I don’t really have roots. I never stayed in one place long enough to make it permanent. But I carry every place I pass through. Like a bird that migrates.

A transwoman told me she would rather beg than return to work where she had been abused. My MSc study of the Aravani Art Project grew from that, and argued that a person is wronged not only by exclusion, but by being flattened to a single identity.

At Mahindra Pride School I built my own module for first-generation graduates, and treated English as a tool, not a test of worth. Fearing it, I told them, is exactly what the coloniser would have wanted. Some wrote back, once placed, to say it had helped.

My baseline survey in Ambedkar Nagar surfaced a belief no desk study would predict, and a disposal habit polluting a lake. I did not argue from hygiene. I reframed it around the neighbour sent to clean that water, and the cost of one cup against years of pads.

My first master’s was in sustainable development, and one tension has stayed with me since. The same growth that lifts people out of poverty strains the land, the water, the climate. I study which government interventions actually ease that trade-off, and who is left bearing the cost when they do not.

A two-way fixed-effects panel on trafficking across India. Where reported cases rise with state income, the likeliest story is not more crime but more reporting. The data measures who is counted, not only what occurs.

I taught myself to build. Know Your Citation puts the source behind political claims, so no platform has to adjudicate truth. Beside it sit a district data atlas, an app to teach elders the phone, and more. I learn the field, then make the thing.