About

Lodha Genius Programme

I was selected for the Lodha Genius Programme out of about thirty thousand applicants and spent the summer on a discrete mathematics course. It was my first summer school and the first time I had been in a room with people from all over the country.

The mathematics was the smaller part of it. What I actually noticed was how everyone behaved with each other. The way they talked, how easily they pulled people into things, how openly they treated each other's mental health as something worth looking after. Where I live that does not happen, or at least I had never seen it.

I spent a lot of that summer hearing what people my age had already built, which changed what I thought counted as normal.

Chess

I play at district level. Second place in my school's inter-house matches and a district under-17 in 2024, then two more district competitions in 2026: the under-17, where I finished in the top ten and qualified for state, and the team event, where we did not get through.

Most of my chess is ten-minute games online against people I will never meet. I wrote an essay about one of them, Poha vs Pasta, which says more about what I get out of the game than this paragraph can.

Theatre

I played the King in a school production of Hamlet.

I do not have a clever reading of the part. What I remember is how far into him I got. By the end of the run I had started to feel like him, which is not something I expected from a school play.

Volunteering

In September 2025 I volunteered at a two-day community health camp run by Shri Guru Harkrishan Senior Secondary Public School in Ajnala. I worked alongside the school staff and the medical professionals running it, guiding patients through the camp, coordinating between the teams, and talking to people about hygiene.

I was also the photographer for Celebration Seva, an event for girls from underprivileged backgrounds. That was the part I did not expect to care about. I went in thinking of it as documentation and spent the day trying to catch people just after they had forgotten about the camera. Most of those frames are technically poor. I kept them anyway.

Notes

I have kept notes in Obsidian for years. In 2026 I rebuilt them into a wiki an agent maintains, currently 349 notes, where I write the rules and it does the work. There is a page about it under work.

Contact

Email is the best way to reach me: mr.karanagulati@gmail.com.