Surjmani

Sometimes a beautiful thing stops me cold before I've even asked what it is. A form, a surface, a gesture — and the first response is just woah. Other times I walk past a dozen beautiful things and the one that catches me is the one doing something I haven't seen before — purpose so clear it's almost elegant on its own. The order changes depending on what the object offers. But I always end up asking all three questions: why does it exist, how does it look, how does it work. I just don't always ask them in the same order.

I start before I'm ready. Not out of impatience — out of conviction that the work teaches you things no brief can. Research and making happen in parallel. They feed each other. The gaps reveal themselves faster when your hands are already moving.

My north star for the people using what I build is effortless relief. Not delight, not surprise — the quiet satisfaction of something working exactly as it should. "Ahh, that was easy and nice." If someone doesn't notice the design, I've done my job. If they do notice it, I want it to feel like it was always meant to be exactly that way.

I think about the Porsche 911 often. Decades of refinement without reinvention. The essence held while everything underneath evolved. That's what I want to build — not something that needs redesigning every few years, but something with a strong enough core to adapt without losing itself. Built to last. Designed to evolve.

I've moved through enough places — Manipur, Delhi, IIT, McKinsey, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur — to know that design is never universal. It's local. It's shaped by how people live, what they trust, what they fear, what they find obvious and what confuses them. The only way to design well for people is to be genuinely curious about them. Not as users. As people.

And I can't switch it off. A tap gesture, a door handle, a queue, a menu — everything becomes something to read, to fix, or to quietly admire. It's a gift and a weight. It means the work is never just work. It's how I process the world.