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. 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 Jadavpur has a particular gravity — a sense that learning here is earned, not handed over.
It was here that I learnt what it is to feel for others. Jadavpur taught me to question everything. It taught me dissent. It made me understand why literacy without education and compassion is just a pen without ink.
"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."