Welcome to my site! I’m Deepti. This is where I write about my Research Quests, Art Adventures, and other explorations.
I’m trained as a mechanical engineer, and I spend my work-day making and testing instruments, parts, and code for satellites (and other things that go into space). In college, I was a founding member of the student satellite project IITMSAT. You can read more about my engineering work on LinkedIn.
I became an engineer because I was obsessed with nature as a kid. I watched wildlife documentaries non-stop and memorized notebookfuls of animal facts. Since my talents were more aligned with mechanical engineering than academic zoology, and since technology has a huge effect on wildlife (mostly negative), I decided I’d contribute to the study of nature as best as I could: through technology. Usually that means trying to image the Earth from orbit, using satellites.
Lately, I’ve been studying other aspects of technology: how it’s made, where it gets its energy, and how it’s disposed of. The design decisions in most of the products we use today: food packaging, electronics, paint, and furniture, are decades or centuries old, and did not take into account how they affect the ecosystem. So it’s not surprising, or necessarily discouraging, that these products affect the ecosystem negatively – they weren’t explicitly designed not to.
So let’s redesign them. I’m in the midst of a massive reading and research quest, to figure out how we can all design, buy and regulate better products. I write about my quest on the Blog. So far, I’ve been experimenting with the types of paper and notebooks I write in, and dreaming up ways to ship food and fluids using only reusable or biodegradable containers. Robots may or may not feature in the master plan.
This is a decisive decade in conservation and climate change adaptation. Momentous changes are taking place around the world with a sense of urgency and determination. It’s frightening, hopeful and awe-inspiring, all at once or in quick succession, and I think that epic quests like these are best understood and prepared for through fantasy fiction. I expect we’ll all relate to Elsa, Frodo and Harry a bit more as the decade wears on.
I write fantasy and science fiction to reflect on dark days, hope and journeys, to explore reality through far-fetched scenarios, and sometimes to tell the story I need to hear. I’ve got a few short stories and a novella coming soon. More details on those, as soon as I have them!
More ‘Abouts’!