Look, if you want to understand how my brain works, you just need to understand that I once tried to calculate the exact physics trajectory of a failing kickflip, missed the board entirely, and ate pavement so hard I tasted my own fillings. But while I was lying there on the concrete, staring up at the Hyderabad sky, I wasn't thinking about the math of my failure. I was mentally mixing a bassline for an indie rock track I'd been obsessing over since three in the morning. That's just how my head operates.
I'm a walking contradiction in the classroom, too. I will happily give you a passionate twenty-minute lecture on the chaotic, beautiful machinery of the Krebs cycle because Biology just... clicks. Every tiny system depends on another, every reaction has a purpose, and somehow it all works. Mathematics, on the other hand, takes one look at me, blue-screens, and starts playing elevator music. If you ask me to solve for x, I'm probably going to ask if we can just let him stay missing.
My friends, by the way, are a hazard to public safety, and they collectively share exactly one brain cell, which is usually buffering. Take yesterday in the cafeteria. Rohan decided it'd be a brilliant scientific experiment to microwave a metal spoon "just to see what happens." Five seconds later there was a shower of sparks, a minor fire, and our principal yelling at us in three different languages while someone frantically searched for the fire extinguisher. While everyone else was dealing with the smoke alarm, I was under the table with my tablet balanced on my knees, quietly tweaking the firmware on my custom-built drone.
Priorities.
My tablet is basically a prosthetic limb at this point. I don't just use it—I practically live inside it. Digital art, interface mockups, video editing, music production... if it involves creating something, I'm in.
I built and modified my own drone because buying one and leaving it stock felt... boring. Whenever Auntie and I travel during holidays, that drone comes with us. I spend hours chasing the perfect shot while she pretends she's annoyed, only to casually point out a camera angle that's somehow ten times better than mine.24Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡen5N32yBLb
Then I stitch everything together into cinematic travel films, color-grade every frame until my eyes cross, layer them with music I've composed myself, and upload them to my YouTube channel. It's not huge or anything, but every upload feels like bottling a memory before it disappears.
Music isn't just something I listen to. It's the operating system I run on. If I'm not wearing headphones, I'm probably tapping polyrhythms on my desk, humming melodies under my breath, or building synth layers that my friends politely describe as "really cool, but maybe you should touch grass once in a while."
Then there's my Auntie.
Naomi Rozario.
Goan by birth, Hyderabadi by choice, and somehow convinced she's still twenty-five. She's lived here for what feels like geological eras, so I'm fairly certain the city legally belongs to her now. She isn't technically my aunt, but if I ever actually called her "Naomi" to her face, she'd probably disown me, change the Wi-Fi password, and remove me from the grocery list.
Honestly, the only thing she rejects more consistently than software bugs is me saying, "Trust me."
It doesn't matter what comes after it.
"Trust me, this shortcut is faster."
"Absolutely not."
"Trust me, this recipe will work."
"Absolutely not."
"Trust me, I know what I'm doing."
"That's exactly why I don't."
At this point, it's less of a conversation and more of a legally binding tradition.
She's a professional UI/UX designer, which basically means she treats life like one giant app that constantly needs debugging. When I walked into our apartment today smelling like asphalt, sweat, and regret, she didn't even look away from her dual monitors. She just lifted her stylus, pointed toward the kitchen, and said, "Kitchen. And if you drip blood on my new rug, you're cleaning it with a toothbrush."
I hadn't even taken my shoes off.
"Auntie?"
"Kitchen."
Same answer.
Every. Single. Day.
Honestly, if she ever replied with "Living room," I'd assume reality had finally crashed. She loves her cooking that much.
She raised me from the time I was ten. She never forced me toward engineering, medicine, law, or any of the careers relatives magically invent for you at family gatherings. She simply surrounded me with creativity until it became impossible not to create something myself. She taught me that good design isn't decoration—it's solving problems people didn't even know they had. And now? She trusts my tech insticnts and proudly boasts that her nephew is a software developer in high school, to those annoying extended relatives.
She also steals my oversized hoodies. Relentlessly.
She denies every accusation while standing there wearing the exact hoodie I'm looking for, somehow insisting that it "has better drape" on her. I've stopped presenting evidence. The legal system is clearly biased.
We fight over the last slice of pizza like it's an Olympic event. We mercilessly roast terrible movies. We edit travel videos together. We drive around the city with playlists loud enough to rattle the windows. Sometimes we spend an entire evening in the same room without saying a word, both working on our own projects, completely comfortable with the silence. It's never awkward. It's just... home.
She also makes me do Krav Maga.
Not the mirror-flexing, protein-shake, "bro, what's your PR?" kind.
The terrifying "here's how to survive when someone twice your size wants to ruin your day" kind.
My instructor has exactly two hobbies: throwing me onto a mat and reminding me that confidence gets people punched.
"Leverage keeps them standing."
I'm five-foot-nine-and-a-half, built lean from years of bruises, drills, and learning that technique beats ego every single time.
Grounded is good.
Especially when you spend as much time inside your own head as I do.
Grounded keeps you from drifting too far into thoughts you can't change.
Like the fact that my parents died in a car crash when I was ten.
It's not something I think about every day anymore. It's simply part of my life, like gravity or the speed of light. It hurts, obviously. I don't think that part ever completely disappears.
But Auntie never tried to replace them.
She just made sure their absence was never the loudest thing in the room.
Instead of teaching me how to move on, she taught me how to keep moving.
Turns out there's a difference.
This city is my playground, too. Not the version travel blogs keep romanticizing, but my Hyderabad. Glass-fronted cafés with ridiculously fast Wi-Fi. Skate parks where afternoons disappear before you notice. Long drives with the windows down, music turned up, and conversations that somehow jump from video games to philosophy in under thirty seconds. It's sleek, creative, fast-moving, and always feels like it's building something new. I fit into it perfectly.
So yeah.
That's me.
Ayaan Krishna.
A guy with a drone that needs a new propeller, a math test I'm almost certainly going to fail, a Biology assignment I'll probably finish for fun, and an Auntie who's almost definitely wearing my favorite hoodie while yelling from the kitchen that dinner's getting cold.
My life isn't extraordinary.
It's messy. It's loud. It's creative. It's full of people I wouldn't trade for anything.
Honestly... It's perfect.
Or at least, I thought it was.
Right up until the universe decided it was tired of my ordinary existence...
...and the dawn decided to belong to the shadow.
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