Kaveri Rajaraman

Mount Holyoke College, Harvard

Harvard University, Attended 2004 - Present, Class of 2010, Ph.D., Neuroscience
Mount Holyoke College, Attended 2002 - 2004, Class of 2004, Bachelor's Degree, Biological Sciences

Street Food and Monsoon Rain Connoisseur

Students for Bhopal, Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia, AID, Boston Anti-war Network, Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice, Alliance for Justice in the Middle East, INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, Global Women's Strike, Boston Mayday Coalition, Student Labor Action Movement.

Social justice, cooking south indian food for my amazing friends, falling in love, field biology, invertebrates, snakes, birds, JNU jungle (jangal mein mangal), nimbu paani at dhaba, CHAAT! - golgappa, live music, frolicking in monsoon rain/ leaf piles/ pile of clothes in sun, playing holi, dancing all night, drumming, the golden shine of ear wax

Everybody Loves a Good Drought, The God of Small Things, Another Roadside Attraction, Raga n Josh, Jitterbug Perfume, A Married Woman, Justine, Birds Beasts and Relatives, My Family and Other Animals, Mrs. Dalloway, The City of Djinns

Khosla ka Ghosla! Monsoon Wedding, Fire, (all movies set in Delhi, basically), Salaam Bombay, Boys don't cry, Sancharram, Hey Ram, My beautiful Laundrette, A brilliant mind, The birdcage, What's eating Gilbert Grape.

EVERY street musician: Gifrantz, Adnan Sami, Hindi gaanas, Indian classical, folk music from anywhere ("world music"), African and Middle eastern pop, Manu Chao, bachata, South American hip-hop, Pearl Jam, Indian classical music, birdsong, whalesong, live jazz-blues, Dave Matthews band and sometimes just hard rock

Noah's Arc

I like invertebrates a lot. Also, drippy rainforests and amphibians and dry scrub desert and elusive reptiles. I wish mainstream biological science today weren't so far removed from the subjects of study. But I do like studying Bio with mathematical and computational tools. Right now I'm a student of neuroscience, but one day I will be able to fuse this with evolutionary biology and natural history.
I wish I were a flatworm. Flatworms live the good life. They eat, boink (are hermaphrodite, yay), and if anyone bothers them they can regenerate their entire bodies from teeny post surgical leftovers.
But I could also settle for being a snail.

My other full time job is being an activist for social justice - education and health care, fair economic policy and political self determination - especially third world revolution, peace, equality as opposed to the massive power structures set up across gender and race and 'ability' and sexuality... and generally speaking, maximum happiness and ALIVEness and peace for everyone. I spend a lot of time working my ass off for this and wondering how to do it better. So email me suggestions. I like expanding my awareness of ways in which hurt propagates through society, because it's unbelievable how avoidable a lot of it is. I spend a lot of time being in love with the world and its with many many people. I love learning random things from sweethearty strangers, and so I love to travel... in lieu of which I read. And I love multi sensory stimulation. As a child, I went through a phase of wanting to be a shopkeeper with a crammed little store with everything you could essentially want stored on the shelf, and I loved the thought of giving people ANYTHING they could possibly need. I didn't really conceive of needing money in return. I still want this, except I now want to specifically earn my living by selling chaat on the streets of Delhi. Of course, if people want the chaat and can't pay, they will have it for free.

People who are, above all, good people - who spread love and not unhappiness. Nothing else matters much to me - the more loving, the better; the more helplessly geeky, the better.

Also, if people need reason to support an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, or reason to support the incredible revolutions in Cuba and Venezuela and Bolivia that the American media so vilifies, or wonder why people think the US is imperialist - get in touch with me! Of course, there are also so many local struggles - real race equality, radical equality of gender and sexuality (feminism, transgender rights, queer rights) and the largely ignored class struggle WITHIN the US - that I would also love to discuss with you.

I also want to meet several Mount Holyokers who graduated and took my heart with them, to many of whom I never worked up the nerve to confess my undying love.