Hi. My name’s Neel. I’m nineteen and I go to Harvard. I like technology and baseball and skateboarding and talking to people.
I just finished my freshman year and agreed with my friend Sara that I’ll write something every week this summer. I took a freshman-only seminar where I wrote an 18-page-long short story (it was supposed to be 4 pages), and through that I discovered that writing is an incredible way to discover something about yourself and start conversations with people about what you’re feeling, things that are really hard to do otherwise. So I thought it’d be great to write some essays and reflections and short stories and publish them here.
I’m interested in exploring these concepts:
- Identity: what determines who we are, and how much should we let things define us?
- Ethnicity: how does it shape your identity, your interactions with others, and your mindset?
- Relationships: how do they work, especially in the context of college?
- America: what does it mean to be American, and what’s unique about this American life?
- People: what makes people tick, and how do they grow over time?
I like to compare life to a bazaar, a gigantic open marketplace. It’s colorful, it’s chaotic, it’s vast, it’s disorienting, it’s exciting, it’s intimidating, it’s an adventure, it’s like nothing else.
Not to mention that life is really, really bizarre.
