RAYS OF SUNSHINE.

For most people, New Year's is the time to a self check-in and evaluate the they're on and adjust course and make plans for the year ahead. Personally, I do New Year's resolutions, but I can NEVER hold myself to them too attentively, telling myself that I am "allowing room for life to just happen." So, a good mid-year inventory is on my birthday: 7/20. walden sometime last fall.  The day I was born was the day that Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong spoke those words forever changing the reach of humanity: " One small step for (a) man one giant leap for mankind." Naturally, this became my own personal benchmark for lifetime achievement. For better or worse, in the deepest reaches of my soul-- I ache to be remembered as an agent of change and a force for good...And to potentially equal the moon landing with my contributions to mankind. Tall order, but I am just competitive that way! So without further ado, 5 things I learned in the ...

In 2016, I am trying to be less like Dickens, more like Hemingway.  Let's see how long it lasts!  2015 in 12 WORDS:  JANUARY: encumbered  FEBRUARY: unsteady MARCH: CHOKEHOLD APRIL: shufflin' MAY: resolute JUNE: reflectioneering JULY: hope  AUGUST: tenacity  SEPTEMBER: LIT OCTOBER: AMAT (she loves)  NOVEMBER: B U R N E D.  DECEMBER: figure-8 LAST YEAR  , the theme of my resolutions was "dreams-into-plans" & I am happy to report that I lived up to them. This upcoming year, is all about EXECUTION because that is what separates the wheat from the chaff in entrepreneurship and in life. It's all well & good to say things, it's what you do that matters. Actions always speak louder. That's why it's taken me until the last week of January to write my resolutions out on this blog: I've been too busy LIVING! & I don't feel the need to apologize like I have in times passed. A lot went down ...

“For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice.” ― T.S. Eliot @Mahabalipuram with my father. The bandages are from the fight-or-flight incident mentioned below. Never bunker dive or run away screaming from wild monkeys into gardens walled by stone.  This year has been a trying one, but I am so grateful for how much I've grown emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. I questioned and hardened my core beliefs and values, which were tried beyond their limits. This year marked many firsts and surprises for me. I quit school--stepping away from an institution most revere-- to examine what brought me there in the first place. I found that many situations were of the "right place, wrong time" variety or even  the "wrong place, wrong time", with only time illuminating the difference. My favorite meal in Hyderabad. Paneer Tikka Masala Dosa, South Indian filter coffee, and mango ice cream.  ...

me with the stata sign in 2014 So, let's recap on where I was last on this blog: hopeful, going into my interview, which went incredibly well last Wednesday. Now, in the interim, my temp agency got me a short-term, data-entry gig at no other place than   MIT Admissions . me in 2010, pre-graduation from Burlington High School I feel like I am living in a sitcom right now. How can I portray HOW ridiculously full circle this opportunity was? My tenuous, pre-frosh connections to MIT include: my dance teacher who worked here for about 6 years her kids are alumni ( '10. '13 ) now, and were the accomplished family friends to whom my parents always looked to for inspiration and comparison signing up, and never making it to Splash! after CTY every summer… sorry, MIT!  MIT SAT prep classes performing/practicing at Kresge multiple times volunteering for MITHAS  OBSESSING over MIT blogs, especially Mollie  & Jess Kim  circa 2006-2008 h...

typography break while applying. lyrics from Weight of Living II by Bastille Self-reflection. It's something we as a people tend to save for later. Saved for the gaps in the rat race that is school and career. Saved for the comma in the sentence, the opportunity to breathe, granted once every few years. Saved for the pauses while we wait anxiously for life to press play again. As Cory mentioned, half-birthdays are a good point to reflect on the road you're on, as you keep on running, but what about those unintended stabs of self reflection we've all seen dozens of times? Those questions that probe on our common experiences as humans, but also make you think about your life journey and how you got to here. That's right, the friendly little password reminder! Since I am on the job hunt, I have been making account after account on different employer websites, and I am usually in such a hurry to just get on and submit the cover letter I spent the last hour perf...

You know that first-day-clean-slate-feeling every new school year as a kid? That feeling that no matter what is going to happen, you will have your friends, you will have lunch to look forward to, and new teachers and new adventures to be had during recess. The familiar routine, revived and renewed. I feel that when I see this empty page on my screen. Waiting for my thoughts. Waiting for my meandering views on whatever comes my way. I can't really explain the calm that envelopes me as I first dip my fingers in, checking the temperature of the water before diving deep. Deep into the terrifying abyss that sometimes is my mind. It feels so good to want to write again. These past few months, I had been feeling the absence of sense. That apathy is more crippling than anything. Instead of every sensory feeling translated into swarths of words, like birds that yearn for release, they beat against me like a rock-- I was unwavering, unrelenting. Paralyzed. Suddenly, I felt passive rath...

Some of my updates on life, thoughts about the election, and all the neverending connections I keep making that exhaust, exhilarate, and motivate me:        So, I haven't blogged since 9/11, not because of a shortage of topics to blog about, but more because I was ill-equipped to deal with my life, and was thrust into multiple situations and confrontations and leadership scenarios that I had hardly anticipated. Within the months of September and October, I reframed and redefined my priorities in life as well as for this year, and my current involvement reflects those shifts.  Here's a quick list of the things I have done in September & October:  recruited 8 new dancers for USC Drishti practiced every week until near the end of October for different performances  performed at APASA Nightmarket done henna design work for 7 people worked faithfully for a social venture that I am really excited to be a part of networked with eve...

So, first there was Aurora. A small mountain town in the middle of Colorado. 12 people dead. The killer apprehended and under trial. A Phd student in Neuroscience who secured a National Institutes of Health grant-- a very prestigious opportunity. A lonely man, distraught about being alone in an isolating environment, heralded by the media as a " poor boy who lost his way". There is much more to this story than simply a boy who lost his way back to sanity and reality. The truth of the matter is that we track all Arab-Americans and South Asians in this country due to a xenophobic fear, but we cease to regulate those who seem harmless: i.e. white males. Our inability to seek them out as a threat, married with their penchant for feeling privilege and ownership over public spaces causes an epidemic of sad white male trigger-happy enemies. In Aurora, his personal become most political. The theatrics of his modes operandi only further isolated this incident. People began t...

Where would you like to end up in a few years time?                    Funnily enough, when thinking up places to attend grad school or what programs to apply to for my coming years, geography was one of my main criteria. Though by nature I am very homely, (cooking, cleaning, and reading a book snuggled on a couch are by FAR my favorite pastimes), I have a restlessness that yearns to find spaces that are want for repair, looking for a kind soul. My love of the cold exteriors of the forgotten shop fronts in Downtown Los Angeles, alongside the newly bustling faux-posh neighborhood of Little Tokyo or the seedier Toy District that looks beaten up, but is just a community that prefers to conduct business a little looser, a little less constricted by the confines of what we call society, stem from this restlessness. I long to find a home in what others may deem lost. So I thought this would be a good moment to define the top 6 places (in no ...

"In the end it's not the years in your life that count, it's the life in your years."~ Abraham Lincoln                   I am now twenty years old. It is so hard for me to believe that fact. In many ways, I feel like age is such a gradual thing. My friends and I seldom act our age, but if "acting your age" means you suddenly lose your sense of humor and become super-serious, I don't think I will ever act my age. I enjoy Disney too much. I enjoy walking around malls with my face covered in cake, laughing into blissful oblivion. I enjoy singing along to Justin Bieber in empty malls, waiting until the last possible minute to walk out, huddling into my friends as we brave the scarily vacant parking lot together. I enjoy ripping open fortune cookies to read what some Chinese factory believes is my good fortune while eating the crispy cookie without a pause.                    For me, twenty...