Welcome to Un framed

A guide to what lives in this room

For the past two years, you’ve been reading a newsletter called CustomerIQ. That name was a leftover from my data analytics days. It never fit what this became.

So I changed it.

Welcome to Un framed.

The writing hasn’t changed. The essays are still about the same things: inherited patterns, borrowed lenses, what slows down when you finally stop running for speed. But the name on the door now matches what’s inside.

Some of you have been reading me for years. Others just arrived. Thank you for both. Here are four essays that tell you what this place is about.

If you want the essay that started everything:
Claiming the Unsaid — On inherited ambition, bathroom dictionaries, and what silence taught me. My father kept an Oxford dictionary in our bathroom. I didn’t understand why until decades later.

If you want to feel something:
Dribbling Through the Stars — About my closest friend, a boxer and football player who became a fighter pilot and died in a MiG-21 crash in his twenties. About jealousy, grief, and the Ladakh sky.

If you want the essay about transitions:
Others See You as a Dead Star — Standing under the Milky Way at 4 AM, I realised the stars above me were already dead. Others see us the same way. As the person we were, not the person we’re becoming.

If you want the essay about AI and identity:
The AI Companion You Didn’t Ask For — What happened when I asked ChatGPT to point out my blind spots. It answered too fast. And too accurately.

There’s more. Essays about Himalayan treks that crack open frozen identities. About hormones I spent a career ignoring. About cycling through Goa’s plateaus and discovering that slow was its own kind of frame. About what's in syllabus and "what's out of syllabus" and what’s out when life refuses to stay inside the lines.

Same writer. Same room. New sign on the door.

Ajay