August 16th, 2026
Last week I said I'd spend the week reaching out to people whose work I admire, and I'd come back and share what happened.
Here's the recap:
I started with M. Ram Murty, a number theorist at Queen's University, the Queen's Research Chair who is also cross-appointed as a professor of philosophy, specializing in Indian philosophy. He's a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, won the Coxeter–James Prize from the Canadian Mathematical Society, and did his PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I came across his work recently, and with college starting in 2027 and my own attention split across math, economics, AI policy, and financial literacy, I wanted to know how someone builds a serious career in more than one field. I emailed him, and he replied within hours and said yes without hesitation. I was thrilled someone at that level would even respond. The call ran long, and most of it turned into him talking about Indian Philosophy. I've been thinking about that conversation all week.
Earlier in the week, I got real time with Prof. Mukesh Sud, who spent three decades moving between entrepreneurship and academia. He now teaches at Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and Ashoka, and is a visiting fellow at the Cambridge Judge Business School. He sent me home with two signed copies of his bestseller and agreed to come on the Decoded Podcast, all because I asked the organizing team if I could help out.
I also spent weeks stuck on a real problem for my research project in financial misinformation regarding code-mixed text. I emailed Professor Monojit Choudhury at MBZUAI, who connected me to Prashant Kodali, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research India who did his PhD on code-mixed text at IIIT Hyderabad and won the Microsoft Research India PhD Award for it in 2024. We finally got on a call this week, and he walked me through why a generic pipeline covering English, Hindi, and code-mixed text together will likely beat something narrowly built for code-mixing, since code-mixed text turned out to be a much smaller share of my dataset than I'd assumed. He also handed me a normalization tool his lab built and a reading list I'm still working through.
Talked twice this week with Aarush Chhatwal, an incoming freshman at Harvard University, about our shared pull toward economics, math, computer science, and startups.
Also sat down with Kai Goodall, from the University of Waterloo. He's a part of the team at Bagel Fund, one of the grant programs I've been talking to about a project that's close to my heart.
On top of all of that, I ran over ten interviews this week for people looking to join the various departments across my initiatives. Turning strangers into a team is its own kind of reaching out.
A week ago I said more people should try this. Send the email. Ask for the twenty minutes. The worst answer is silence, and that costs you nothing.
See you guys next week!