Life Outside the Lab

Growing up in Chennai, my idea of the outdoors was the city itself — loud, dense, alive with people and traffic at every hour. Nature, in the way Australians mean it, simply wasn't part of my frame of reference.

That changed quickly after I moved to Melbourne.

The first time I drove out of the city and watched the skyline disappear in the rear-view mirror — replaced by open road, eucalyptus forests, and sky that goes further than you expect — something shifted. I started planning weekend road trips, then longer ones. I started researching trails. I found myself at the Grampians, along the Great Ocean Road, in stretches of Victorian High Country I couldn't have pointed to on a map six months earlier.

Hiking taught me something I hadn't expected. Being physically uncomfortable — cold, tired, not sure how much further the trail goes — and choosing to stay with it anyway is exactly the same skill as engineering. You assess what you have, adjust your plan, and keep moving. The summit is the deliverable. The trail is the process.

The road trips gave me something different: a real feel for the scale of this country. Australia doesn't compress well. You have to drive it, sleep in it, wake up inside it. For someone who arrived with a suitcase and a study plan, it became the way I made this place genuinely mine.

I'm comfortable in remote environments now — not because I trained for it, but because I sought it out and kept coming back.