dhruv writes

I’ve decided to start blogging again. Blogs are entirely out of fashion, and I honestly think for good reason too –in today’s world, there are more engaging and direct ways to communicate with an audience. So I think it’s natural, both for you as a reader, and for me as a writer, to ask why I’m doing this.

For a long time, I had a blog. My Masa (uncle) made me write daily entries into a blog when I visited him and my Masi (aunt) during hot Connecticut summers. There is nothing remarkable about the state of Connecticut. I have been there so many times and I still do not know what there is to do. That being said, each summer was still nothing short of special with them. I don’t remember what I did every day, but almost everyday was documented on that blog, eventful or not. Regular blogging through the summer became semi-regular blogging when I returned back home for school. Regular blogging would then again resume when I would returned the next summer. This cycle continued every year, and unglamorously (is that a word?) ended when my parents and I moved to the United States as I entered eight grade.

That blog, for all intents and purposes, served as evidence to the world that there was a buck-tooth teenager that lived from 2012-2016. For as long as the internet is around, that blog will be there. Even if I delete it, and attempt to erase my entire digital footprint, through the beauty of the Wayback Machine, it will remain on the internet.

I admittedly over-romanticize this fact. I know that blog is, just like Connecticut, unremarkable. But I love museums of all kind –living next to Washington D.C may have had something to do with this. To me, what makes museums special are their reliance on first-hand accounts and artifacts to articulate different periods of history. They immerse you into what you’re learning about and make you feel like you’re having a conversation with someone from a particular era or event. When we look back at the 2000s some fifty-odd years in the future, internet life will certainly be studied and looked at. Future web “artifacts” will be blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, etc, and my former blog is one of these artifacts, regardless of if it will ever be seen or stumbled upon by any future historian.

By the way, I’ve been intentionally cryptic about the name and website about my old blog. It’s not that I’m embarrassed about it (even though much of it is cringeworthy), but I’d like to dedicate a future blog post just for it. If you already know what it is and where to find it, that’s great, good for you. Please keep that to yourself. If not, maybe this induces some perceived suspense to keep reading along.

I’ve never had a conversation with my Masa on why exactly he made me start a blog all those years ago. I know it certainly didn’t have anything to do with all of the over-romanticizing bullshit I spewed earlier. It couldn’t have been that, because to see a website as an artifact requires that it is, by definition, an object –something static, finished, and not intentionally tampered with in the years to come. And seeing something in this way is only possible in retrospect. I think his reason has to do with my development as a human being. Writing is such an important skill to hone, and making a kid write a blog is a way to get them to be better at it. I enjoyed school, but writing for an assignment is very different to waking up writing for yourself.

Writing is also wildly introspective. Regardless of genre or purpose, a writer is forced to be introspective in any work that is produced by them. This reality is what kept me writing on a semi-regular basis all those years ago when I wasn’t around my Masa and Masi. My blog was an only-child outlet. Although I got excited seeing the number of “hits” a blog I wrote grow, my long term motivation to continue writing wasn’t derived from that. It was from the comfort that came from introspective thinking.

There is a lot going on in my life right now. I am at the most important crossroad of my admittedly short life so far. I’ve just finished my undergraduate degree, and I’m about to start a real “adult” job in a new city and state I’ve never been in before. For the first time in my life, I’m moving to a new region of the country, permanently, without my parents. The friends that I have made will be leaving my immediate vicinity, and we’ll all be venturing off to different parts of the world to start this period of our lives.

I’m scared. And it’s taken writing this sentence for me to admit this to myself.

It is both unbelievably scary and freakishly cool that I have no clue what my life will look like one year from now. But I think this moment of change warrants a fair bit of introspection, both as a coping mechanism, but also as a way of documenting my thoughts and perspectives as life moves forward.

This is also why “you should not read this blog post”, or really anything else I post here. Every piece of writing has a target audience, and in some sense every medium does as well. And on this website, that target audience is selfishly always myself. This isn’t to say that I don’t want anyone else to read what I write (if that were the case, I would do this all in a journal by my bed). It’s just that what is written on this blog, the way in which I write, the extent to which I ramble or go on a tangent, is and will fully be up to my own volition. It will not be informed by what someone else wants me to do, or wish I did. And by virtue of this being a blog in 2025, I also expect that nobody will read any of this, even though there is a part of me that not-so-secretly hopes that more than just me will read this (if this weren’t the case, I would all this in a journal by my bed). But I write all this knowing that my future self may come back to read all this, and that I hope I write in a way that entertains them, and makes them remember the moments in which I wrote all this.

A secondary motivation for doing this is my innate distrust and worry for how AI will impact our future. This is something I think about enough that it warrants its own set of articles for further elaboration and introspection. I truly hope future me will laugh at what I am currently afraid of. But when I say distrust in AI, part of what I really mean is a distrust in myself. I have used AI to help me in lots of different things, from debugging code and rewording sentences to shitty Tinder bios (I cringe even think about the capital T in Tinder). No matter how desensitized we are to the abundance of AI tools and what they’re capable of, what they can do is insane: What takes an AI model seconds to phrase would take me hours to come up with. The high from an AI generated result articulating exactly what I wanted to express in seconds, for what would’ve taken me hours to come up with, is nothing short of incredible. But never-been-seen-before instant gratification is terrifying. It discourages critical thinking, something I feel is foundational to the human experience. I am addicted to using it make my life easier, even though it is at the expense of how much I’m learning from everyday experiences and decisions. And finally, I don’t want to be dependent on it, even though to be frank, I am kind of am right now. I want to use this space to prove to myself that I can in fact reflect, think, and write without it at all. No part of this blog will be edited or ideated using AI tools. Like the “good old days”

My final, least but still an important reason, is my desire to become a better writer. I feel like the quality of my writing has stagnated in the past couple of years, and I’d like to change that. My career for the next six years will be centered around doing science and communicating to audiences with different backgrounds what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it. This is integral to people remaining trusting in science, and I want to be better at this.

Without belaboring these points any further, welcome to my blog!