About Me

This is my only home in the digital realm. The rest of this site is about the things I do, and this page is about the person doing them.

I'm a good listener, and I don't wait for a gap to say my own thing. I can sit with someone for hours while they work something out, without trying to fix it or steer it anywhere. I don't judge much, and I joke a lot.

There's a stricter side of me underneath that, where I have very particular ideas about how things ought to be done. When the language model on my computer got Bhimpalasi wrong, I built it a library of Wikipedia articles on raags to read before it answers me.

I'm either at a hundred percent or at zero, and I've never worked out how to coast. That cuts both ways - it's why I'm up at five to get ready for tennis and training, and it's also why I'm useless at anything I've decided I don't care about. Whenever I do something that I really love, I find myself lost in it without any track of time. This happens every day.

Everyone who gets to know about all my activities say that I'm way too energetic. I'm also an introvert, and both are real - I spend the energy, and then I need to be alone to get it back.

Mostly I take something on because I want to enjoy it and to be good at it, rather than because it's expected or because it looks like progress. That's the whole filter, and it's why some things are on this site and others aren't.

The freedom to choose matters more to me than almost anything else, whether that's practising what I want or working on what I find worth doing.

I'm not much good at hypotheticals. What-if conversations make me restless, because the real thing in front of me is always more interesting than a version of it that doesn't exist yet.

If we talk, I'd rather go deep than wide, and spend three hours on two things instead of two hours on ten. My favourite thing is the point where a conversation has gone somewhere neither of us would have got to alone, and then the silence when there's genuinely nothing left to say about it.

I recently took a couple of personality tests for fun (the HEXACO and a Big Five one), and they placed me high on conscientiousness, openness, and honesty-humility, and on the bolder, livelier half of extraversion, though not the sociable half. They also put me well below average on anxiety. I do all the items on this website every day with high effort and discipline, which would have broken me in the past if it weren't for my hold on emotions.