Who am I?

I'm Advaita. I'm from Kolkata, and I've never quite worked out how to be from anywhere else.

Most of what I do for a living happens a few layers below where things are supposed to be interesting — curves, clients, the arithmetic underneath the arithmetic. I like the part where something stops being magic and turns into a sequence of steps you can check. I'm not fast. I'm thorough, which is a different thing, and it took me a while to stop apologising for the difference.

I'm quiet in a way people sometimes read as distance. It isn't. I just tend to think a thing through completely before saying any of it out loud, and by then the conversation has usually moved on. I'm working on that.

What I actually enjoy: eating well in places with no menu. Walking a city that has too many opinions and no interest in mine. The specific satisfaction of a problem that took four days and turned out to be one line. Long stretches of not talking to anyone. Then, abruptly, wanting to be somewhere else entirely — a train, a hill, anywhere with different air.

I'm restless and patient at the same time, which is an inconvenient combination. The patient half builds things slowly. The restless half is already three cities away, wondering what's for dinner.

This site is where both halves get a say. Protocol work when I have something worth writing down. Food and travel when I don't. Occasionally something in between.