I am from Kolkata, India and am starting my PhD life at Oxford, UK from October 2022. My PhD shall be in International Development where I aim to look at the experiences with smartphones among the women of lower-income communities of India and understand them in the context of their life lived under multiple challenges and oppressions.

I like to watch football and movies, write occasional poetry and enjoy stories and deep philosophical discussions with almost anyone caring to have them, not as a popular culture but to understand all perspectives of all people as if I am them. I believe there is a certain freedom and certain love to be experienced for knowing a person better.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

'I want to talk to everybody I can, as deeply as I can.' —Sylvia Plath

I am a person interested to know people deeply, across all ages, cultures, races, religion and nationality. I am good at making friends and keeping friends and have kept most friends I valued since childhood. I believe it is in the smallest of moments that we discover the most magical aspects of people, not in habitual long years of living. I have thus joined CS as I embark on my PhD journey in Oxford, hoping to travel and meet people a lot, and hopefully host a lot of interesting people whenever suitable. What is life without a story about how we made each friend?

Interests

• books
• movies
• table tennis
• sociology
• football
• gender
• technology and society

Music, Movies, and Books

Schindler's List
Forrest Gump
500 Days of Summer
Don't Look Up
The Dark Knight
The Trial of the Chicago 7
Black Swan

God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai
A Silent House - Orhan Pamuk
Shadow Lines - Amitav Ghosh
The Myth of Sissyphus - Albert Camus

Bob Dylan
Queen
Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali)
Soulful Bollywood Music
Folk and country
Football songs and all kinds of anthems

(The order is mostly random)

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

I have studied Engineering in my bachelor's in a fairly reputed institute in India and then changed directions completely and risked it all to pursue Social Work for my master's, which fortunately did not turn out to be bad as it could have. :P

What I Can Share with Hosts

I can share about my work, about my passion for movies, life and football, and about my country India and my hometown, Kolkata. I have lived in 5 states in India for at least a week and also in Nepal for a month, which gives me a rounded perspective of various parts and people of the subcontinent.

Countries I’ve Visited

Nepal

Countries I’ve Lived In

India, Nepal