The Long Way to Understanding (Part 2)

This post was polished using ChatGPT

The turning point did not arrive as a sudden revelation. It arrived as a conversation.

Rahul Roy had been a topper in my class, the kind of student whose path seemed clear and inevitable. Around the time he entered IIT Bombay, our lives moved in different directions academically, yet somehow that was when we began to really talk. It was just after Holi when those conversations started to stretch late into the night. Hours would pass without either of us noticing. At first we spoke about subjects, exams, ideas. Slowly, those discussions became something deeper. He asked questions about how I approached problems, how I read, how I thought. And somewhere in those exchanges, he saw a version of me I could not yet see myself.

Until then, I had quietly accepted a story about who I was: someone curious but inconsistent, interested in ideas but unable to execute them well. Rahul did not accept that version. He never said it directly, but his patience implied something else. He treated me as if I were capable of much more than my recent years suggested.

Taking a gap year felt like standing at the edge of a cliff. It meant admitting that the path I had been on was not working, and choosing uncertainty over momentum. But the more we spoke, the more that choice began to feel less like failure and more like a reset. I decided to attempt the entrance exams again, not out of desperation but out of a quiet belief that maybe I had not yet learned how to learn.

Rahul did not just help me with subjects. He taught me how to think.

We began with physics. At first my approach was scattered, jumping between concepts without grounding. He slowed everything down. Focus on definitions. Understand the structure of a problem before touching the algebra. Question each assumption. Those sessions felt less like tutoring and more like reshaping the way my mind moved through complexity. Gradually, something shifted. Problems that once felt overwhelming began to look like sequences of steps. Mastery did not arrive overnight, but I could feel the fog lifting.

Organic chemistry came next. It had always seemed chaotic to me, a collection of reactions without logic. Rahul showed me patterns instead of memorization. Mechanisms became stories. Electrons moved with intention. For the first time, chemistry felt coherent. From there, the rest of the subject began to fall into place, each piece connecting to another until the discipline stopped feeling like a wall and started feeling like a landscape.

What stayed with me most was his consistency. He never gave up on me, even when I doubted myself or drifted into old habits. While managing the intensity of IIT academics, he still found time to guide me, to correct small mistakes, to insist on detail and clarity. He pushed me to focus, to slow down, to respect precision. Bit by bit, my mind felt less scattered and more directed, as if someone had adjusted the lens through which I saw problems.

Looking back, I realize that the real transformation was not just academic. It was relational. Someone believed in a version of me that I had stopped imagining. That belief created a space where change felt possible. The gap year stopped feeling like an admission of defeat and began to feel like a deliberate rebuilding.

There were still difficult days. There were moments when progress felt fragile. But something fundamental had shifted. Instead of reading endlessly without direction, I was learning to engage deeply with material, to wrestle with it patiently until it yielded understanding. Rahul did not simply teach me subjects; he helped shape a way of thinking that felt stronger, more precise, more grounded.


For the first time in years, effort began to feel meaningful. Not frantic or desperate, but focused. And somewhere within those long nightly conversations, I started to believe that the curiosity I had carried since Rishi Valley could coexist with discipline. That the mind I once saw as unfocused could become something powerful when guided with patience and care.

The Long Way to Understanding (Part 1)

This post was polished using chatGPT

I did not begin with equations. I began with books.

Ninth and tenth grade at Rishi Valley felt less like school and more like a long corridor lined with ideas that were waiting to be opened. The campus itself had a strange quietness. There was space to think, space to wander, and I filled most of that space by reading. I read constantly. Not because I was brilliant or disciplined, but because I was hungry for something I could not name yet. Stories, science, philosophy, anything that hinted at a deeper structure beneath the world felt irresistible.

Math, ironically, was not one of the places where I felt at home. I was not terrible, but I was never the student who solved problems quickly or effortlessly. Numbers did not arrange themselves into clean patterns in my mind. While others seemed to move through algebra with confidence, I felt like I was always slightly behind, translating a language everyone else already spoke. At the time I did not think of it as a struggle. I thought of it as a quiet embarrassment that I hid behind curiosity in other subjects.

Physics, though, felt different. It did not ask me to be fast. It asked me to wonder.

I remember picking up QED by Feynman and reading it with a seriousness that probably surprised my teachers. I did not understand everything. Sometimes I barely understood half of it. But the idea that light could be explained through paths, probabilities, and tiny arrows felt like discovering a secret grammar of reality. I kept asking physics questions, sometimes clumsy ones, sometimes repetitive. I was not chasing grades. I was chasing the feeling that somewhere beneath the confusion there was an order I could almost touch.

One evening the school staged a play about a conversation between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. It centered on the uncertainty principle, but it did not feel like a lecture. It felt like watching two minds circle around a mystery they could never fully resolve. The dialogue moved slowly, almost carefully, as if each word carried the weight of an entire century of thought. I remember sitting there completely still, feeling something shift inside me. It was not just the physics. It was the realization that ideas could be alive, that disagreement could be intimate, that uncertainty itself could be meaningful rather than frightening.

Until that moment, I had thought of science mostly as answers. That play showed me science as a conversation that never ends.

Looking back, it is strange to think that I was so captivated by quantum ideas while still feeling mediocre in math class the next morning. I could be mesmerized by probability amplitudes at night and then struggle with a simple problem set during the day. At the time it felt like a contradiction. Now I think it was the beginning of a pattern that would follow me for years. I was drawn to the deepest questions before I had the tools to approach them. The imagination arrived before the technique.

Rishi Valley gave me permission to live in that gap for a while. I read under trees, in dorm rooms, in quiet corners where time slowed down. I was not building a clear path toward anything. I was assembling fragments. Physics questions that had no immediate answers. Scenes from a play that refused to leave my mind. A book by Feynman that felt like both a doorway and a challenge.

If I try to locate the exact moment when curiosity stopped being casual and became something closer to devotion, it might be that evening with Bohr and Heisenberg. Watching them argue about uncertainty made me realize that confusion was not a failure. It was the terrain itself.


At fifteen, I did not yet know that I would struggle with mathematics for years, or that learning to think clearly would become a much more personal journey than I expected. I only knew that there was a world made of questions, and that I wanted to stand inside it, even if I did not fully belong there yet.

Shaving my head and other things

 I recently shaved my head to fulfill a religious vow in Tirupathi, India. It's been an interesting experience. I love the feeling of wind on my scalp, and the fact that I don't have to worry about combing and styling my hair every day. The only thing I'm worried about is the in-between short hair phase of growing my hair out. So I asked ChatGPT to make a prediction of what I would look like. Here's a picture of me with short hair as imagined by ChatGPT:

And one of me bald!