01 Many Places, None Fully
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T here is a particular feeling of being in many places at once without being fully in any of them. This past week I knew it well. Part of me was at TERI for convocation. Part was in a classroom untangling what power actually means. Part was in Madurai, in a home corridor that existed only as a background smell in my mind. And a small, persistent part was nudging AgentsFactory forward in a thread with Ragu, because some things just keep moving whether you're ready or not.

404, my room at Zaap, was more transit lounge than home this week, bags half-packed, people slipping in and out between classes, convocation, and travel. I kept arriving and leaving. I was never quite settled.

02  ON THE TRAIN
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I took the train to Madurai alone. After four months away, I was going back to family. My mother's father has been unwell, and between AI summits and convocation lights, there was also home smell in the background of my mind , quiet, persistent, not dramatic. Just there.

Guilt, I have learned, is not the opposite of love. Sometimes it is love with nowhere to put itself.

On the train, the dominant feeling was guilt. Not grief, not relief, guilt. I felt I should be doing more: for my mother, who has been carrying this alone; for my cohort, for whom I had organised Spread the Love; for myself, who felt like I was failing on all fronts simultaneously. The train moved south and I sat with all of it.

There is something the PMDL simulation taught me that I felt again on that train: the Outs created safety by being vulnerable first, not by waiting for guarantees. I had spent the last week building warmth for 102 people, writing daily reminders, designing the red seals, planning the love letters. And I had forgotten to be soft with myself about the things I couldn't control.

03  SPREAD THE LOVE
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This was also, somehow, the week Cohort 9 ran Spread the Love, a simple series of daily acts across Feb 10–13. A video shoutout. Papers on people's backs, with strengths written in passing. Bingo during lunch. Love letters sealed with a red wafer, the way letters were sealed before envelopes were common. 

I had designed all of it. Written every daily reminder. Chosen the red sealing wafer because it felt right. I organised it but I was also half in Madurai while it was happening. And still, it landed with warmth. People felt it. There is something almost strange about building a container for love for others while you yourself are mid-transit, carrying things you haven't processed. But warmth doesn't require the giver to be whole. It just requires honesty about what you're offering and why.

Guilt and love at the same time. Both real. Neither cancelling the other out.

04  CONVOCATION & THE CORRIDOR
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Watching Batch 8 graduate at TERI felt like standing in a corridor between two doors. Behind: the messy, noisy present. Ahead: the polished, hopeful version of who we might become. I watched them cross that threshold and felt, mostly, hope.

Which surprised me a little, given everything else the week contained.

The same week, the AI Impact Summit was, literally, inaccessible to many of us because of security protocols. A summit on AI for development. And we, the development practitioners in training, couldn't get in. The distance between aspiration and access is rarely accidental. It is usually a design choice. That's worth sitting with longer than I have time to here.

05  WHAT THE SIMULATION TAUGHT ME, AGAIN
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In Group Dynamics this week, I wrote about something I called “manufactured scarcity”, the way organisations create the feeling of not-enough when abundance is possible. I wrote: I will challenge scarcity stories and operate from abundance: share credit generously, trust first, recognise freely.

And then I sat on a train feeling guilty for not being enough for my mother, my cohort, myself, and recognised the very pattern I had written about. I was performing scarcity on myself. Acting as if love and presence were finite, and that giving some here meant failing somewhere else.

Ragu kept AgentsFactory moving this week. I followed his lead. I'm grateful for that. Some things keep going not because you're holding them alone, but because someone else picks up the thread while you're mid-journey. That is what collaboration actually looks like, not seamless coordination, but unglamorous continuity.

Every interaction is world-building. What world am I building right now?

My honest answer for this week: I don’t know yet. And I think that’s alright. “I don’t know” isn’t the absence of an answer. It’s the most accurate one I have for a week that held too much to resolve neatly.

06  CLOSING

I'm arrived in Madurai. I saw my mother. I sat near my grandfather. I came back. 404 will be home again for a while, bags unpacked, until they're not.

This week taught me again, from a different angle: guilt and love are not opposites. They often travel together, especially when you care about more people than you have bandwidth for. The question isn't how to stop feeling both. It's how to carry both without letting the guilt hollow out the love.

I'm still learning that. I think I will be for a while. Summer is coming, apparently. Week 8 is ahead.