About

It is cliched to begin with a quote, but a quote it is that I will resort to this once. The famous children’s author Lewis Carol said, When we don’t know which way to go, any old way will do. ‘Which way to go?‘ has often been a fixture with respect to work for me. I studied to be an engineer in the lovely Indian coastal city of Madras, post which I pursued a degree in mass communication. For the most part of the career that followed, I created and edited content for various media and purposes, quite fitting in and yet quite not.

Sometime in the middle of the infamous pandemic of 2020, I got an opportunity to tutor a young girl on creative writing. What began as a couple of normal hours every week of exploring the written word with an earnest child turned to me re-discovering after a long time the joy of being immersed at something for its own sake, with absolutely no thought whatsoever of where it could lead.

Since then, I have had the opportunity to work with larger groups of children, teaching both language arts and mathematics. I am currently pursuing a master’s degree in Technology, Creativity, and Thinking in Education at the University of Exeter. I am particularly interested in writing pedagogies, new literacies, and mathematics education. I imagine myself getting quite nerdy about teaching mathematics to middle-school children, pointing them toward the joy of abstraction in numbers.

Our journey at work (and outside it) is always one in progress, and I am aware that many crossroads will lie ahead even in a vocation you earnestly flow into. During moments of doubt, I try to remember the joy I felt working with that young girl — making silly couplets, creating funny protagonists, and sketching bulky castles. Sometimes we just need to trust in the process and, as Lewis Carol said, take any old route, for when traveled with the best intention, they all lead to the same destination.