Musings

On the gap between generic advice and what producing arts events actually requires. Every article about event planning will tell you to set a budget, choose a venue, and create a timeline. This is true in the same way that "practice regularly" is true advice for learning Bharatanatyam — technically accurate and almost entirely useless without the twenty years of context required to make it actionable. I curate events. Not as a side project or an occasional favor, but as a cor

sometimes i stand outside my house and peer in through the windows. if i manage to scramble onto the roof — don't worry, it's safe — i'll look into my bedroom window. it's a fascinating feeling — being an outsider peering into your own life. the world within the walls doesn't seem real but rather something constructed by soldering imagination, aspiration, and desperation into an image we present to ourselves and anyone else who — rather than looking in — waltzes through the f

The thing about boredom is that it is often paired with laziness — the assumption being that one cannot bring oneself to do much of anything, when in truth the more accurate diagnosis is that until you have done something, anything at all, you feel as though your soul is quietly packing its bags and making for the door. This, upon a brief moment of reflection, sounds rather like a bout of the blues, shall we say — and in the words of a rather famous maison du vin, "yes, me an

It is a truth universally acknowledged, if selectively practiced, that the greatest literature has always made its home in the darkest corridors of human experience. Consider Austen — a writer whose genre has always extended to the reader a certain reassurance, the drawing room as a space of wit and courtship rather than crisis, and whose social commentary, though widely acknowledged in academic circles, is somehow never quite allowed to disturb the comfort of the reading ex

To be lonely is to be in acceptance of one's own lesser worth. rational thought dictates that true happiness comes from the ability to thrive in the presence of the solitary body & mind, and to carve out those moments of joy that aren't derived from external input. but humans, foolishly, aren't solitary creatures. Instead, they form bonds — more often fragile than not — that can dissolve with the slightest tension. And we've deluded ourselves into believing that this thing, l

Contrary to popular belief, depression is not so much a state of being as it is a realisation — specifically, a realisation about one's own personal outlook of futility, which arrives not, as one might expect, at the bottom of things, but rather in the disconcerting calm of feeling, for once, entirely all right. It is in this moment of relative equilibrium that the preceding months or years arrange themselves into perspective, and the perspective is not always welcome. The ro

Rescuing my parents is not something they prepared me for in school. Nor in television shows, nor in the books I have been poring over for decades — and there are rather a lot of them, covering subjects as varied as the human condition, the collapse of civilisations, and the precise etiquette of afternoon tea (yes, I wasted a few hours on that last one), none of which, it turns out, contain a chapter on this. It arrives not as a single moment but as a cascade, settling over e

On the uncomfortable overlap between moving and capturing movement. I am not a dance photographer. I want to be clear about that upfront, because what follows is not a guide to dance photography or a portfolio of stunning mid-air captures. I am a dancer who takes photographs, which is a different thing entirely — and the difference is more interesting than it might seem. Bharatanatyam trained me to understand the body as a precise instrument of communication. Every angle of t

Author Note: I have been thinking about cities for a long time, from multiple directions simultaneously — as a designer, a policy analyst, a GIS researcher, a speculative thinker, and someone who has lived in enough places to have opinions about what makes them work and what makes them quietly unbearable. This essay tries to pull those threads together. Urban Development Insights from a Creative Mind When I was nineteen, I wrote a one-page response to the prompt "what is your

In high school, I competed in radio as part of debate, and people responded to my voice — to the cadence of it, the control, the fact that I apparently knew what to do with a microphone without being told. I filed that away and mostly forgot about it, the way you do with things that come naturally enough that they don't feel like skills. Then the pandemic happened, and the campus radio station was looking for hosts, and I ended up with a Friday night slot and a show called Ma

I joined Prospect Journal of International Affairs at UC San Diego in fall 2020, became Director of Marketing almost immediately, and was appointed Editor-in-Chief within my first year — largely because I was the only one who wanted to do both jobs at once. I held the EIC and Director of Marketing and Media roles simultaneously through June 2023. This is a reflection on what that actually looked like. Prospect Journal of International Affairs was, when I joined it in fall 202

There is a particular kind of full-circle that happens when you end up teaching the course you once sat in as a student, writing papers you now know were mostly good but occasionally embarrassing.