second grade, show and tell. my classmate pulls out a piece of paper, folds it maybe fifteen times, and suddenly there's a tractor sitting on his desk. an actual tractor, with wheels and everything, made from one flat square of paper. i remember staring at it like he'd just performed a magic trick.

started my first "business" in elementary school selling mini origami school supplies. tiny paper pencil holders, folded boxes, little origami bookmarks shaped like animals, eventually even small folded organizers with compartments for pens. classmates would request custom designs, a pencil holder shaped like their favorite animal, and i'd spend weekends prototyping folds that could actually hold weight without...

in middle school i noticed my mom's salon losing regular customers to competitors with slick websites. she kept every appointment in a paper notebook, split between gujarati and english, along with all her inventory counts and expenses scribbled in the margins, because building anything digital had never felt like an option for her.

went to an art studio i'd been attending for five years, but this particular workshop felt different. my art teacher had picked me to join a session with experienced artists from around the state, most of them way older, way more skilled, easels already covered in intricate sketches before i'd even set up mine.

my brother and i have this ongoing tradition where we debate completely absurd questions until one of us gives up or my grandmother yells at us to go to sleep. last week's topic: does your head grow faster than your feet.

i have this habit that confuses literally everyone who knows me. at big cultural gatherings, weddings, festivals, dance performances, i'm the person crouched down scanning the floor for loose beads and crystals that fall off people's outfits while they're dancing.

got weirdly obsessed with linear b for a few weeks last year, which is this ancient script used in bronze age greece that took decades for actual linguists to decipher. i have no formal training in linguistics whatsoever, i just found it fascinating that people used to communicate in symbols we forgot how to read for thousands of years.