Ask me what I value and I arrive at the same three things: money, friends, and family. The order matters. It starts with what makes a life possible and ends with what makes that life worth building.
01 / Money
Money is an unromantic place to begin. It is also an honest one. Most ambitions eventually run into a bill: the cost of starting, the cost of continuing, the cost of having enough room to fail.
I care about money because I care about what it allows me to do. The legacy I want to leave will take resources. So will giving the people around me a better life. I want enough to turn those intentions into something useful.
Much of my character comes from people I was lucky enough to meet.
02 / Friends
Growing up as an only child, I watched friends become older siblings and wondered what I was missing. They had someone to care for, teach, and look out for. I thought that responsibility was making them grow in ways I wasn’t.
I eventually stopped treating that difference as a permanent disadvantage. High school helped. So did realizing how much I could learn from the people already around me.
Before then, I was happy to drift between television and comic books. I had interests, but very little direction. Arjun Suresh changed that. Watching the focus he brought to his education made ambition feel concrete: you could care about a future enough to work toward it every day.
I wanted that kind of dedication. I had been comfortable believing I was talented; his example made it harder to confuse talent with effort. A considerable part of my work ethic began there.
Much of my character comes from people I was lucky enough to meet. My friends are kind, driven, and generous. I would give the world to them if I could.
03 / Family
I could wear out my fingerprints writing about my parents. Here is the shorter version.
As a child, I kept borrowing possible futures from the characters I loved. KD Pathak from Adalaat made me want to be a lawyer. Dr. Sam Abrams from Chicago Med made medicine look irresistible. There was a firefighter phase, too. Eventually, I found computer science.
My parents stayed in my corner through every change. Even when relatives or friends questioned a choice, they let me imagine a life and try to move toward it.
Their sacrifices gave me possibilities I would not otherwise have had. I cannot settle that debt with a single achievement, or even a lifetime of them. But I can carry their generosity forward. I can help someone else feel as supported as they made me feel.
That is the life I want to build: enough means to act, good people beside me, and something of my parents’ generosity in everything I leave behind.