Leibniz, Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire were not my friends. Throughout sophomore year, the phrase “Ecrasez l’infame,” asking to “crush” organized religion, tormented me, even in my sleep. In Candide, Voltaire announced that religion exploited people‟s superstitions and crushed the human spirit. Was the Supreme Being I had been taught to believe in nothing but a deistic God – a clockmaker who built an orderly universe and then left it to operate under natural laws? I spent weeks of tumultuous...

At a young age, I abandoned my beloved Lego blocks, and began to imitate the raccoons ravaging my Rubbermaid trash bins outside. Embodying the maxim: “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” I developed a special relationship with refuse. Amid bicycle remnants, piles of soda cans, office supplies, and microwaves, I find curiosity, ingenuity, and rational thought. Garbage is a puzzle, a system of variables where there is never only one correct solution. I have turned soda cans...

“KABARI”, “KABARI!” While visiting my grandparents in New Delhi every alternate summer, the screeching siren of the scrap man doubles as my alarm clock each morning. Without avail, he is scrounging the streets and alleyways at 5am, hoping to buy recyclable refuse from those who will heed his call. Tumbling out of bed, I prepare to go on my daily vegetable hunt with my Nani (grandmother). Peering out of their Tata Nano’s glossy windows, I marvel at the surrounding...