I struggle with writing about myself vulnerably, whether it be on resumes, artist introductions or on this about me page. I wish I could write a polished story of my life where I was evidently the benevolent protagonist overcoming a slew of villainous monsters, assured in my strong sense of morality. But when I look back on my life, I’m not sure which side I fall more on. Am I the darkness that must be overcome, or the light that banishes it? Both, maybe? I’ll let you decide.

I was born in Tenkasi, Tamil Nadu, a small town nestled in the foothills of the Western Ghats in Southern India. A mostly calm pregnancy came to a crashing halt when I came out of the womb with clubbed feet, a condition where the feet are twisted both inwards and downwards because the connecting tissues are too short. Much to the distress of my family (the earliest sign that raising me would be anything but uneventful), the first few months of my life were filled with many overnight train rides to Chennai, the largest metropolitan city in the region, to try to correct my feet.

No matter what they tried, no plaster-casting could get my feet to budge. I guess those feet were as stubborn as the person they belonged to. Dejected, but hopeful that the doctors in the United States could be of some help, I immigrated to the country and immediately underwent an intensive set of surgeries to help shape my feet. I don't know if it was the anesthesia, the bright surgery lights, or the hospital food they were feeding me, but it was during that surgery that, unknowingly to me and my family, the seeds for a life full of philosophical questioning were planted.

Years flew by as I learned to move my new legs. Free from the casts and pain, as my parents nursed me to health, I was always aware of the blessing of movement. Restrained as a child, motion felt deeply sacred. It was the body's way of communicating its desire for autonomy. For expression.

But this desire for freedom grew and multiplied feverishly, carrying over to every other part of my life. But I find it fateful that the culture that I was coming to experience was anything but that. The world around me was built on caste-based ideologies, rigid familial expectations, and religious orthodoxy. In other words, unquestioned obedience to "Matha, Pitha, Guru, Deivam" (mother, father, teacher, and god) was the highest virtue a child could embody. Freedom was an afterthought.

But for some reason, no matter what I was told, I just could not hold myself back from craving more and more autonomy of my mind, body, and spirit. As early as six years old, I remember asking myself why my mom (who loves me so much) told me that they didn't want to have another child, out of fear that they too might have club feet. I wondered: if they had somehow found out that I was going to be born with club feet before my birth, would they have chosen not to have me? What was so wrong with my legs that it deemed my life not worthy? Club feet is a genetic condition, and so if I have those genes running through my blood, does that mean that I shouldn't have children? Is my life worth living? Why?

But I kept silent. I knew that if I let these questions escape the confines of my mind, I would be told to be silent and to not overthink. That I was wasting my time with such questions, and that I should spend my time instead on the most important thing in my life, school.

And so my schooling began with these questions tucked deeply in the bottom of my backpack, hopeful that I could talk about these things with someone. Spoiler alert! Seeing that I've spent my entire adulthood working on education reform, you can already predict how that went. Though I was filled to the brim with curiosity, school didn't turn out to be the place of discovery I had hoped that it would be. In fact, it was a place that actively stifled it.

Every morning, I dreaded the monotony of a system designed to mold me into a brain-dead test-taker and a polite hand-raiser. To numb the very human out of me, with aims to replace me with a complicit and docile shell of what once was.

During those 12 years, I sleepily and cunningly navigated a system that stripped away the very things I valued most: autonomy, curiosity, and respect. I felt belittled by teachers who, overworked and undervalued themselves, dictated when to sit, when to speak, and when to leave (asking to use the restroom has to be an archaic practice).

I didn't care about anything they were saying, for it had nothing to do with the questions I most cared about. Questions of assimilation, acceptance, rage, and disobedience. But instead of real discourse, I was strapped into a seat and told that talking out of turn results in punishment. And so I got in trouble. And trouble. And more trouble. Every parent-teacher conference was prime time for a rush of anxiety, waiting to see what complaint I would get thrown at me that year. I had a math teacher once tell my mom that if she was throwing a party, the first person she'd invite would have been me. But seeing that she was running a math classroom, I was the last person she wanted in there. Funnily enough, I eventually did both. I became a mathematician and a great party ROI. But in that moment, I felt like a fish being asked to climb a tree.

It was soon after that drugs, adrenaline-fueled nights of petty crime, and sex consumed my life, as I looked for any escape from the banality of school. Every year, the deep disappointment with which my parents looked at me rose. I wasn't doing very well in school, and my overall behavior was deeply problematic. I still think back to those times with so much sadness, wishing I could explain that things would eventually be okay, and to be patient. Both to myself and to them.

For a student who performed so haphazardly and poorly at school, it may seem odd that I was able to pursue my higher education at the University of California – San Diego. I credit that to my ability to understand and game any system I'm placed in. In other words, to cheating. A lot of it. I was mostly helped by a nearly perfect score on my SATs, which I got half by downloading a Webster's dictionary onto my calculator to use and half by copying the rest off the genius who sat next to me. I had figured out the ways in which the questions and sections were shuffled, and the rest fell on a half-asleep proctor.

I asked a friend's friend to rewrite my admissions essay, chose my major apathetically, and sent my application in with my fingers crossed. I failed my calculus class and spent my entire senior year anticipating being rescinded by every school I had applied to. But somehow, miraculously, I slipped through the cracks, and UCSD didn't flag my application, and I was headed to the sunny beaches of La Jolla.

Computer science & mathematics was the major I had apathetically chosen. But it was this decision that ended up changing my life. Ironically, I grew up despising math. Side note, if you ever want your children to feel the same, send them to Kumon, or even better, the Russian School of Math. Intensive repetition, memorization, and computation will kill any inherent awe of numbers, and replace that with a high-functioning calculator.

But at the university, the world of mathematics completely transformed before my eyes. The classrooms that housed theories of combinatorics, graph theory, and abstract algebra became the first space that allowed me to ask the question I had begged to ask for so long. Why? In fact, not only was that question allowed, but extremely encouraged. So much so that it was made clear that a core trait of a great mathematician was someone who never took a premise for granted.

Memorizing a formula dogmatically and learning to crunch large numbers was never what mathematics was about. Mathematics was a creative art of expressing beauty through reason. It was a sensual dance between the abstract and physical, meeting to make graceful sense of the absurd. The first time I watched a classmate prove that the square root of 2 must be an irrational number was the day I had my first intellectual orgasm.

I finally had a reason to wake up.

But I didn't know then that this intellectual revolution was just beginning. It was a university policy to encourage students to take classes outside of their major, and so for one of my GE requirements I fell into my first philosophy class on accident. Hellenistic philosophy. Our first lecture was on the question, if a god does exist, what is god made up of? And if god is in fact made up of these components, don't these components reign more supreme than god themselves, for god couldn't exist without these components?

My brain exploded. Is this actually allowed? You're telling me there is no question that's deemed a waste of time? Ahhhhhh. I still get excited thinking about those early days of intellectual discovery. It was the most beautiful experience of my life. It was through these classes that I was introduced to Socrates, Hypatia of Alexandria, and Seneca. The amazing people who came before us, who possessed the unbreakable courage to ask why, unafraid of any consequences. They stood for something eternal. A quest towards truth. Even when their disobedience meant death. What had they understood about life that allowed them to value their loyalty to intellectual freedom at the expense of their own lives? I wanted to be like them.

And so with my dreams set lofty, I finally had the tools to question definitions, societal structures, cultural norms, and the illusion of the self. Math taught me to find beauty, and philosophy taught me to search for love. I woke up every day excited to see what the world would throw at me. I began to read like an addict. Anything I could get my hands on. In the span of three years I fell in love with education.

But I just couldn't wrap my head around how school could be the genesis for such drastically different experiences. How did I go from hating school and learning so vehemently to wanting to do nothing but that?

I left UCSD, amid the pandemic, hungry and desperate to understand what caused this shift in me. I felt that if I could change, anyone could. Perhaps I could help, in some way, all those kids who also felt incompetent, uninspired, and left behind, learning things that were so disconnected from the lives that they lived.

And so I moved to Washington D.C. to pursue my graduate studies at Georgetown University, focusing on Educational Public Policy and Data Science. I had moved there, thinking that prestigious universities would be the place to meet thinkers from around the world who cared deeply about the world of ideas. Nurturing their philosophies as if they were their own children. But instead, I found the anti-intellectual habits that help people thrive in school to have corrupted graduate studies as well.

No matter where I looked, it was very clear that learning was just a means to an end. A job. A 4.0 GPA. An internship on the "Hill." I met peers who wrote about poverty and the decline of literacy in the United States, more worried about what grades they would receive than solving the actual problem they wrote about. I couldn't understand if I was just crazy, or if the people around me looked at social problems as a way to climb up their professional ladders. I figured out quickly that the intellectual hub of discourse I so desperately longed for was not waiting for me in graduate school.

And so I decided to do something about it. Re-Educated was born. I was deeply inspired by Harvard's EdCast, but felt that their discussions on their show focused on a limited American perspective on practical logistics regarding education.

I wanted to build something far more broad. Something everyone could connect to. No matter where you lived, what you cared about, what your political affiliation was, or what your thoughts on schooling already were. I didn't want to provide answers. I wanted to highlight the most pressing questions and dialectics that underlay all educational discourse.

And so I began to talk to as many people as possible. I had only one North Star. If I heard a perspective that I had never heard, I invited them onto the show. From Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry to the UNESCO chair of education, to indigenous communities in New Zealand to math curriculum experts in Russia, the list grew ever more expansive. I never anticipated it when I began, but learning about people's worldviews and perspectives is the purest and cleanest high I have ever experienced. If I had known that at 16, maybe I would have just spent my time interviewing people on the local bus instead.

The ideas shared on the show grew exponentially into more ideas, and before I knew it, I had released 250 episodes, with guests spanning 26 countries and 110 universities around the globe. I began summarizing my findings through my newsletters and writing, penning Beyond Small Talk, my first book covering the art of conversation as an attempt to highlight the inherent intelligence each one of us carries within us. It serves as a guide for teachers to step into the complex worlds of their students, so that the line between the teacher and the taught blurs itself into the background.

The show provided opportunities for me to travel the world and work with more people than I could have ever dreamed of. But I want to take a pause here and say that even though I would like to incorporate more of what's happened since leaving D.C. in this brief memoir, it feels disingenuous to narrativize a phase of my life before it's even complete. Captured articulately by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."

And so as I trek forward, as bravely as I possibly can, into the uncertain future, hopefully in a Socrates-like manner, I know but one thing. There is no answer key to living. No bubble-in Scantron or computation metric that can determine whether a life was well lived or not. Searching for it is a futile task that cannot bear fruits. And so, the best antidote we have to imposed dogma is to never stop asking why, encouraging those around us to do so in the process. Perhaps life really is far more about our questions than it is about our answers.

I've found that recently, what started as a desire for freedom has turned into a desire for contribution. I've experienced the depth of freedom. To write as I please. To live where I want. To speak to whomever I choose to. But in all that freedom, all I found was a different font of emptiness. I learned that a free life disconnected from community is as empty as a communal life disconnected from freedom.

And so as I turn the next chapter of this story, I see a life of deep roots and a lot of love. A whole lot of it. I'm no longer inspired by the same angst that started this journey. But that Goutham will also always have a home within me. He is not gone. There is space for both the light and darkness this body has housed throughout my life.

I hope this brief memoir made sense. I have found that memoirs are not reflective of the truth, but speak more to the narrative a person constructs in order to make sense of the absurdity and randomness thrown at them throughout their lives. And so I hope this is understood, not as fact, but as an artistic attempt to make sense of what life has presented me thus far.

I really hope that one day I can make my parents proud. Raising me has not been peaceful thus far, but hopefully this next stage will be more so. I know that I've taken an unconventional path, experimenting with radical honesty, but I wish nothing more than for my parents, family, and friends to feel like it was all worth it.

Thanks for reading.

Love,
Goutham