about liberation and for some it about entrapment. People’s identities don’t revolve around their relationship with alcohol, and I have learnt not to judge people for that. I don’t drink, and don’t intend to anytime in the future. But I have learnt to become more accepting of people’s choice around alcohol as long as I am not directly at an inconvenience (although I would still like to argue that when it comes to alcohol and cigarettes, personal choice is an illusion and folks often start doing it to fit into social groups which is a form of indirect coercion).

14. Anyone can be an entrepreneur

The New Venture Creation Course (NVC) showed me that entrepreneurs come from different backgrounds, solving vastly different problems, and how resilience is probably the only pre-requisite to become one. BITS gave me access to networks and support systems to get started, and as a first-generation entrepreneur this matters a lot.

“Some things are more precious because they don’t last long”
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

What will I miss the most about campus? (in that order)

1. The LDC

I came to campus with a severe identity crisis - I am a Malayali, who had grown up in the UAE all my life. I felt like I would not have anyone to relate to, and that’s when I ended up at the Literary and Debating Club by chance. Palli and Harsha (and the rest of their core) managed to create a sense of belonging for new folks in the club even when our first year was fully remote. No one asked me where I came from, what my major was or what caste I belonged to. For the first time in my life, I felt seen and heard for who I really am. In spite of the fact that I had never met these people in person I knew they were my tribe.

In my second year, I had the opportunity to lead this club as the chief coordinator. As exciting and fulfilling as that was, it was also one of the most draining experiences of my life. I had to deal with multiple challenges that I was not prepared for (read: harassment complaints and outings gone messy because other people drank too much), but I am so glad I got to do with the best core team ever - Abu, Manan, Harsh, Nirmal, Anuj, PG, Ishan, Chetan, Aaditi - I am so so grateful to you all for holding the fort.

LDC is probably one of the only liberal (read: inclusive of gender and religious identities) spaces on campus, one of the handful where you will be accepted regardless of how contrarian your views are. Most of my closest friends are from the LDC, and it’s often the spirit of LDC that I look for in any new person I meet wherever I go. No other club on campus has senior members so fully involved, that speaks volumes about how much people value this community of misfits.

The club was a significant part of my college identity (people often asked me how is LDC right after they asked how are you), and it breaks my heart when I think of the fact that I will not be able to show up for a debate or a book club at A50x. But I also know the club is (and always will be) in very safe hands, and knowing that I have been a part of this legacy gives me so much joy. Although seniors assure me that LDC never leaves you even if you leave the LDC, it’s still the hardest goodbye.

2. Accessible Labs Project

I found this project (or this project found me) quite by accident. I never thought I would be spending hours on end in college trying to make science experiments accessible to visually impaired (VI) students.

But I am so glad I decided to lead the Accessible Labs project - it has ironically enabled me to see the world differently. It gave me the opportunity to work with educational researchers (I didn’t even know this was a thing), NGOs, VI students and their educators, and peers from across disciplines trying to crack a grassroot level problem. I saw first hand that cool tech wasn’t good enough, it had to be affordable and relevant.

This project introduced me to Dr. Swaroop Joshi and his PhD student Partha, who are people I want to grow up to be like. I will miss sitting down for weekly meetings in the conference room (where I was the only chemistry major among a sea of computer science majors), working out of the robotics lab twice a week, and representing the project at assistive tech conferences. More importantly, I will miss SAlly - this is the name we gave our device that detects color and volume, and she has now grown into a human-like presence in my life.

I was walking out of my last work session on May 2, 2024 and thought this thought and then wrote it down:
“There are days when you wake up with bated breath questioning what the hell you are doing in life. And one some days like these you slowly grow into the answer – within the miniscule universe you inhabit you have managed to will into existence something that didn’t exist before, something that has the potential to radically transform someone else’s life (and in that process have your own life transformed). You had the courage to take that leap, make others’ eyes light up with a vision so compelling that they had no choice but to join you”.

Many years down the line, I might come back to pick this project up again. I hope I do.

3. Fried Maggi at FK

4. Chilli Cheese Garlic Naan at RC
This is a dish I haven’t been able to find at any restaurant anywhere else in the country (of course, please recommend if you know).

5. The sky during sunrise and the sunset
Growing up in the UAE, I didn’t get to see much of a clear sky due to the all-pervasive skyline. It’s on campus that I realized how beautiful skies can be. I don’t click a lot of photographs (I have good photographer friends to borrow them from), but a lot of these images have become deeply imprinted in my mind.

6. Spontaneous conversations with folks in the mess
I have made a lot of friends by just striking up random conversations with folks in the mess. It has enabled me to expand my surface area and interact with the kind of people I wouldn’t bump into otherwise. And it often changed my life - in good and not so good ways.

7. Walks
This is something I hated when I first came to campus, the world seemed to have expanded out of the blue, and every place seemed so far away. But I have grown to love these walks. On sunny, cloudy, rainy and pleasant days, walks on campus have been my go to strategy to relax and find a sense of grounding. And walks with my favourite people, gosh I am going to miss that so much.

8. My room in CH-4
I had never had a room of my own until I came to campus. And I have valued that private space a lot. I lived in room 246 for two years and in 215 for a semester. Both these rooms have held me in their arms in their own unique ways as I tried to navigate love, laundry and lessons. Although I never decorated the walls or tidied it up everyday, it felt like home (except when the hostel assistant asked me to put my footwear inside). Wherever I go, I know I will be looking for a room like this one.

9. The library

10. MPOWER and their free mental health support
This has helped me deal with a lot of my complex emotions over the years, and I am super grateful to my therapist Cleon for being such a source of warmth. I have sat in the comfy couch at MPOWER on multiple days crying my heart out and knowing that my struggles are being heard and valued, it helped me cope with college life. And the best part is that I didn’t have to pay for it - free mental health support should be accessible to students everywhere at all times, I hope we get to a world like that.

11. Buying fruits from the fruit-aunty (her name is Neetra, by the way)
I bought fruits almost daily, and we became friends - she was especially happy when I introduced her to my parents. She always picked the best coconuts and cut mangoes for me. I think she was really happy that someone valued her beyond the transactionality of everyday life.

What am I the proudest of?

1. I learnt to sort my laundry, clean my room and pack my luggage
These are things I have had the privilege of not having to do until I showed up to campus, and I still remember the first time I was going back home, Rohini, a friend who lived next door had to show up and pack stuff for me because I was so clueless.

2. I am now able to set healthy boundaries with people

3. I went on my first solo trip and managed to not get lost
And all of this in a place where the public transport system is broken, cabs are extraordinarily expensive and you are constantly worried about safety

4. I made some incredible friends
This matters a lot because I grew up believing that I wasn’t good enough to be anyone’s friend

5. I have become more inclusive as a person
I now understand the queer movement better and how it is allied to the broader feminist cause, I don’t judge people (as much) for the choices they make

6. SAlly
She has grown up so much in the last two years, and our team has come very close to the audacious goals we set at the beginning

7. I found the courage to take a leap into entrepreneurship
And most importantly convince my parents that it’s not such a bad career choice after all

8. I am so proud of how my core team at LDC managed to pull off so many events in spite of the very difficult hybrid situation, and how new we ourselves were to campus (because our first year was online)

9. Stood up to a harasser, and filed a complaint against him
This takes a lot more courage than I thought it would (and I am super grateful to Akanksha for being there throughout). Ideally the college should have better support systems around this.

10. I have learnt to handle money
both in person and digital, and make my first mutual fund investment

11. I figured out that my super power is curiosity
It’s good to know that I have a super power, and that it matters because something like AI can possibly never be curious, unless we discover the exact chemical processes that enable curiosity and replicate it.

As I step out of college, what are my biggest fears?

1. Not having a set timetable
This has been such a characteristic feature of my life, setting my own schedule and sticking to it without any external institution involved feels like a huge mountain I have to scale

2. Staying in touch with the people I met on campus
I want to be friends with my favourite people for many more years, I don’t know if I will have the energy to sustain those. But even if I don’t, I hope they will be people I can reach out to anytime.

3. A sense of fear when it comes to investing money
I still haven’t got to investing in stocks. I will soon.

4. Having to figure out independent housing and living expenses
In a city like Bangalore

5. I am afraid of the roads, I need to learn to drive

6. My parents growing old
This is a super underrated fear, I don’t know how people face this in general

7. And of course, BioCompute the moonshot company I am building - I don’t know if it will work out, but I am doing everything I can to maximize my chances of success

Lots unsaid, but there is only so much words can do.

Yours comfily,
Anagha