Hi, I'm Ashish.

I grew up with Hindustani classical music. Initially because of my parents. Then I kept listening because I wanted to. The structure of a raga, the way improvisation happens inside rigid constraints, the fact that a live performance can go somewhere no recording ever has. It's not casual listening. A proper raga unfolds over an hour. It asks something of you.

I also listen to folk. Indian folk, mostly. There's a plainness to it that I find appealing. It says what it means without much decoration. Fusion can work, but usually only when both traditions are being taken seriously. Fusion that's just one tradition dressed up to impress audiences who don't know the original doesn't hold up.

Music is the one thing I can't have running in the background while I do something else. Either I'm listening or I'm not. I'm not sure what that says about me but I suspect it says something.

The pandemic gave me time to pay actual attention to coffee. Not in a performative way. I don't have a strong opinion on third-wave vs whatever comes after it. I just started noticing that the same beans taste different on different days, and that turned into a small obsession with why.

I make filter coffee, occasional espresso when things go right, and a cold brew that takes an unreasonable amount of time but is usually worth it. The ritual matters more than any individual cup. It's how I start thinking in the mornings. The coffee is almost incidental.

I spend a lot of time on these three. Not because I have settled answers but because the questions are genuinely difficult. What do people believe? Why do they believe it? How do those beliefs translate into how they think the world should be run? These aren't small questions, and I don't think they get less interesting the more you look at them.

Religion particularly. I've read the Bhagavad Gita, parts of the Quran, parts of the Bible. Not as a believer. As someone who wants to understand what billions of people have built their lives around for centuries. That seems worth understanding seriously rather than dismissively.

Ethics is harder. How do we decide what's right? Why do thoughtful, well-meaning people disagree so fundamentally? I don't think the answer is usually that one side is stupid or dishonest. Usually they're starting from different premises. Politics is mostly what happens when those premises collide at scale. Which is why arguing about politics on the internet goes nowhere. You're not arguing about policies, you're arguing about what matters — and that's a much slower conversation.

This gets its own section because it matters to me differently from just being curious about religion.

I read the texts. When someone confidently claims a scripture says something, I check. And what people claim religious texts say often has almost nothing to do with what's actually written. This happens constantly, across traditions. The Quran gets misrepresented in both directions — to make it sound more violent than it is, or more progressive than it is. The Gita gets invoked to justify things its authors would not recognize. The Bible has been through enough translations and interpretive layers that confident citations from it should come with a disclaimer.

I'm not anti-religion. I'm pro-accuracy. If you're going to use a sacred text to make an argument, you should get it right. Misinformation attached to religion causes real harm — people persecuted for things their own tradition doesn't actually teach, entire traditions defined by their loudest and least accurate interpreters. When I see that happening, I say something. Not to be difficult. Just because accuracy matters, and especially so with things people take seriously.