Why I Still Want to Fly

I was six when I first noticed I couldn't hear a plane without tilting my head to find it in the sky. Not the planes themselves — the sound. The engine noise would reach me a second before I'd located the source, and that gap felt like a puzzle I had to close.

This went on for twelve years.

A week before my JEE Mains — the entrance exam that decides most of an Indian engineer's near future — I had half-convinced myself I should be at a flying school in Delhi instead. I had looked it up. I had a plan. I was ready to make the case to my dad.

He listened, and then he said: set your foundation first. Get the degree. If you're still this interested afterward, nothing's stopping you. It was a reasonable argument, and I was seventeen, so I took it.

During my bachelor's I found programming. Not as a compromise — as a genuine discovery. The specific satisfaction of making a machine do something it couldn't do before. The way a well-designed system has a kind of inevitability to it, the same way a clean landing approach does. I got absorbed. I did a master's. I'm building software now.

The interesting thing is that what I loved about flying wasn't the flying. It was the instruments. The idea that something could be genuinely dangerous and still be made legible — that you could know, at any moment, exactly what state you were in and what the procedure was for that state. There's a discipline in that I find difficult to articulate but easy to recognize when it's present in other things.

When I write a failover system, I'm thinking about states and transitions. When I'm debugging something unfamiliar, I'm reading instruments — logs, traces, metrics — trying to reconstruct what happened. The machines are different. The approach is the same.

I still want to fly. Not professionally — that window has probably closed, and I've made my peace with it. But I'll get a license someday. The dream hasn't gone anywhere. It's just been patient.