Ashika Jayanthy’s Blog

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 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...

 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!