TYPHOON-PROOF CITY BUILT FROM TURMERIC WASTE Forget good mornings. That landed in the family WhatsApp chat at 6 AM. Most Desi group chats are flooded with prayers, memes, and political rants. But ours? Daily dispatches on sustainable innovation from my grandpa in India. He sends them because he knows I’ll be excited. As a kid, I sketched makeshift floodgates after typhoon rains hit his town. Eventually, I started answering his headlines with projects of my own. So when I opened my phone to “TYPHOON-PROOF CITY BUILT FROM TURMERIC WASTE,” I had one response: Okay, Grandpa, challenge accepted. At the University of Miami, I was already spending my afternoons tinkering with ways to make concrete less dependent on conventional cement. I started with dredged sediments and incineration ash—materials that usually get treated as waste. I wondered if I could make them useful instead. I ground the materials at high speed to mechanically activate their surfaces, hoping to make them reactive enough to replace part of the cement. Then I started testing. I changed the activation time, adjusted the mixtures, cast new samples, and crushed them to see what happened. My compressive strength climbed. Bulk resistance followed. A pile of gray waste that had started out as something to dispose of was gradually becoming part of a material that could actually hold a structure together. I sent Grandpa a photo. His response was exactly what I expected: a thumbs-up, followed immediately by another headline. That became our game. He would send me some bizarre piece of climate technology from halfway around the world, and I would try to build something that answered it. Sometimes I could show him a result. Sometimes I just sent him a photo of whatever strange setup had taken over my lab bench. He never needed a full explanation. He was just delighted that the kid who used to draw floodgates was now actually getting to build things. But the more I worked with waste materials, the more I started wondering why they were being discarded in the first place. If dredged sediments and incineration ash could be engineered into useful construction materials, what stopped cities from actually using them? So I started tinkering with the system around the material, too. I researched how construction standards, waste regulations, and material requirements affected what could actually be reused, then drafted policy for the City of Miami on incorporating waste materials like dredged sediments and incineration ash into construction. My lab work had started with a pile of material and a question about what I could make from it. I think that is what I love about tinkering. It doesn't always mean taking apart a machine with a screwdriver. Sometimes it means grinding a strange powder until it behaves differently. And sometimes it means sending a photo across the ocean and watching your grandpa respond with a thumbs-up and another ridiculous challenge. I don't know what his next headline will be. But when it arrives at 6 AM, I'll probably roll my eyes, text “challenge accepted,” and start figuring out how to build it.

I reluctantly sat cross-legged on my home’s granite tile beside Amma—my mom. The power had just gone out during Hurricane Matthew. I could have been building pillow forts with my brother; instead, I found a lit brass oil lamp separating Amma and me. “Fold your hands like this,” she says, guiding my hands into pranama. My tiny fingers awkwardly meet together. “Now close your eyes.” I listen to her stories of the gods: how Lord Krishna lifted an entire mountain to shield villagers from seven days of rain, or how Hanuman, the monkey god, launched himself over the sea during a monsoon. She told me we couldn’t stop the storms, but we could pray for protection. So, I always folded my palms together, just in case Amma was right. I did the same when Hurricane Eta arrived in 2020; although this time, it seemed our prayers weren’t enough. Within hours, a flood evacuation warning forced my family out of our home. I wasn’t sure who to plead to any longer—it seemed God had abandoned us. At Hallandale Elementary School’s Emergency Shelter, my parents knelt immediately, pulling a frayed shawl from our backpack and spreading it out like sacred ground. They began chanting Sanskrit slokas I still knew from memory; however, this time, I stood apart with my fists buried in my jacket pocket. It angered me: what kind of “God” would hurl storms at the innocent? What kind of “God” rips away people’s homes, scatters them like ants, and asks them to kneel? But then, I looked around. An elderly neighbor clutched his rosary. A young woman waved incense sticks around her sleeping toddler. A teenage boy traced the Star of David on his neck whenever the building shuddered. None of them were asking for the storm to vanish—they were trying not to vanish with it. For the first time, I understood that nature was not something happening outside of us. It could decide whether we slept in our own beds, uproot the trees we grew up under, and scatter families into emergency shelters. I began wondering why some storms hit harder than others, and why some communities had so much less to fall back on when they did. As a Red Cross Preparation Chair, I now offer the same solace I found in that crowded room. In the aftermath of floods and hurricanes, I distribute care packages, but mostly, I listen. I sit alongside children who whisper bedtime prayers with their stuffed animals. We talk about birthdays, favorite songs, and the mango trees they used to climb. But I began wondering what it would mean to prepare for a storm before it arrived by changing the systems that make communities vulnerable to them. That question led me to environmental advocacy and sustainable cement research. I began lobbying for clean energy with other students and studying how ordinary materials like concrete can be redesigned to reduce their environmental impact. I learned that caring for people and caring for the planet are inseparable—and that solving environmental problems requires understanding the systems behind them. I understand that I cannot control the planet’s storms; however, I can choose whether to simply wait them out...or spend my life learning how to build a world better prepared for them.

In my house, nothing is ever what it seems. A cookie tin doesn’t hold biscuits; it’s stuffed with thread spools and needles. Old yogurt containers are filled with Indian pickles. Although my hungry self is always disappointed, I’ve learned that what looks like “trash” to many is simply waiting to be reimagined with my family. However, outside my house, people don’t view waste the same. The City of Pembroke Pines championed removing curbside recycling, touting historical cost cuts. But all I saw were perfectly good cardboard boxes and jugs—things my family would have reused—having their second life cut short. I had always been taught that waste had value, but suddenly Pembroke Pines deemed the opposite. The only option now was to drive miles to the recycling center—a hassle most avoided; my family, however, still made the effort. Weeks later, I began offering to take neighbors’ recyclables too. At first, only a few said yes. Then more. Before long, our porch became a weekend collection zone, with paper bags marked in Sharpie from houses up and down the block. As the pile grew, so did my realization that I couldn’t keep doing this one neighbor at a time. I could drive a few extra miles every weekend, but that wasn’t a solution for an entire community. If recycling depended on someone like me volunteering their car, the system was still broken. So, I started thinking bigger. Those weekend drop-offs morphed into community-wide recycling drives through CycleSphere. We developed a new headquarters at our neighborhood clubhouse and a grassroots team of friends and family to help collect, sort, and transport everything. Suddenly, neighbors didn’t have to plan a separate trip across the city; they could bring their recyclables to a familiar place in their own community. It was encouraging to see people show up, but still I found something missing. I had made it easier for people to recycle, but I hadn’t changed the way they looked at what they were throwing away. A cardboard box could still be a cardboard box. A plastic bottle could still be a plastic bottle. I wanted people to see what my family had always seen: that the life of something doesn’t necessarily end when its original purpose does. So, I organized a Plastic Waste Art Contest for local high school students. The challenge was simple: turn trash into treasure. One student recreated Van Gogh’s Starry Night using painted bottle caps. Another wove a jellyfish with tentacles cascading from discarded plastic bags. By the end, students proudly showcased their creations, pointing out the bottle caps, bags, and other scraps they had transformed. The same objects that would have disappeared into a trash can were now the centerpieces of their artwork. I started CycleSphere because I couldn’t understand why something my family considered reusable had suddenly become waste. I ended up learning that sometimes the best way to solve a problem isn’t to accept the system as it is, or simply work around it yourself. It is to find where the system fails, build a better one, and help others see why it matters. Maybe that’s why I still can’t look at an old container the same way. In my house, it might be a pickle jar today and a storage box tomorrow. Outside my house, I hope I can help others see that “trash” doesn’t always have to be the end of the story.

"TYPHOON-PROOF CITY BUILT FROM TURMERIC WASTE" Forget good mornings. That landed in the family WhatsApp chat at 6 AM. Most Desi group chats are flooded with prayers, memes, and political rants. But ours? Daily dispatches on sustainable innovation from my grandpa in India. He sends them because he knows I'll be excited. As a kid, I sketched makeshift floodgates after typhoon rains hit his town. Now, I text back photos of my latest projects. I blinked at the new headline: "Okay, grandpa, challenge accepted." I rushed to my lab at the University of Miami, eager to push the limits of sustainable strength. Grinding local dredged sediments and incinerator ashes under high speed, I was hooked by mechanochemical activation's ability to convert my static pile of waste into reactive, cement-like precursors. Over a month, I watched my compressive strength and bulk resistance values incrementally rise, signaling that my concrete structure could truly hold—and even sequester atmospheric CO₂. By the end, it felt like I'd turned my grandpa's headline into something tangible. I snapped a photo, texting it across the ocean. He replied with the usual thumbs-up and another project, unfolding our long-distance routine: I prototype here, while he hears about it from there. What I keep coming back to is the timescale. Cement is responsible for roughly eight percent of global emissions, and the buildings we pour this decade will still be standing when my grandpa's great-grandchildren are the ones deciding whether his town floods. Infrastructure is the longest bet a society makes. A material choice made once in a lab, gets multiplied across millions of tons and locked in for a century. It's also why the waste angle matters to me more than the strength numbers did at first. Dredged sediment and incinerator ash are problems cities already pay to store. Turning a disposal cost into a structural input means the sustainable option stops requiring anyone's sacrifice—it just becomes the cheaper one. We get to a healthier world by making it the default, rather than asking people to confirm. That belief is why I'm pivoting from materials toward the computational side of energy systems. A better concrete is one decision; the models that determine where we put data centers, how grids absorb variable load, and which retrofits actually pay back are decisions repeated at every scale, everywhere. I want to build the tools that make those choices legible—so that a city engineer are working from the same frameworks. At Stanford, I want to do that work inside the Doerr School of Sustainability, starting with CEE 107A: Understand Energy to learn how energy systems actually behave before I try to redesign them, then finding my way into the Bits & Watts Initiative, where the questions about computing's energy footprint are the ones I've been circling on my own. South Florida taught me what unmanaged water does to a coastline. Now, I'd like to spend four years learning to model it instead of of simply sketching floodgates. Maybe one day my grandpa will open his phone to find a Stanford Daily article about something I helped build, and forward it to the group chat at 6 AM—without realizing it came from me!

The sharp, peppery scent of tulsi fills my lungs with each deep breath. I'm back in Chennai: narrow streets lined with bustling stalls as the air overflows with spice and chatter. I crouch beside my grandma as she deseeds each leaf, while I learn what has passed through our family for generations. The smell, the sounds, the taste, the sights—all of Chennai compressed into a single green leaf. I blink. I'm in Miramar now, standing over a patch of cracked pavement and dry, stubborn dirt. Nothing grows here. So, I bend down and press a tulsi seed into the soil, trying to carry a piece of that Chennai kitchen into this abandoned lot. Over the next four months, that empty space slowly changed. Neighbors brought seeds from their backyards and balconies, and eventually, what was once asphalt transformed into the Miramar Community Garden: a shared sanctuary rooted in many origins. At the Sierra Club's first monthly seed swap event, I held my tulsi and realized just how much I had to learn. A retired teacher handed me Trinidadian Chandon Beni, explaining that her ancestors brought it during indentureship so they could continue cooking native cuisines. A veteran from Venezuela shared cocoa seeds while exposing the history of exploitation on her country's plantations. With each new seedling placed in my hands, I held someone else's story by offering up a piece of my own. Weeks later, however, I crouched over our garden in panic. Pale gray patches of Anthracnose fungus had crept across the undersides of leaves, spreading between every plot. Anthracnose thrives in uniform plantings, where spores move between identical hosts, threatening to wipe out entire harvests. But our garden wasn't uniform. Thai basil's strong oils created a protective barrier, broad shiso leaves reduced humidity near the soil surface, and chayote with deeper root systems absorbed excess moisture that would have fueled the fungus. The unintentional diversity we'd built had interrupted the pathogen's transmission. Everything I had learned in AP Environmental Science about ecosystem resistance unfolded before my eyes. Organisms occupying unique niches didn't compete for space; they supported one another. Witnessing our garden recover within two weeks made it clear that resilience grows where difference is embraced. But outside of my garden, the same cannot be said. South Florida is a mosaic of identical St. Augustine lawns and imported hedges, and the wildlife that once moved through it can't. Our preserves are too fragmented to carry species on their own, so the land between them has become the habitat that matters. But a monoculture yard is as vulnerable as a monoculture plot. Nothing eats it, nothing nests in it, and nothing can survive in it. But the barrier isn't that people don't care. It's that native seed is expensive, rarely stocked, and hard to identify. So I built the missing link. Across five public libraries in Broward County, I created a native seed library network and distributed over 100,000 seeds checked out like books. Coontie is the only plant the atala butterfly's caterpillars can eat; the species nearly vanished from Florida when coontie disappeared, and came back because people planted it in their yards, one at a time. Now I'm working to close the loop, asking growers to return seed from their own harvests so the collection sustains itself instead of depending on me. When I arrive at college, the first thing I plan on growing is tulsi. Because no matter where I am, I've learned that I never have to leave home behind; it's something I'll plant, share, and grow wherever I land.