My garden

A slower corner of the site — books beyond the field, places that left a mark, speeches that stayed with me, and poems I keep returning to.

Books outside the field

Man's Search for Meaning

Man's Search for Meaning

Viktor E. Frankl · psychology / memoir

Hard to talk about. Reframed how I think about hardship and purpose.

Meditations

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius · stoic philosophy

Two thousand years old and still calling me out from the page.

Palpasa Café

Palpasa Café

Narayan Wagle · Nepali fiction

A novel I keep coming back to. Reminds me of home.

Sapiens

Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari · history

Opinionated, sweeping, and the kind of book that ruins you for small talk.

Places I've visited

A web of places that shaped me. Click a node to jump to its story.

Melbourne Kathmandu Pokhara
Melbourne · AU

Melbourne, AU

2022 — present · home base

Where I’m studying, building, and slowly figuring myself out. A city that took a while to grow on me, then never let go.

Kathmandu · NP

Kathmandu, NP

home · always

Where I grew up. Loud, layered, full of contradictions. The place I think of when I’m asked where I’m from.

Pokhara · NP

Pokhara, NP

family trips · childhood & teens

Phewa Lake, paragliders overhead, the Annapurnas at sunrise. Probably where I first understood what “stillness” means.

Speeches & words I revisit

It is not the critic who counts… the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.

— Theodore Roosevelt

"The Man in the Arena," 1910 · for shipping anything publicly.

If you're going through hell, keep going.

— attributed to Winston Churchill

For exam weeks, debugging weeks, and any week ending in "y."

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

— Steve Jobs

Stanford commencement, 2005 · the line that made the speech famous, and rightly so.

Poets & poems

मुनामदन — line that stayed with me

Laxmi Prasad Devkota · Nepali poet

“मानिस ठूलो दिलले हुन्छ, जातले होइन।” “A person is great by their heart, not by their birth.”

— Mahakavi Devkota’s most famous line, in spirit if not exact form.

If—

Rudyard Kipling · 1895

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too…

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son.

— closing lines, abridged

The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost · 1916

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.

— closing lines