📝 2025 Wrapped

We had a suburban holiday season. The final days of 2025 slipped away in quiet, rain and rest. We didn’t travel anywhere, which was (finally) keeping in line with my everlasting resolution to travel less (unlike 2024). I’m slightly worried that I’m turning into my Dad, who loves home with a burning passion, but I just hate the idea of flying and airports and flight delays and cramped seats (having said that, I am actually looking forward to traveling in 2026, more below).

So I spent the past few weeks sheltering from the atmospheric river in San Ramon with family, foraging for eggnog lattes, shopping in Walnut Creek, snapping at Claude Code, inhaling copious amounts of ~~white rice~~ quinoa, and going for long walks afterwards to shake off the brainfog. I gotta say, I love dense cities as much as your average SF YIMBY, but for nighttime walks, nothing beats a nice leafy American suburb. I’m still slightly scarred (only mentally, thankfully, not physically) from my drunk driver scare last month.

We also re-watched some classics like Prisoner of Azkaban and the original Star Wars movie. We had a brief shot at acting young on New Year’s Eve because we had bought tickets for a Swedish House Mafia NYE concert way back in November, but eventually the “show runs till 3 am” part sunk in and we decided to become inadvertent ticket scalpers and settle for a nice evening in with friends, playing Kombio and finally figuring out how the karaoke machine that my uncle gave us as a wedding present works.

Wedding

That’s right: we got married in 2025! It’s crazy to think of this time last year, when I was in India frantically calling wedding venues in Hyderabad and Bangalore (all of which was ultimately for naught, since we ended up getting married in California). We went from deciding to get married in late December to finalizing our venue in March, and then the wedding soon after in the summer. The first half of the year was entirely spent in wedding craziness.

Now that the wedding planning trauma has worn off a bit, I find myself looking back on our wedding with fondness. There’s probably no other time in your life that you get to gather all your loved ones in a single location and have a huge party. Our sangeet night was probably the happiest night of my life. The wedding itself also felt pretty meaningful: both the religious one, when the priests started chanting very intensely and we had our hands on the crowns of each other’s heads; it felt like we were in a sietch in Dune, participating in an ancient ritual (which I guess we were), and the official signing in front of a representative of the Californian government (which felt very legal and very solemn). I personally also think we both looked gorgeous.

Doing the main wedding in California meant that we got to control the wedding to a very large extent, which I’m grateful for. Our respective parents got to have their own wedding receptions in India when we visited North and South India in June/July. I highly recommend this distribution of wedding planning: minimize conflict by performing an Inverse Conway Maneuver and leaning into Conway’s Law. Weddings are emotional hotboxes anyway.

Proposal

I didn’t initially intend on proposing since we’ve been together for almost a decade and had begun planning the wedding together before the thought of a proposal even occurred to me, but my wife (my wife!) made it very clear that she wanted a ring and that it had to be presented beautifully and memorably. I dutifully planned a nice proposal weekend in Carmel-by-the-Sea. Highlights:

Gain: one beautiful diamond ring (check out Frank Darling if you’re in SF or NYC)
Gain: one tick bite (turns out you shouldn’t get down on one knee in a park named after the Spanish word for ‘tick’)
Loss: one purse, which was left behind after our celebratory dinner (I’m still sure the staff at Anton & Michel restaurant know more than they are letting on about that, but oh well)

I had also arranged it so that she came back to the hotel room to find strewn rose petals, a bottle of champagne and chocolate truffles. This was accomplished with some advance planning and faking a last-minute bathroom emergency right before we headed out from the hotel to the dinner. Big thanks to the hotel staff at La Playa Hotel, and big thanks to Instagram reel-spiration.

Death

I dealt with a lot of age-related things this year. Three grand-uncles passed away. One of them, to whom I was especially close and who was like a grandfather to me, passed away in the spring. I’m glad I decided to travel to India for his funeral, even though it was pretty close to our wedding. I think we all got a chance to remember him together, as a family.

My birthday

Birthdays always make me sad. My feelings about this are complex, but my wife (my wife!) surprised me this year by taking me on a last-minute trip to LA. I didn’t know where we were going until we got to the airport gate, which was pretty crazy. She also chose a couple of amazing restaurants (LA’s food scene remains superior), we stayed at a cute hotel and then at night we went to an Anoushka Shankar concert.

Traveling

I barely traveled this year, compared to previous years. We did a trip to India after our wedding where we traveled to the following places:

Hyderabad
Barog
Kashmir
Goa

Domestically, in the US, I traveled to:

Roadtrip down the Pacific Coast Highway to Ventura and then back for Thanksgiving
Midwest for the first time: Minneapolis and Madison
Los Angeles for my birthday

I’m actually looking forward to traveling more next year! I think I’m over my aversion to traveling, finally, after a big break in 2025.

Fitness

I had a couple of health scares right after coming back from India. Nothing too major, just means that I need to be a lot more careful about my diet and cardiovascular health. I also had my first brush with just how utterly broken and annoying the American healthcare system is.

The major change in my fitness routine compared to last year was that The Center shut down :( I’d written about it last year as one of the highlights. Why can’t we have nice things in the city? Our yoga teacher moved to teaching at Love Story Yoga but unfortunately it’s hot yoga, which I despise. I don’t need helping sweating, thank you very much.

I continued playing frisbee, running occasionally, and lifting weights at home. I’ve realized that most of my walking happens while I’m traveling, which meant that I walked less in 2025 than in 2024 since I traveled far less. I did do more Walking Club events though, and finally did the Crosstown Trail.

I plan on walking a lot more in 2026, especially after meals.

Tango

No more tango for me, since it started conflicting with yoga once I started going to Love Story Yoga. I might bring this back in 2026, since the teachers changed.

Concerts

Tame Impala: great laser show, I’m happy he is still going strong and is popular with the youngs.
Outside Lands: had a great time this year, especially with the double-set Vampire Weekend bonanza. The trick is not to overpack your agenda and only attend the shows you really care about, even if that means you only attend a couple a day. It’s just so much more fun if you’re not hurrying all the time.
Arooj Aftab: this was our second time seeing her in concert. She was great as always, and got progressively drunker as the night went on.
Zayn: tickets were surprisingly cheap, and the crowd was 95% millennial women. Great show though; Zayn’s a fantastic singer.
Anoushka Shankar: my birthday gift concert in LA!

Kashmiri

I learned a lot of Kashmiri this year primarily due to attending Koshur lessons every Sunday in the Fall. It’s also been nice to spend more time with Kashmiri people, which I’ve been doing a lot of. I am also signed up for Kashmiri Intermediate classes next year and I hope to continue getting better. I try exclusively talking to family in Kashmiri but it’s very hard, since I get frustrated with my lack of expressiveness.

Work

I was effectively acting-CISO for Brave while my manager (our actual CISO) was out on maternity leave. In general, I took on a lot more security work this year, in addition to privacy. One big theme was prompt injections in AI browsers. I wrote about our work here.

Rohan leaving

My good friend Rohan left SF for NYC. I miss him a lot! There’s going to be way less FIFA in 2026.

What I’m curious about next year

The big theme in 2026 will be immigration. Let’s see where I end up. I will know more by after the first quarter of the year.
I’m also looking forward to traveling more, if everything goes well with immigration. There’s a big Europe family trip coming up in the summer that I really don’t want to miss 🤞
I want to be more intentional about getting better at Saturday frisbee. I plan on showing up 30 mins earlier and getting some throwing practice in.
More walk club, for sure.
Work should be interesting and change a lot this year. Stay tuned.
I’m looking forward to training for a half-marathon again, and in general running more.
Continue getting better at Kashmiri.