CHANDIGARH → DELHI // BUILDING THINGS THAT MOVE
Aspiring roboticist with a restless pull toward astrophysics — I build robots, chase Doppler shifts, and occasionally put the same curiosity into verse.
I'm an aspiring roboticist with a deep interest in astronomy, astrophysics, and robotics. I've built everything from an autonomous obstacle-avoidance robot to a gesture-controlled car, and spent a summer studying Doppler shifts in observational data through an astrophysics internship.
Outside the lab, I read, write poetry, and think a lot about where science and imagination overlap — which is really what this page is about.
Research and activities outside the classroom.
Things I've built, mostly with a microcontroller and too much curiosity.
Two books that shaped how I think about the world and where it's headed.
This book completely changed how I look at a map. Marshall walks through ten regions of the world and makes the case that mountains, rivers, coastlines, and deserts have quietly decided the fate of nations more than ideology or leadership ever could. Russia's endless paranoia about invasion, China's obsession with controlling its borderlands, and the Middle East's tangled conflicts all start to make sense once you see the terrain underneath them.
What I liked most is how readable it is — it never feels like a textbook, even though it's genuinely reshaping geopolitics into something you can visualise. If you're curious about why countries act the way they do, this is a brilliant starting point.
A really clever format — ten science-fiction stories set in 2041, each paired with an essay from Kai-Fu Lee unpacking the real AI research behind the fiction. Instead of just predicting a distant sci-fi future, the book grounds every story in technology that's plausible within two decades, from deepfakes and autonomous weapons to AI-driven healthcare and job displacement.
As someone interested in robotics, I found the essays especially useful for separating what AI can realistically do soon from what's still speculation. It's optimistic without ignoring the hard trade-offs, which is rare for a book about AI.
I write poetry alongside the science — a different way of paying attention to the same universe. You can read the full collection on my blog.
Read the poems →Random things I keep coming back to, sorted by category.
A day on Venus is longer than its year — it takes about 243 Earth days to rotate once, but only 225 to orbit the Sun.
The Doppler effect — the same reason a siren changes pitch as it passes you — is how astronomers measure whether stars and galaxies are moving toward or away from us.
There are more possible chess games than atoms in the observable universe.
Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoon of their material would weigh about a billion tonnes on Earth.
Light from the Sun takes about 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth, so we always see the Sun as it was a few minutes ago.
Saturn's density is low enough that the planet would float in water — if you could find an ocean big enough.
Bananas are naturally radioactive, thanks to trace amounts of potassium-40. You'd need to eat around 10 million at once for it to matter.
Time moves very slightly faster at your head than at your feet — gravity warps time, and your feet are just a fraction closer to Earth's mass.
Water can boil and freeze at the exact same time. It's called the “triple point,” where solid, liquid, and gas all coexist in equilibrium.
Uncoil all the DNA in your body and it would stretch about 10 billion miles — to Pluto and back, twice.
Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire — teaching began there around 1096, over two centuries before Tenochtitlan was founded.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The shortest war in recorded history lasted 38 minutes, fought between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896.
Napoleon wasn't actually short — at around 5'7", he was roughly average height for his era. The myth came from British wartime propaganda.
Ancient Romans reportedly used urine as a mouthwash and laundry agent, thanks to its ammonia content.
The Eiffel Tower grows more than 15 cm taller in summer, as the iron expands in the heat.
World War I formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918.
The Wright brothers' first powered flight in 1903 covered a shorter distance than the wingspan of a modern Boeing 747.
Russia spans 11 time zones — more than any other country on Earth.
Point Nemo, in the South Pacific, is the spot furthest from any land. Astronauts on the ISS are sometimes physically closer to it than any human sailor.
About 90% of the world's population lives in the Northern Hemisphere.
The Amazon River discharges more water than the next seven largest rivers on Earth combined.
Vatican City is the smallest country in the world — smaller than most golf courses.
Mount Everest grows roughly 4mm taller every year as tectonic plates push the Himalayas upward.
Chandigarh, where I went to school, is one of India's few fully planned cities — designed from scratch by architect Le Corbusier.
The Sahara is the world's largest hot desert, but its nights can still drop below freezing.
Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have found 3,000-year-old honey in Egyptian tombs that's still perfectly edible.
Octopuses have three hearts and blue blood.
A group of flamingos is officially called a “flamboyance.”
The inventor of the Pringles can was, per his family's wishes, buried in one.
Wombat droppings are cube-shaped — it stops them from rolling away when used to mark territory.
Sharks are older than trees. They've existed for roughly 400 million years.
A single fluffy cloud can weigh more than a million pounds.
Bubble wrap was originally invented as a textured wallpaper.