We met over Zoom, as so many things begin these days. A scheduled call that ran long, then another, then another. What was supposed to be a professional conversation kept wandering off course. We’d start with a question about teaching or creativity and end up somewhere entirely unexpected: a film one of us had just rewatched, a half-remembered poem, a YouTube clip that somehow made the abstract concrete.

A discussion about AI would jump to Kant, which would land on a Borges short story, which would remind one of us of a scene in a Bollywood film, which would somehow illuminate something about how we learn to see. The connections weren’t random, exactly, but they weren’t linear either. They were associative, intuitive, sometimes ridiculous, and occasionally, unexpectedly profound.

We kept saying, “We should write something about this.” And then we didn’t. For months. Because life.

But the conversations continued, and somewhere along the way we realized we weren’t just talking about ideas. We were hyperlinking them. The web gave us that word: a simple mechanism (click here, go there) that transformed how knowledge connects. But hyperlinking is also a way of thinking. It’s what happens when you refuse to treat ideas as isolated objects and instead see them as nodes in a vast, interconnected web.

We are both academics, trained to stay in our lanes. But what drew us together was a shared refusal to do so. Science and philosophy. Mathematics and film. The rigor of research and the messiness of wonder. The most interesting insights, we’ve found, tend to emerge at the edges, where disciplines blur and unexpected things touch.

Think of what follows as an invitation to join an ongoing conversation. We’re not here to deliver conclusions. We’re here to follow the links, together.

Punya Mishra & Raaghav Pandya
January 2026