This chapter,
not a permanent
label.

I'm working on a growing collection of small websites and essays connected by one recurring fascination: how humans interpret a situation, decide what matters, and attempt to act. One idea might become a long argument. Another might become a button you press, a simulated rule you change, or a room that responds to your curiosity. I'm interested in what happens when a reader can explore an idea rather than only agree or disagree with a paragraph about it.

The main public entrance is sahiltayal.com. It is deliberately more playful than a professional résumé. Within it, questions about identity and action sit beside education, organisational behaviour, culture, technology, and experiments with scent. I am trying to build enough connective tissue that these don't feel like a collection of unrelated tabs, while accepting that a person is allowed more than one kind of interest.

I'm also writing about human capital without treating people as a pile of marketable skills. That concern grows out of studying and working around organisations, but the questions are wider than the workplace: What do we help people become? Which capacities are easiest to count? Which are important precisely because they refuse to fit neatly inside a metric?

A parallel craft experiment is perfumery. Fragrance asks me to work with another vocabulary altogether: attention, association, material, memory, and form. The claims should remain modest—scent is not a diagnosis or a magical shortcut to an emotion—but the medium is an enjoyable way to investigate how an abstract idea might become something physical.

I am learning browser-based creative technology by making things. HTML gives a page its structure; CSS gives it rhythm and atmosphere; JavaScript lets a person touch an argument and see what changes. I increasingly think of these not merely as employable skills but as a new set of expressive instruments. The attraction isn't the ability to say I know a framework. It is the ability to imagine a particular experience and understand enough to build, inspect, and improve it.

AI-assisted development is part of the process. It can accelerate a prototype astonishingly quickly. It can also produce elegant-looking nonsense, inaccessible controls, fragile code, and confidence unsupported by evidence. So an important part of my education is learning to verify what a tool hands me: Does the link resolve? Can a keyboard user finish the interaction? Will it behave on a narrow screen? Is the claim true?

Alongside the code sits the older curiosity that led me toward organisational behaviour and psychology. I keep returning to the gap between intention and action, the social conditions that shape individual choices, and the distinction between a helpful explanatory model and a story that merely sounds convincing. The goal is not to force human complexity into a single equation. It is to become more precise about what a question can—and cannot—tell us.

The disciplines are in conversation. A small interface can make friction visible. A management idea can become a simulated trade-off. A perfume accord can remind me that some experiences resist being completely translated into language. None of this requires arriving at a final identity called 'technologist' or 'researcher'. Learning is permitted to be a verb.

The writing I'm returning to publicly includes a recent essay about changing one's mind: ‘But Sahil, Back Then You Said X. Now You're Saying Y!’ It asks whether revising a position must count as inconsistency. I don't think so. There is an important difference between abandoning an argument because it is inconvenient and updating an argument because the evidence or one's understanding has changed. The essay is a marker of that question, not a personal certificate of perfect intellectual humility.

Another piece of my published writing, ‘Stop Asking Which Skills Will Matter in 2036,’ challenges the temptation to reduce education to forecasting the job market. I keep finding new connections between that question and the way I am learning technology: foundations matter, but so do judgment, curiosity, cooperation, and the freedom to learn something that is not immediately monetisable.

And there is hip-hop. Eminem and Lil Wayne are among the artists I've written about as part of my listening history, not as authorities on psychology but as voices that made me pay attention to language, cadence, identity, defiance, humour, and the distance between a public persona and a human life. An artist can be an influence without becoming a blueprint. The music is allowed to remain music, too—rhythm does not need to justify its existence with a learning outcome.

I have deliberately not put a stack of invented 'currently reading' books here. When I have a genuinely current title and something specific to say about it, I'll add it in the next dated edition. Until then, these are the texts and sounds I can responsibly name.

An internet presence is necessarily selective. The person who publishes an essay and the person who eats dinner, listens to music, helps around the house, jokes with someone, or spends an unremarkable afternoon are not separate identities. One is simply easier for a website to display. I want to leave room for ordinary life without making it a public diary.

Rest, family, friendship, good conversation, play, and occasional solitude are not the supporting cast of 'the real work'. They are among the reasons a creative life is worth having. Some experiences become better when I put them into words; others become thinner when I insist on capturing them. Being present can mean letting a moment pass without trying to archive it.

I don't want to promise a perfect balance. There are periods when curiosity runs ahead of my attention, and periods when doing less is the more sensible choice. A dated page makes that easier to acknowledge: this is what occupies me in this chapter. It does not need to become an obligation to remain interesting every week.

If there's a rule here, it is a gentle one: the work should enrich the life, not demand that the life continuously produce material for the work. Even the most elaborate digital universe should have a door leading outside.