Leaving Srishti
2022 gave me the thing I had been asking for, and then showed me I had to leave it behind.
After years of pushing, I was finally allowed to turn my informal cohort into a real, named space: the Experimental Maths Lab. It was a clean break from the traditional classroom, a room I could run on my own terms inside a design school. The turnout was thin at first, then a handful of students found something there and kept coming back. We ran workshops I was proud of. Should you Copyleft?, on open access and its philosophies. Glider Gun, on cellular automata and Turing machines. Mathematics of Magnificent Flora, where we read leaf specimens and rebuilt them with L-system grammars. Vineeta co-facilitated, and her shared sense of what the lab could be made the whole thing lighter to carry.
And yet the success is what clarified the problem. The better the lab worked, the more obvious it became that my way of teaching had drifted from Srishti's collective principles. I was out of alignment, and I started, half on purpose and half not, looking for a life outside the institution.
In September I left, to become a student again. I am genuinely grateful to the director and to Dr. Naveen for backing the lab. But its real lesson was about me: I had built proof that I belonged somewhere this place could not quite hold.