About

The thing that was waiting

At fifteen, I went quiet. My mother kept finding me in the study room for hours at a stretch. When she asked, I told her that one day I would study at Hogwarts.

She didn't laugh.

Then, during my HSC, my grandmother died. I sat with everything medicine had fixed for her, and everything it had broken. I still wanted to be a doctor. I just no longer wanted to be that doctor.

Around then, I found my cousin's stack of Ayurveda textbooks. I read them the way you read something that has been waiting for you.

It was never a straight line

NEET didn't give me a college seat. Bharati Vidyapeeth College of Ayurveda gave me five years instead: four and a half of study and one of internship, most of them spent on the last row, with startup work and research tucked under the desk.

Then came an MSc in Marketing and Brand Management at Oxford Brookes Business School, and now the University of Oxford, where I study Philosophy and Psychology.

Now I am doing exactly what fifteen-year-old Rinku said she would. If you are fifteen and quiet, nineteen and rejected, or twenty-two with a plan nobody else can see — stay where you are. Keep reading the thing that's waiting for you.