the seeds of this apnaapan archive were planted on a December morning in 2024. an excerpt from a thank you note i wrote describing this event is below:

i first encountered the word apnaapan in December 2024. a joyous, elderly aunty invited me to breakfast after a morning satsang session. the word satsang literally translates to “good company” [or “in the company of Being”] and is used to refer to a group of people discussing living and loving. Sarita aunty, the first time we ever hung out, exclaimed after breakfast, “mujhe aapke saath itna apnaapan mehsoos ho raha hai!” (i’m feeling such apnaapan with you!).

that word found a snug, soft corner in my heart. it is often lucidly translated as oneness. but apna in hindi actually means “own” or “one’s own”, so apnaapan could more closely be translated as own-ness or one’s-own-ness. it attempts to refract the reality of our oneness into a feeling. it is a beautiful linguistic and sonic venture into describing the intimate joy of undifferentiation. what i imagine a droplet feels—dancing with, cared for, and buoyed by its friends, family, mentors, and soulmates—when it realizes it’s perhaps no different than the ocean itself.

unlike other “feelings”, this one merged with my self. in that merging, it unlodged a creative force that had been stuck for many years—the desire to honor that which has changed us. apnaapan sprouted as a ruminative response to questions around what forms, what media, what shapes this honoring archiving could take.

my portal to apnaapan was kritajnata—a profound thankfulness acknowledging how we are being existed through everyone and everything around us. as i entered it, i began noticing this undifferentiation in life’s less glorious experiences. in anguish, in betrayal, in grief. in my greatest acts of courage and in my lowliest acts of cowardice.

and so, in the truer spirit of undifferentiaion, this archive beholds joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, heartbreak and heartbeat as one. it beholds the agents of these as one. it beholds change as that which destroys us and creates us, builds us and unravels us. this project is thus both personal and impersonal, passionate and dispassionate. its quintessence is perhaps best captured by these excerpts from two spiritual poets i hold dear.

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is this a personal brand/website?
no.

what’s with the no/weird capitalizations?
the sparsity of capitalization in these works is influenced by a few forces. first, languages from my native lands, including my mother tongue, are unicameral, so writing in this way is simply a nod to the plurality of script. second, i have an aversion to the capitalization of “i” in the english language. even though it evolved as a readability response, the capital “i” feels like it is a separator between it and other personal pronouns, symbolic of how we seem to be getting more imprisoned by little, limited notions of our self and less committed to the collective. third, it’s an homage to bell hooks, who chose to shift focus away from personal identity and towards work instead. finally, the lack of general capitalization allows for capitalization to be directed towards words that have meaning beyond their lower-case word and often language itself (e.g., being vs. Being, presence vs. Presence, silence vs. Silence, etc.).

that said, if anyone has a way to improve the readability/distinction between commas and periods, i would love to know. let’s connect!