By profession I work with Southern Railway, Trivandrum Division — electrical systems, infrastructure, contracts, the relentless business of keeping things running on time. It has taught me one thing above everything else: that clarity of thinking is not a luxury. It is the work.

That same clarity is what Magia Ligera is built on.

In college I wrote poems. Romantic, dramatic, thoroughly painkili poems — the kind you are grateful nobody can find years later. I searched for those old notebooks recently. They are gone. Some things are better left unfound.

After college came the years I wouldn’t trade — friends, travel, noise, life lived loudly and together. Writing wasn’t part of any of that. I wasn’t looking for quiet. Quiet hadn’t found me yet.

Then in 2008 I joined the railways. Almost overnight, my world changed. Travels that were once full of people became solo journeys. Solitude — which had once felt like something to escape — slowly became something I looked forward to. It became, unexpectedly, where I did my best thinking.

That is when I started reading seriously. Not as a habit — more like a hunger.

I read widely — science, philosophy, history, biography. Less drawn to fiction, more drawn to ideas. Sapiens by Harari broke something open in me. I’m currently working through Sean Carroll’s The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. These books make the world feel both larger and more intimate at the same time.

Somewhere I read that it helps to write down what you read — not just highlights, but your own thoughts, your own pushback, the connections only you can make. So I started keeping notebooks. Scattered, honest, sometimes half-finished. But consistent.

During the Covid lockdown I went back through years of those notebooks — pages of observations, half-formed arguments, questions without answers. I thought: what if I tried to bring some order to this?

I started using AI tools — not to write for me, but to help me think more clearly. ChatGPT to shape structure, Perplexity for research, Anthropic’s Claude for scripting. The process gave me an idea. And that idea became a book.

Habitually Positive — everything I had been reading and thinking about for years, on habits, decisions, and how to actually live well. Finally given a spine. Not a self-help book dressed in certainty. An honest one.

Long before I thought of writing, I had a passion for photography — especially dance and dancers. There is something about movement caught in a single frame that has always stopped me.

When I started an Instagram account to share my photographs, I wanted a name that felt like light. I was deep in a phase of Spanish music at the time. So I put the two together. Magia Ligera. Light Magic.

I chose it on instinct. Only later did I realise how well it fits — a home for ideas that illuminate quietly and shift something.

I am a genuine admirer of Article 51A(h) of the Indian Constitution — the duty of every citizen to cultivate scientific temper, humanism, and the spirit of inquiry. I carry that not as a legal obligation but as a personal creed.

I don’t write self-help dressed in certainty. I am sceptical of ideas that feel profound but cannot be tested, and of advice that sells because it is comfortable rather than because it is true.

What I try to do here is honest, evidence-grounded thinking about habits, decisions, leadership, and how to actually live well. Written by a curious engineer — not a clinician.

I am from Kerala. I think in Malayalam and write in English. Curious about politics, sceptical of consensus, and endlessly interested in why people do what they do — not as a philosopher, but as an engineer who refuses to stop asking questions.

I read everything. Mostly non-fiction. Currently: Sean Carroll. Always returning to: Harari.

Honestly — I’m still figuring that out.

But I think I am writing for the person I was before the notebooks. The one surrounded by noise who hadn’t yet discovered what solitude and reading can do to a person.

If something here makes you stop and think — even for a moment — that is enough.

This space also occasionally features writing from people I trust and admire.