About Me
The name I was born with, is Prakriti Sardana. Meera, or more correctly, MeeRa, is the adopted middle name my sister gave to herself and I followed suite. It is the amalgamation of both of my parents' names, and not to say that I, like most people, share a brilliant-beyond-perfect relationship with them, I do have to acknowledge that as I've grown up to be where I am today (in my late 20s now), through years of violent, disconcerting yet resilience-making personal and professional ups-and-downs, I have always found myself going back to a strong sense of self and identity that in a lot of ways, I owe to my parents. Through direct or indirect interactions and conversations with them through the years, I have learned and held onto so much of my identity that I've found incredibly important to keep going back to, especially finding myself lost, and wandering alone, every now and then. And so I choose to keep it, I choose to keep this middle name, as a reminder of everything that I came from, everything that I am today, and whatever else, who-ever else, I am going to be, in all the years of my life to come. I am forgetting now which of the many writings from The Marginalian I read this in, or who even said it (and I promise I will search and mention that here once I have indeed re-discovered it), but there was something somebody intelligent and thoughtful said, about (paraphrasing) "...holding onto who you used to be, as dynamic as you are, because no matter how embarrassed you are of that person, that person has been your closest companion so far, and shall continue to be..."
On a less (perhaps) philosophical note, I am currently (at the time of writing this), a PhD student in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. I had initially started my PhD in the fall of 2019 in a field I always thought was my true calling, and then through a series of "I don't know what I'm doing but this feels right", I stumbled upon something I am getting to love deeper and more powerfully every single day that I spend on it. So now I work on climate change as an engineer-of-sorts, "on", as in, like with everything else, "I want to fix this". Which, as a standalone statement, seems like an amazingly far-fetched ideal (but wait, aren't all ideals of this nature?), but, as with everything else, put in the right context(s), things, for the most part, are fixable. In stark contradiction to the hedonistic, instant gratification-type existence of human beings generation after generation, I truly believe that some, if not most, of us, have it in us, that spark, to work on things and to fix things. Not only for "me" as the individual human entity that I am, but for things outside of and beyond me, and I believe that no matter how hard it seems every day, and it really does, there's a true sense of integrity and purpose to be gained from such a strife (u. obsolete). I (still) have a long, long way to go, but I'm excited, because any kind of meaning-making in life, in my opinion, can only come from work. Not work alone perhaps, but that has got to be the fountainhead to any other thing of meaning and significance in life. So, I am a PhD student working in humanitarian engineering and you can find out more about my group's research here.
Anyhoo, after that big rant (as always), if you feel like you need to, or want to, say something to me, or just say "hi", please reach out at prakritisardana94@gmail.com. I promise to write back, because gosh, there's always so much to talk about!