A Splash of Color, A Sense of Home There is a particular kind of longing that lives quietly inside every immigrant family, a homesickness that never fully goes away, no matter how many years pass or how well life unfolds in a new country. I did not fully understand this until I stood in the middle of a yard covered in clouds of pink, yellow, and green powder, watching a classmate's mother wipe tears from her eyes. She had not celebrated Holi in over six years. A visa restriction she had no control over had kept her from going back. And yet, for one afternoon in a backyard in America, she was home. That moment is why I became president of my school's Indian Cultural Club. I grew up straddling two worlds, deeply proud of my Indian heritage while also navigating the very real feeling of not fully belonging anywhere. As an international student, I understood firsthand what it meant to feel unmoored, to miss something you cannot easily name or reach. When I joined the Indian Cultural Club, I saw an opportunity not just to celebrate culture, but to create a sanctuary for everyone who carried that same quiet ache. Organizing our Holi festival was the most meaningful thing I did as president. On paper, it was an event, permits, supplies, permission slips, coordinating with administration. In practice, it was an act of restoration. I had to fight for the event to be taken seriously, to convince people that this was not just a messy afternoon activity but something sacred to an entire community. I had to rally students who were stretched thin with academics and extracurriculars, and I had to make the event welcoming not just to South Asian students, but to every friend and classmate who had ever been curious about a culture that was not their own. What I did not expect was how much it would mean to the parents. Families showed up. Some had been in the United States for a decade and had never had a space like this. Some of the students had never experienced Holi at all, born here, raised here, loving a country they had never been able to visit because of paperwork and policy that felt completely out of their hands. Watching those students throw color for the first time, laughing and breathless, I understood service differently. It is not always about solving a grand problem. Sometimes it is about handing someone a moment they thought they had lost. This experience taught me that leadership is an act of empathy before it is anything else. You cannot lead people well unless you first understand what they are carrying. For me, that understanding was personal, I was not just the president organizing an event, I was also the international student who knew what it felt like to miss your motherland on an ordinary Tuesday. That shared vulnerability, rather than being a weakness, became the most powerful tool I had. It allowed me to build something real, because it came from something real. Service, I believe, is rooted in seeing people fully, not just their needs, but their dignity, their stories, and the invisible weight they carry without complaint. My faith in community, and in the responsibility we have to one another, was cemented in that gymnasium, surrounded by color and noise and the laughter of people who, just for an afternoon, did not feel so far from home. My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhinaya-guduru/

If I could have everyone in the world read just one book, that book would undoubtedly be one’s personal diary. A personal diary serves as an archive of one’s actions and experiences, offering insight into the vast tapestry of an individual’s existence. Within the pages of their dairy, a lot can be said through a person’s thoughts and feelings but when written down, it emphasizes just how much a person has been through. In a diary, the full spectrum of human experience unfolds, encompassing both moments of joy and sorrow, the creation of cherished memories, and the endurance of heartache. Yet, it is the act of meticulous documentation that gives these experiences such importance. Reading through happy memories brings back a nostalgic feeling that was once forgotten but in the end, nobody is perfect. Everybody has a time when they felt their life crumble apart in their very own hands with no sense of control and a person reading that in their very own diary from the past helps a person reflect on themselves and how much they have changed. A diary serves as a form of reflection for an individual to reflect on how much change there has been since back then, to reflect on how relationships have changed over the years, to reflect on how many embarrassing things they have done in the past but overall, to truly reflect on how much a person has grown throughout their entire life. People change and people bloom into the person they are and while the prospect of personal growth may be daunting for many, their diary has documented the entire process of how a person became who they are, throughout their entire life. A person's diary is so close to one’s heart because of how personal and fragile it is. It contains so many concealed secrets, so many memories, an array of thoughts, emotions, lived experiences, issues, and so much more that have made an individual’s life journey a better one. A person's own diary is one book I would have everyone in their life read as it serves as a great form of documentation of a person’s life journey of how they have changed while also taking pride in the person they have turned into now because of all the experiences one has been through.