So then

If you are done with the boring details, let's get to the important stuff.

I enjoy playing Journey and Tiny Glade once a week minimum.
I got into Tarot because of the artwork but I want to experiment with how it can be used as a collective narrative making tool.
I qualify as GenZ on a technicality.
You are reading this because my parents designed the house I was raised in keeping peak efficiency and aesthetic in mind. And for some reason that has culminated into a passion for walkable cities and the pursuit of good taste.

Route to Career

I used to live in a neighbourhood that had many e-rickshaws when I first moved to Delhi. The flighty, rickety little vehicles, with four passengers crammed with knees knocking, was a staple of North and Old Delhi where 10 rupees can get you far. When I moved to Central-South Delhi, where the lanes where narrow and eternally busy, a lot more manual cycle-rickshaws, but even more yellow-black autorickshaws, common around markets. South Delhi is where SUVs and Audis start mixing in with autorickshaws. Here, 100 rupees only gets me through a quarter of my commute. If you go even south, you reach the border of Delhi and into a sprawling concrete mess of Gurugram with accordion like roads that go from 8 lane to one lane highways every 2 minutes. This city is famous for bars frequented by venture capitalists but also for being underwater during the monsoons. The only recommended entryway here during rush hour is a metro so congested that it puts any any other crowd to shame. Congratulations, you have just taken the shortest ever trip through Delhi.

Spatial design has been an elusive subject for me. I first found out about architectural sociology during my undergraduate degree, over two years after the only faculty who taught it quit. I wanted my thesis to be on the subject when Covid struck, making fieldwork and exploration impossible. I got into my Masters in Social Design because I thought surely it'll have a component of urban design. I instead got to do an online elective in urban studies, which I couldn't minor in because it was on a different campus. After graduating, I started working in design and architecture studios, always feeling I'm window shopping the actual thing with all my fieldwork, desk research, and systems/policy mapping.

I have built up substantial lateral skills for the field but now I want to be formally introduced to the spatial planning and urban design and its technicalities. This is how I approach the field now: Neighbourhoods act as templates; a high-income background neighbourhood is like a high fidelity template, exhibiting neat intersections of culture and design, the social and the technical. Low-income backgrounds are even more complex in their innovation, the discourse created by infrastructure, with their informality pushing the boundaries of our textbooks and creating more case studies. My sociology background allows me to understand the power dynamics between two vastly different visual languages. My work experience makes it easy to just hop on a rickshaw, go where the flooding happens and talk to people. I want my design experience to give me the language to put my thoughts on paper (or a blueprint?) and see what can I do to help.

Where do we go from here except the future, which is riddled with questions on how to make our cities resilient, accessible, capable.