dear itp,
i love you.
it is the fourth-of-july. i sit in red-square — alone on a floor that felt unimaginably out-of-reach about a year ago. i am now here; i now crack jokes with people i once admired; i made projects that other people on the internet thought were ‘wow’.
i made (some-version-of) it.
i’m grateful — for the space; the cohort; the faculty; the resources — how welcoming everyone (and everything) has been. how myself i can feel, and how myself i was not back in india.
when you’re the first one to walk, the lights on the floor turn on automatically; as if lights are guiding you to magic: where anything you dream of could be possible.
today, i want to let go of the expectations of my second-year. i have a clear thesis-direction, and it is conveniently phrased to last my whole second-year. for 9 months — starting august — i am going to soak in everything that this place can offer me, and ==when i feel complacent, i shall think back to a boy, in bombay, programming at midnight; wondering how he could just do this for the rest of his life.==
thank you red, and all the other faculty who keep this place philosophically alive, even though times are grim; the future is bleak; the world is terribly unkind; and many students perhaps aren’t as interested in learning as they were before a.i.