My Fun Side

Everything else on this site is trying to get me into a PhD program. This page is not. This is where the person behind the cache plots admits to having hobbies, opinions about food, and a competitive streak that predates any of the research.

Consider it the footnotes of an actual human.

I draw

Before engineering, I went to the Savannah College of Art and Design for visual effects and studio art. The render pipelines pulled me toward engineering, but the seeing-things part never left. Charcoal figures, ink, the occasional digital painting, and for a while a drawing a day on Instagram with whatever sentence I was chewing on that morning. A selection is below — including one piece photographed from first lines to finished, because the process is half the fun.

I am annoyingly competitive at small-ball sports

Badminton — 7th, Andhra Pradesh state-level open. The six people ahead of me know who they are.
Table tennis — 9th, district level. The basement-table years paid off.
Skating — 1st, once, in a competition I will keep bringing up indefinitely.

There is a straight line from "wants to win at a scoreboard" to "wants the out-of-sample Sharpe to hold up." I have made peace with it.

I cook, with ambition that occasionally exceeds skill

Cooking is the one optimization problem where the loss function is just "is it good," and the feedback loop is fast and delicious. Weekend meal prep doubles as a hobby. The failure modes are educational and usually still edible.

I collect languages

English, Hindi, Telugu (native), Kannada, and enough Japanese to be dangerous in a restaurant. Languages scratch the same pattern-recognition itch as math, except the error messages are politer.

Things I will defend in conversation

A good whiteboard derivation beats a slide deck, every time.
The best debugging tool is a walk.
Naming things is genuinely one of the hard problems in computer science, and anyone who says otherwise has not maintained a factor pipeline.

If you came here from the serious pages, thanks for staying for the human part. If you came here first — excellent instinct.

Watch a drawing happen

The same piece, photographed from the first lines to the finished drawing over one long evening. Roses, ribbon, and a figure that did not exist a few hours earlier.

A few favorites

Digital painting — a blossom tree on a floating island. My first serious digital piece.

Pen — a crowded interior, drawn one stubborn cross-hatch at a time.

Foundations-year perspective and value study (SCAD).

Drawings, with a line attached

For a while I posted a drawing a day, each with a sentence I was turning over at the time. Equal parts sketchbook and diary.

Portrait, annotated — “Living a true dream is preferred to having an extra heartbeat to live.”

“You can shoot an arrow through another's bow, but the arrow must be yours.”

Wolf — “Always reflect back towards your shadow when you lose your chosen path.”

Phoenix — “At the end of everyone's soul there is an in-depth feeling of trying to belong somewhere.”

Tree — “Never forget the gods, or the gods will forget that you exist.”