In July 2025, I did not know a single one of them.

104 people. 21 states. More languages than I could count. On one of the first days, someone cut a cake and nobody saved me a piece. I went back to my room and felt small about it.

This week, there is a network tree with all 104 names on it. There is a letter we wrote promising to hold each other for three years. And ISDM gave me a letter too, and a name my batch decided was mine. Har Funn Maula. The one who can turn his hand to anything.

That is the whole story of this year. The distance between those two things. From a stranger who was not saved a piece of cake, to a name, a tree, a goodbye that hurt to say.

This is my last weekly note from inside ISDM. It is long. It is the whole year. Mostly it is thank you.

We started as 104 people who did not know each other.

The first festival was Onam. I ran around arranging dhotis and sarees so the first-timers would not feel lost. There is a small magic in helping someone tie their first dhoti. We cooked egg fry together in Room 404, passing the spatula and our stories.

Then the canteen. I touched a sweet on Sakshi's plate. She is vegetarian and holds it sacred. She threw her whole plate away. I shouted. I could not calm down. Then Kirti came. She did not say who was right. She took the food to a cow, and the three of us sat and had chai. Sakshi said sorry. I said sorry.

That was the first time I learned the thing this whole year would keep teaching me. Two people can both be doing what they believe is right and still hurt each other. The work is not to win. It is to find the next step you can both take. Kirti found it.

Thank you to Sakshi, who showed me a frame was not the only frame. Thank you to Kirti, who did not argue, she just found the cow and the chai.

This was the month I learned that community is not the party. It is who stays when things break.

Half the cohort fell sick. Fever, typhoid, friends in the hospital. My roommate was diagnosed and our room went quiet with worry. I was down five to seven kilos. I slept one real hour some nights. But I wrote that my spirit was getting stronger, and it was true.

Pao opened a tiny café at ISDM with green tea. I wrote that it tasted like hope. Small thing. Big lift.

Thank you to Pao, for the tea that tasted like hope. Thank you to everyone who turned a hostel room into a place of care.

Every holiday plan fell through. So I went to the mountains alone. 83,795 steps. My first Delhi Durga Puja at CR Park, where something quietly shifted and I just said yes to the trip.

Then Diwali at home. The first Deepavali my mother and I celebrated in our own house. Lighting crackers with my brother and little Sidhu, three of us, engineering and medicine and a third-grader, working like a team. It felt like we had finally become a family that stays together.

Thank you to Udaya, who reminded me to take a self-care day. Thank you to the mountains for taking me when my plans would not.

A stranger named Aishwarya shared a cab with me from the airport. She gave me cookies from Chennai. When we reached, I asked how much I owed her. She said no. Just, you go, take care, book the next cab safely. She only wanted to know I got home safe. I gave her the cookies back, not as payment, as thank you. I saved her number thinking, this is what community actually is.

Then the Cohort 9 Summit. PLCs standing in front of each other, saying out loud the things we usually keep quiet. This is how we learned to fight. This is what we learned together.

Then Pali, Rajasthan. Twelve days in the field. I walked into a school where everything looked fine on my checklist. Then I met Class 8 children who could not read Hindi after eight years, and one asked me to play a song in their own language, Garaisya. The checklist was fine because it was the wrong checklist. You can build the right thing for the wrong person and call it development.

Thank you to Aishwarya, a stranger for thirty minutes who cared like family. Thank you to my Pali team, PLC 4, who listened to the same village and slowly saw the same system.

One week I had 25 calendar events and 105 emails. It looked fine on paper. My body knew it was not.

December 5 was the anniversary of our house. The first one I spent away from home. My mother was alone. When she called, I cried more than I expected.

But there was joy too. The 404 band performed at Christmas. Tamil songs playing loud in Delhi. I danced, and I do not usually dance. A green cap arrived from a Secret Santa I still cannot name. I stood in the mountains and watched clouds spread out below me like an ocean. And I made one quiet decision. Cash only from now on. What is in my account is what I have.

Thank you to my mother, who was alone that night and still told me to keep going. Thank you to my Secret Santa, whoever you are. Thank you to the 404 band.

I cooked Korean egg gravy. Too salty. But it tasted like mine. I realised I had been cooking other people's way for a while, and that week I brought my own taste back. Small shift. Felt bigger than it should have.

I opened my jury presentation in Tamil, under Murugan's name. I told them I now connect more slowly, more carefully, and with more respect for what already exists.

And CoLife began on Republic Day. India and Europe, building together in Jaipur. David from Denmark told me his father funds ten siblings across Africa. We connected somewhere deep. My group, the Paper Machaans, learned to make handmade paper together without knowing each other at the start.

Thank you to Nidhi, who I gave a guitar to that month. Thank you to David, for the story across continents. Thank you to the Paper Machaans, my four-country team.

Group Dynamics. Five days. I was put in a group of fourteen called Infinity. As I listened, I caught myself putting frames on people. Same language, easier to connect. Same context, easier to understand. Those frames helped me, but they also decided who I let in before I even knew them.

Then I took the train to Madurai alone, after four months away, to be with my grandfather who was unwell. On the train the main feeling was guilt. I learned something there. Guilt is not the opposite of love. Sometimes it is love with nowhere to put itself.

Thank you to the fourteen of Infinity, who let me see my own frames. Thank you to my family, who I keep leaving and keep returning to.

Pao and Sandeep had their birthdays and 404 threw a party the only way 404 knows how. Loud. Unplanned. We went to the turf and played football with no teams and no score that mattered. Then Holi. Colours on the faces of people I barely knew a month before and now could not imagine the week without.

That is the day you know a group has become a community. The day you let them throw colour at you and you laugh about it.

Somewhere in that month, 404 stopped being a room number. It became a name. A band. A thing with its own energy.

Thank you to 404. You were never just a room.

I was in two groups this year. The first, Vikasa Taranga, understood me easily. I got used to that. The second, the Godfathers, did not always understand me. My ideas took five tries to land. I had a choice. Leave and find an easier room, or stay. I stayed. So did they.

There was Manaswani, who would pause in the middle of an argument and say back what the other person meant, slightly clearer than they had said it. The whole room would breathe. She made both sides feel heard before anyone had to give in. That is not a skill. That is a practice.

And ARAM. Five of us, eight days, built a whole NGO and a working system to protect people in police custody. Strangers in a group at the start. A team by the end.

Then April 14, Tamil new year. A fifteen minute break, prasadam in my hands, and the room full of Hindi, Tamil, Manipuri, Malayalam all at once. I understood all of it. The thing I had been studying all year about trust just happened on its own. Happiness does not need subtitles.

Thank you to the Godfathers, who gave me the harder, realer safety. Thank you to Manaswani, who taught me to slow down. Thank you to my ARAM team, Udaya, Charlie, Madhi, Shruti.

My phone broke. So I went to Tushita on an old Nokia, cash only, no maps, local buses through the hills. The noise outside had gotten louder than the voice inside, and when that happens you move.

The teacher said a warrior has a broken heart. That strength without tenderness is just armour pretending to be strength. I had been armoured for years and called it discipline. I found my own name on a list of patterns that tire you out. Mine was discontent. The feeling that there is always more to fix. The antidote is joyous effort. Discontent feels heavy. Joyous effort feels light. The body knows the difference.

Thank you to the road, that found me even though I went looking for nothing.

Near the end I looked back at all the groups I had been in.

The program kept moving us around. New PLC, new electives, new teams, term after term. Every few months I was a stranger in a new room again. And the quiet thing I noticed is that across all that moving, the same faces kept turning up in my rooms. Not everyone. But the same few, again and again, like the shuffle kept dealing me the same cards.

Then there were the groups nobody assigned. Room 404. The kitchen where we cooked. The trips to the mountains. Those I chose.

When I put the two side by side, the people who matter most are the ones in both. The ones the program placed next to me, and the ones I would have chosen anyway. That overlap is small. That overlap is everything.

I am not going to name them all here. If you read this and you are not sure whether you are one of them, you probably are. That is the whole point of a year like this. You stop being able to tell the difference between the people you were given and the people you chose.

I walked five hours with Nidhi this month. A year ago she came to a train station just to send me off somewhere. This week she walked me out of one chapter and into the next. She is the reason I came to ISDM at all. She told me what I already knew but needed to hear again. Be yourself. Do the creative part of you. That is you.

So I did. The things that were graded this week, the portfolio, the jury, those were required. But the things I actually made, nobody assigned. I wrote a letter with Pao, Peter and Alfred and sent it to all 104 of us. We are 404, and we are saying we will hold this community for three years after the building closes, because we are not willing to lose it.

And I built a Network tree for the farewell. Not a real one. An idea. All 104 names growing into it, ending on every single face. Nobody asked for it. I just saw it and built it.

This week ISDM gave me a letter. It said we made the campus feel fuller, louder, more alive. It said development work is about listening deeply, standing with dignity, and choosing compassion even when the work gets hard. And my batch gave me a name. Har Funn Maula.

The hardest goodbye was Kirti. The stranger from the canteen who found the cow and the chai, who became someone who helped me move on. I told her what I meant. Always, take care of you and your family. Good life ahead. Remember, do what you love to do.

Thank you to Nidhi, who sent me off a year ago and sends me off again now. Thank you to Pao, Peter and Alfred, my co-writers of the letter that holds us. Thank you to Kirti. And thank you to all 104 of you. Every name on that tree.

We came not knowing each other.

Now everyone walks toward their own life. New jobs, new cities, fellowships, families, the field. We will not be in the same building anymore. The classrooms will be quieter without us in them.

But a year of this does not stay in a building. It travels. Everyone leaves, and nobody leaves alone, because we are carrying each other now.

That is the whole thing. We arrived as strangers. We leave carrying each other.

Be kind, help people, trust muruga.

Nami