9/16/2026
8/10/2026
summer affairs
This was (pretty much) my first weekend now that I've moved to a brand new city! I started Saturday meeting my friend at a cafe, and had a delicious date-banana smoothie. I'm dying to recreate it now, it was so good. Felt so good to catch up with a friend I haven't seen in a while. After that I went to the arcade, FINALLY, and the trek was almost an hour. This particular arcade has all my favorite rhythm games, including DDR and Pump It Up!, so I played for a couple hours. DDR requires repetition, which requires money and a free machine. I don't always get lucky, but the arcade didn't get super crowded until an hour after I arrived. Next time, I'll go earlier. After the arcade, I met up with some friends and had the most magnificent South Indian meal I've ever had in the city I live in. I wish I took pictures of it grrrrr. It healed me head to toe. At night, I got the AC installed in the room I'm living in thanks to my 70-year-old roommate and her friends!
On Sunday, I realized it was almost 90 degrees outside and I felt cooked alive while buying groceries. Felt so proud of myself for grocery shopping and doing my laundry that I took a victory nap! When I woke up, I went to the public pool with some friends by a reservoir. My friend and I wanted to live our Diary of a Wimpy Kid fantasies but the pool felt more like Rowley's country club than the public pool, it was not crowded at all on one of the hottest days of the year! The reservoir next to the pool was GORGEOUS, it's also the one thing I remembered to take a flick of this weekend oOps >.< Note to self to bring my camera more places.
Sprinted to my friend's presentation night and ALMOST missed the bus, but the kind bus driver let me on in the middle of the street. Watched Interior Motives, watched each other's presentations (I did mine on my college dating stories), and hopped back home by 10. My friends are such good hosts, I'm excited to have my own place to throw parties for them! I've never been a big fan of summer but... yeah I'm still not. I miss layering my clothes and not sweating off my makeup.
7/25/2026
AI
So I've started a new job (still don't know how I feel about that) and am quickly making some horrifying realizations. The main one being that companies are reeling in AI in ways that, in my opinion, add barely any value and completely strip the creative process. In the process, I'm sadly becoming more of a doomer than ever. It's so upsetting to see grown adults struggling to read a five-minute article without pasting it into AI. The worst is when an entire workflow becomes pasting prompt after prompt into AI and letting it do all the work for you. It feels like I'm flooding my senses and succumbing to the Chat GPT forces. Most of the work I've done in school feels sort of pointless in this context. I really would not like to lose my ability to write and code, so I will try to not use AI for everything, although it's heavily being pushed into our workflows :(. For larger data analysis, it is definitely helpful, I can't fully dunk on it, but I do think about how our psyches will be permanently altered from excessive AI usage. Will full-length books and articles become obsolete and be reduced to bullet points? Are our brains even meant to only partially understand concepts? Will future media become regurgitations of existing media? Who knows?
6/03/2026
obsession
I watched Obsession yesterday at the theater in the college town I grew up in. It was absolutely packed with college kids but I like watching movies in a packed theater. I think I watched Wuthering Heights in a small theater too, and hearing people's callouts and gasps are so funny! Anyways, Obsession was a great movie and I had a lot of thoughts on it. This review will have some spoilers in it, so just be wary.
Although I'm not a person who runs to the theater to watch a horror movie, this one was worth running to. Like many of the movies that have come out in the past five years, this one is a critique on modern dating, specifically on the entitlement of "nice guys". What I liked was that Bear and Nikki had a relationship so genuine that if Bear had just confessed his feelings, there was room for them to gradually become romantic. Since he chose to take a shortcut, turning Nikki into basically a yandere, he had to pay the consequences. The movie could have easily punished Nikki for not reciprocating Bear's feelings, or been another commentary on incels, if it weren't for Michael Johnston's performance. But Inde Navarette gave an Isabelle Adjani-tier performance!!
5/17/2026
graduating
I graduated college yesterday!!! If anything, I've felt more happy than sad about this change in my life. Four years is a long time, and I've laughed, cried, grown, reached highs and lows, and tried more things than I ever have in my life. After my high school graduation, I knew I had outgrown my hometown and the stifling environment of my public school, but now, I slightly feel I've outgrown my college too. A business, finance-bro oriented school is not where I imagine more than four years of my life in. What I've missed of high school and what I'll miss the most of college are the people (unsurprisingly). Never again will I make and break relationships faster, greet multiple people on my walk to get food, or stay up all night chatting with friends on the floor of my dorm. Or maybe there is space for that in post-grad life--my idea of life from now on is vast and fleeting. That could be an opportunity, as I won't be living semester to semester anymore, working towards a piece of paper that grants me whatever opportunities it deems fit. My life is now in my hands. All that agency is scary to think about, especially for a deeply indecisive person. For the past ten years, I could see a clear light at the end of the tunnel, a graduation or ceremony to look forward to. Now, I can't see myself celebrating my eighth anniversary at a company or hitting a major life milestone. I feel too young for that!!
My goals for the next year, at least, are to live as fruitfully as I possibly can. I hate saying I'd like to "make memories", because it's not something that should be forced, but I'd like to soak in as many experiences as I possibly can. With nobody living in cramped dorms forced to interact with each other, we'll just have to make the most of it. This past year has definitely been my most well-spent, so note to self, let's top that. Oh, and I have to work on this website more. >.< sorry for not doing that lol
3/28/2026
catch up
Recently, I've been in a kind of funk and haven't been able to write. I need to push myself to keep writing as I don't want to lose out on this website. So, here's a short essay on my spring break travels:
This spring break, I traveled to India to work for an NGO called Sharan Home Foundation, a children's home located about three hours from central Mumbai. The experience was gratifying-- the kids and I made a big traditional Indian lunch and played cricket on the beach afterwards. I had quite a few findings from my short visit. What's amazing is that the neighborhood supports the home in any way they can. The local stable owner offers free horse riding lessons to the kids in the mornings, and the owner is in talks with the local surfing instructor for summer lessons. The kids also get a lot more outdoor time than the average American child. When I asked about this, I was told a story about one of the children who for the first five years of his life, constantly sat in front of a television while his mother worked. He never learned how to communicate that he was hungry or thirsty, or to tie his own shoelaces. Now that he's spending more time outside and with other kids his age, he's finally hitting milestones most children did at a younger age. Regardless of their backgrounds, the dreams these kids had were big, and so were their hearts. A girl even aspired to be Miss Universe, which made me so happy to hear.
Truthfully, the contrast between the way these kids lived before coming to Sharan Home versus my living accommodation in Mumbai was night and day. For almost the price of a Holiday Inn in America, I was able to stay in one of the fanciest hotels in Bandra. For the children, many of them came from slums, one of them grew up under a bridge. This is the paradox of India, it's difficult to wrap your head around just how large the lifestyle gap is for people in cities like Mumbai or Delhi. On the highway, I noticed people building large metal walls covering the slums from those who can afford to take cars around. In some spots, I could see young kids playing on the side of the highway, no parks or really any greenery to be seen, despite my initial impression of Mumbai as an exceptionally green city. While looking out the window of the airplane, I could see just how big these slums were, houses and tents nearly stacked on top of each other.
I don't know when these issues will be solved, or if they will ever be solved. Looking into the political history and culture of India, the direction the country has taken post-colonial rule is not really productive for class equality. A mixture of its religious traditionalism and incompatible British systems prevent India from recognizing its deep issues and solving them. While situations have been improving, albeit at a snail's pace, attitudes towards lower-status people made me feel deeply uncomfortable, and I never wanted to get used to it. That's why I was semi-excited to visit Bengal again, a region that has birthed the country's largest Maoist rebellion and is usually leading the conversations about what communism could('ve) done for India. There's a lot more I could write on its failure as a state, and it still shares a lot of the problems the rest of India suffers, but reading and learning about its history is so interesting to me.
Here are some pictures of the area surrounding my house in Kolkata:
3/16/2026
pre spring break
Not much interesting has happened since my last post, other than my spring break plans getting funded by my school. I'll be spending five days in Mumbai--mostly outside the city volunteering--and two days in Kolkata to visit family. Growing up, my trips to India exclusively consisted of (what felt like) being locked at home in Kolkata for weeks. Not to say I don't have great memories there, but since the trips were over my summer breaks, I never felt integrated into Indian society, especially since I had a hard time with the language. This is my first time staying somewhere outside of East India for more than a day, which is exciting to think about.
Before my trip, I've been reading In Light Of India by Octavio Paz, a Mexican diplomat and poet stationed in India during the late 1950s. The book has made me rethink a lot of my previous notions about India as a country destined to make me irritated by its inefficience. However, I failed to recognize its past of colonial rule, caste, and extreme traditionalism, the things that make it the chaotic but culturally rich country it is. There are things that definitely will annoy me about being in India--having to push through a crowd instead of standing in a line, the streets full of litter--but as a (hopefully) more well-adjusted adult, I'd like to see if I can analyze these annoyances instead of compaining about them. I hope to update again soon once I'm in Kolkata.
2/25/2026
neo-blogging
When I was 10 years old or so, my dad made me a blogspot blog, where I would provide life updates for my aunt and cousins in India. I enjoyed creative writing so much as a kid, but as I grew older, the hobby got buried under all the other hobbies I started exploring. It wasn't until I took a writing class in college that I refound my love for reviewing things! Music, movies, books -- the sheer amount of media that I consume warrants at least some opinions on them. Writing is not my strong suit any more, to say the least, but the more I write, the better I'll probably get? I hope so. Soon, I'd like to make a media log where my reviews live on paperdoe. Until then, I'll keep blogging on here. :)