'Five Minutes' The slush was knee high. My sandals, trying their best to shield my feet, ran into all sorts of quagmire on the way as cement, oil, rain, and occasional dog-poop enveloped my bubble of typical upper-middle-class elitism. For those five minutes, my existence became secluded to a mere 100 metre long stretch in the middle of an abandoned industrial settlement, as I prodded against nature’s adversity during the consecutive sultry weeks of my internship as the youngest student...

During my summers, I took a fancy to fidget-spinners. Dextrously rotating those focus-retracting banes to humanity, I often wondered: What if my fidget spinner was a mini-dynamo? When I presented well-appreciated research on the same at LIYSF 2017, ‘What if?’ became my central question, one which STEM answered beyond ‘Why’. Hailing from a technologically-developing country, I have developed a strong propensity for learning to use science to create opportunities, overcoming resource-scarcity, climate-change through alternative energy-systems. Materialising such endeavours demands a rigorous...

2017 has been extremely rejuvenating for me. Besides changing my wardrobe, augmenting my online literary blog, and constantly checking my OCD, I took a fancy to fidget spinners. Dextrously rotating those focus-retracting banes to humanity, I often wondered: What if my fidget spinner was a mini-dynamo? When I presented well-appreciated original research on the same using Arduino-programming at LIYSF 2017, What if? became my central question, one which STEM answered beyond Why. Since Ramanujan’s infinite natural-numbers sum to -1/12, what if...

It began as a reproduction of thoughts. My sprightly emotions of ecstasy, bewilderment, and oblivion in most situations would be too difficult to contain or physically manifest. I would resort to splashing them around in ink on blank sheets, filling line by line, till the imagery permeated my very soul. Creativity, to me, is that uncontrollable hysteria, that emotional force to express a maelstrom of ideas and perspectives, and release it all on the wings of brevity and in the...

Initially, I thought it would be the cause of public embarrassment. After all, people used euphemisms like 'extrovert' in order to describe what I thought was 'bigmouth'. But over time, it dawned upon me as my unique panache- a confident youngster ever-willing to voice his opinion on stage and engage a conversation amongst the audiences regarding a topic of collective resonance. Public speaking is my greatest talent, which has often allowed me to emerge as an audacious, yet unprejudiced expresser....

“Change is hard at first, messy in the middle, and gorgeous in the end.” - Robin Sharma, Simple Reminders (B.McGill) Marks. Marks. One more. Because even 99 per cent can not satiate his penchant for perfection. Who is he? A grade nine student cynical about his desire to top the Indian Certificate of Secondary Education. And he wouldn’t, in his wildest dreams, let an elective impede his ambition. He is great at Math and Science, so much so that...