The Long Way to Understanding (Part 1)

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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.