Kolkata
The city that never quite lets you go.
"If you know Kolkata, you know that no city in the world wears its contradictions quite so openly — chaotic and tender, crumbling and alive."
— Personal note, written on a return flightJoy, chaos, and everything in between
Kolkata is not a city you visit — it is a city you are from, or it claims you. I grew up navigating its trams, its monsoon floods, its adda culture and its ineffable sense that life here is lived at a slightly different tempo than everywhere else.
Twelve years at Calcutta Boys' School. Four years at Jadavpur University's Engineering campus in Shibpur. The city is woven into the way I think about problems, the way I argue, and the way I still reach for mishti doi whenever I land back home.
Jadavpur, and learning to think
Four years of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering at Jadavpur University shaped me more than I anticipated. The campus in Shibpur has a particular gravity — a sense that learning here is earned, not handed over.
It was here that I first got serious about machine learning, spent long evenings in the library reading about signal processing, and eventually found my way to research internships that would take me across continents.
"Every time I come back, the city has changed imperceptibly — and yet it feels exactly the same. That's the trick Kolkata plays on you."