A student of how things came to be.

The part of history I enjoy most is not any single period but the question underneath all of them: how societies organised themselves, what people believed, and how accounts of the past come to be argued over. I have spent this degree moving between the Indus Valley, the Mughal mansabdari system and the Scientific Revolution, and I keep finding that the most interesting problems sit between subjects rather than inside one.

So I don’t keep my interests in separate rooms. Historiography sends me to philosophy; geography explains politics; psychology explains why people believe what they do. Hindi literature — and the compressed argument of a good sher — is another way into the same questions. I would rather follow a question across disciplines than stay inside one.

Making things

I also make things. I photograph events, streets and landscapes. I wrote, co-directed and acted in a short film about discrimination against women, and in school I made two short films about scientific phenomena. In 2025 I was part of the founding team of my college’s Media Cell, where I set its visual direction and ran its creative work.

More recently I have been teaching myself to build with code — HTML, CSS, Python and C, slowly and through small, useful projects. The largest so far is Opportunity Pi, a tracker for jobs and exams that runs on a Raspberry Pi at home. This website runs on the same machine.

How I try to learn

I try to look at the evidence before the conclusion, to notice my own biases as well as other people’s, and to stay open to being wrong. I like first principles, primary sources and a good argument from someone I disagree with. I keep a diary and a notebook, and I write short personal stories from lived experience.

My earliest piece of research was a study of light pollution, published in the International Journal of Science and Research when I was in Class IX. Before that I took part in the National Children’s Science Congress, as a district and state child scientist. The habit those years left me with — ask a question, collect what you can, and say only what the evidence supports — is the one I most want to keep.

What’s next

I hope to study history at postgraduate level, with a particular interest in global and world history, and to grow into someone who researches and writes carefully. I am working on my academic writing in English, and slowly building the skills — technical and otherwise — that will let me ask better questions.

This site is where I keep track of all of it. It is unfinished on purpose.