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Science has been my passion since I was a little girl. I earned good grades in school and broke a 75-year-old record in chemistry in my college with my scores. Everyone thought it was my field, until, I paused and realised that I wasn't really enjoying something I was brilliant at. I took a year off. My parents panicked because in India it's not common. Then I enrolled in a journalism course and figured I could write on the sciences for a wider audience. 20 years down the line, I again paused, for there wasn't a way open for people who weren't drawn into the the rapidly partitioning media. I have been a bird watcher for 23 years. I wrote my first science paper in two decades and presented it at a conference on sustainability in a roomful of economists! People in business talked about birds. The way has opened.

I am in a space where I prefer oblivion and invisibility over the ambition to network and attain glory in my fields and it has been most freeing and unburdening to have an identity that doesn’t define me with work or the people I meet.

As a journalist, I always believed I was making a big impact through my writing, until the deadlines, the upheaval of emotions and the discord between what I was writing and my true self made me quit. After a pause of two years, I have started writing again, but only academically. The idea is to write on only my research, not worrying about whether the masses read it. Sometimes, micro is much better than macro.

Maybe a practise before practice is our way of letting every atom of our body know that there’s a time just right for us and we need to be prepared to meet it.