The story of a young aging researcher

Hi everyone,

I’m Bharat, originally from Jammu, a small city in northern India. Like most of you, I love asking the “why” and “how” questions and chasing down their answers. On an average day, these questions range from “Why does the bread taste so much worse today than it did yesterday?” all the way to “How does this tRNA charging nuclear protein lead to mitochondrial dysfunction?” which also happens to be the focus of my thesis project.

Sometimes, I miraculously stumble upon the answer to one of these questions within a few days (though obviously not the latter), while others take years to unravel. Of course, many of these answered and unanswered curiosities are lost to the hippocampus, forgotten forever. Yet the moments right after discovering something silly, novel, or fun give me goosebumps every single time.

Often, I get so excited that I have to share this “world-changing” piece of information with everyone around me. Combine that enthusiasm with my extroverted personality, and it’s doomsday for whoever happens to be sitting next to me. They are about to be subjected to an overly enthusiastic rant about my latest “groundbreaking” discovery.

This website is my attempt to save the world from those rants by giving me a space to channel my energy into documenting the observations and questions that pop into my head, rather than spending the day unleashing them on innocent bystanders. It will also serve as a fun record of the things I have wondered about over time, so if they ever escape my cortex, I can find them here again. This website has been a long-procrastinated project, and I am genuinely surprised and excited that it is finally coming to life.

• Record-keeping and reflection: I wanted a space of my own to document my research journey. This site will serve as a witness to how much fun I have had doing science, a place to look back from time to time, notice patterns, and learn from them.
• A platform for curiosity: I hope this becomes a hybrid journaling space where I can share the fun and “silly” experiments that never made it into a project but brought me joy, the inspiring lectures I have attended, and even my current scientific obsessions, whether or not I am officially working on them.
• For resilience: I want this site to remind me, and perhaps others, that tough times and rejections are part of an academic journey. What matters is holding on to the excitement of pursuing truth and knowledge, and remembering that setbacks do not define us. We only lose when we accept defeat.