Beyond the Papers

Writing & Reflections

Public writing and literary reflections that shape how I think about science, ethics, uncertainty, and society.

Published / Public Writing

Short public pieces where climate science has to meet policy, evidence, and public language.

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Op-ed
The India Forum
To Solve North India's Air Crisis, Look Beyond Stubble and Fireworks
A policy commentary on why North India's air pollution problem needs a wider source-attribution frame.
Published
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Literary Reflections

Notes on books that keep pressing on questions of personhood, work, longing, and moral imagination.

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Fiction
Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis
"Even after waking up as a bug, Gregor's first thoughts are not about fear or freedom, but about work: missing the train, disappointing his employer."
A meditation on usefulness, isolation, and quiet replacement that feels disturbingly familiar inside high-pressure institutions.
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Speculative Fiction
Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go
"The girl knows. She holds it anyway."
A reflection on normalization, withholding, and how people learn to accept the unacceptable when no other life has been made imaginable.
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🌙
Novella
Fyodor Dostoevsky
White Nights
A brief, tender study of longing, imagined lives, and the strange intimacy of being understood for one night.
What stayed with me is hope treated not as heroic force, but as something fragile and self-deceiving.
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☀️
Philosophical Novel
Albert Camus
The Stranger
"The jury does not convict him for what he did. They convict him for what he is."
A reflection on isolation, recognition, and the unsettling familiarity of a life lived at a remove from itself.
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Philosophy
Albert Camus
The Myth of Sisyphus
"The boulder rolls back down. I walk after it."
A reflection on routine, revolt, and the ordinary work of living without appeal.
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Science & Non-fiction

Books that treat climate as a scientific, political, and communicative problem at once.

🌍
Climate Science
Elizabeth Kolbert
The Sixth Extinction
A model for urgent, accessible science writing that still respects evidence and field detail.
🎭
Climate
Rajan Mehta
Backstage Climate
Useful because it treats climate as science, politics, economics, and public action at once.
Currently Reading

Reading Now

☕
At the Existentialist Café
Sarah Bakewell
🦠
The Plague
Albert Camus