Hi, I'm Saurav.

My story starts in Assam, in the northeast corner of India, where the land is generous and the water sometimes isn't. Arsenic gets into the groundwater there. You can't see it, smell it, or taste it, and whole villages drink it without knowing. My first real work was on that problem: the bacteria that somehow live in that water, what they do to the arsenic, and whether they could help us deal with it. I spent about five years with pumps, sample bottles, and petri dishes, and it left me with a habit I've never lost — assume the important thing is happening somewhere you're not looking.

From water I followed the microbes into the soil. In 2018 I moved to Nebraska, which is about as far from Assam as a person can get in every sense: flat, wide, and covered in corn and soybeans to the horizon. For six years I worked on farm fields there, chasing questions that sound simple and aren't. Is this soil healthy? Is it getting better or worse? Where does the carbon go, and the nitrogen? A lot of that work happens on long-term research plots — the same pieces of ground, measured the same way, year after year. You learn patience from land like that. You also learn to distrust any single number that claims to sum it up.

Somewhere in those years a different problem started bothering me more than the science did. There is an enormous amount of careful, hard-won knowledge about soil and farming sitting in journals, in university drawers, and in the heads of people about to retire — and almost none of it reaches the person standing in a field deciding what to do this season. I watched that gap up close for a long time. Eventually I stopped just being bothered by it and started building things to close it. Five of them are live now, and they take up most of my days.

The rest of my time goes to questions that won't leave me alone. I write essays when that happens — about how we ended up chasing "more" in food, about what work means after AI, about whether a machine could ever do real science. On weekends I tinker with AI agents and how they remember things, partly because it's fascinating and partly because it's fun. And when I finally sit down, it's with a good film or a long series, or a beer I'm quietly rating in an app I built for exactly that.

I'm in the United States now, still close to the soil, still building. If any of this sounds like your world — you farm, you do research, you build things, or you just have a strong opinion about Interstellar — I'd genuinely like to hear from you. Email is the best way. I read everything.