Saurabh

Out of the Box

It may seem that my world revolves around black holes. In a sense, it does. I spend much of my time either lost in thought or lost in the experience of living, though I have never been particularly good at separating the two. Curiously, my thoughts often lead me beyond the very science that inspires them. What does it mean to observe something whose defining boundary permits no light to return? If two fundamentally different spacetimes cast the same shadow, have we discovered the truth, or merely found an explanation that fits? Where does observation end and interpretation begin? That is where I find myself dancing on the thin line between science and philosophy, and, on braver days, dangling off the edge. Perhaps that is what draws me to the philosophy of science: the suspicion that understanding the universe and understanding what we can know about it are not quite the same endeavour.

But life cannot be lived entirely in thought (or maybe it can?), and not everything worth expressing lends itself to an equation.

Somewhere in the final months of my PhD, amid the rather complicated relationship with my thesis writing, I taught myself to play the bansuri, the Indian bamboo flute. It began as a modest escape from stress and gradually became something of a refuge. I make no claims to understanding the intricacies of classical music; I know little of its grammar, only something of its language. My encounters with the ghazal and the qawwali have turned music from something I hear into something I feel. Put simply: the ghazal is a medicine for the pain and misery of life; the qawwali is the ecstasy that carries one beyond them.

Whatever spills out of all this lands here: essays, poetry, photographs and more.