From Childhood Onward

The Iliad, Fagles translation, read in 2010. Latin and French attempted the same year; not retained.

Two years of Carnatic vocal under a local guru in Bengaluru; varnams and kritis learned by rote, abandoned at the family's relocation.

Discovered the library's poetry shelf; copied Dickinson by hand into a notebook alongside Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali, translated by Tagore himself.

A 4,000-word school essay examining the Arthashastra's revenue apparatus against Romila Thapar's reconstruction; cited six secondary sources for the first time.

Self-taught Python 3 via Swaroop's "A Byte of Python"; built a command-line trainer that quizzed first/second/third declension endings across all five cases.

Catalogued 19th-century C.V. Raman correspondence; first exposure to scholarly apparatus, controlled-vocabulary subject headings, and the discipline of the finding aid.

A close reading of the Odyssey's Penelope as a figure of disciplined interiority; submitted to the school literary magazine and rejected, then revised and published in the college magazine the following year.

During the pandemic, built a static-site archive of quotations, marginalia, and reading notes; first attempt at a personal scholarly archive, abandoned in favour of the present one.

A 9,000-word extended essay on 17th-century Marathi-Dakhini lexicons; first sustained engagement with manuscript evidence and the politics of lexicographic inclusion.

Built TEI-XML ingestion pipelines for a digital edition of late-19th-century Bengali periodicals; learned Git, regex, and the discipline of scholarly encoding.

Re-entered Urdu with the intention of reading Ghalib in the original; produced sixteen draft translations of short ghazals, kept a prosodic commentary on each.

A 28,000-word thesis on the rhetorical structure of the Major Rock Edicts; argued, against the older inscriptional tradition, for a deliberate audience-design across dialects.

Rebuilt the personal scholarly archive from scratch; replaced the abandoned Hugo prototype with a deliberately archival design system, typed in Yeseva One and Alice on lavender.

Applying to read History, Classics, or Comparative Literature at Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Yale, and the University of Edinburgh. The archive is read, in part, as a portfolio of sustained intellectual attention.