I fall in love quickly - with people, places, flowers, colors, songs, books, movies, even characters in books and movies.

I love stories. My favorite opening line with people is ‘what’s your story’ - I get to bypass the small talk and come to the main plot. Most people I ask this question to, look at me with wonder, not because they don’t have a story - everyone does - but because they have not reflected about it in that perspective. We will all be stories one day, might as well make it a good one.

I love the abstractions of mind and thought, and I love traversing across them because it is raw and untethered and not ‘curated’. I like to model, to postulate, to debate, and to have discourse about this - with my husband.

I have some favorite words, it is seasonal - gumption is one for this season, I think I live with gumption. (if anyone is reading this line; you have to hear music and get goosebumps, or at least pause and wonder what in the world is going on!).

I am a synesthete; I have told my husband to call me out if I am a pseudo synesthete; he is hyper objective, sometimes painfully so. But, he always tells his highest known truth. I digress. Being a synesthete has added many layers and richness to how I experience life. While it gets overwhelming sometimes, I don’t know any other way.

I love typography. A lot of words appear in interesting typography in my mind and numbers are always in charcoal grey and Times New Roman. I love font pairings, some of them are match made in heaven - like grandpa and grandma, like me and my husband. I like to shamelessly sing praises about my husband, because he is a good man, and they are so damn rare - again I digress.

I love light, how it falls, how it reflects, how it peeps through the leaves, how it makes the water shine, how it falls on the floor and lights up the hallways. I am grateful to my mom, among other things, for naming me Roshni - it means brilliance.

I love kaleidoscopes - not just as a metaphor but physical kaleidoscopes - endlessly shifting, never final, always revealing beauty in motion.

I love Bertrand Russel and deeply resonate with every word he has written in this reflective prologue from his autobiography:

“What I Have Lived For

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness–that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what–at last–I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

At 84, when he wrote this prologue, he definitely knew better, to say the least by the virtue of more ‘life happened to him’ and the winds he weathered. Yet still, I long to try to alleviate the pain of at least a few people, I want to at least try, lest I fail, it might still be the noblest failure of my life. For I live for love, I reach for knowledge, and I cannot turn away from suffering, so with unyielding gumption I choose to act.