A college application

Nowadays, most people in the West do not believe in ghosts. Still, ghosts remain culturally relevant with Western audiences (think Casper the Friendly Ghost, Ghostbusters, Pac-Man, etc). Analyze an enduring cultural symbol. Why do you think it remains popular? (600 words)

Before NASA explained “why is the sky blue”, or even now, when we ask “what happens when we die?”, it was, and is, more comforting to create and share anecdotes that explain these unknown concepts amongst our communities—rather than what is ‘factually correct’. The sky’s blue because it reflects the deep, azure seas. When we die, we move onto the afterlife and for those of us with unsettled business, we linger as ghosts in the land of the living.

When we don’t have answers, we create stories.

Although this concept of ghosts and supernatural beings is seemingly ubiquitous, the lore behind the concept is almost like a fingerprint, unique to every family. My family is no different. Our story has been passed down 3 generations by my Nani (maternal grandmother).

Born in British-controlled Bombay in the 1930s, Nani often recounts a story of her older sister’s tragic death at less than a year old—allegedly because of kalo jaadu (black magic). The story goes that a beautiful stranger, claiming to be a friendly neighbor, asked to hold Nani’s baby sister (my great aunt) while Nani’s mom made them chai. Within minutes, the infant that was my great-aunt was found dead with burn marks across her body, and the ‘neighbor’ had disappeared. The ‘scientific truth’ of this story was likely that Nani’s sister had typhoid, and ‘witch doctors’, common in India, had a recorded history using hot clay on infants as a way to purge diseases from them. At the time, however, it was far easier for the extended family to say that it was a witch that killed Nani’s sister—rather than an Eastern medicinal technique gone wrong.

As such, most enduring cultural symbols became grounded in the desperation to explain the sorrows haunting our ancestors’ lives, and thus became a foundational part of religion—what most societies turned to in times of despair. Ghosts appear extensively in the original Hebrew and Greek versions of the Bible—and in modern versions, many consider demons and angels to walk the Earth, disguised as ghosts. Bhūtas (ghosts) are in the Bhagavad Gita, and while Islam doesn’t have quite the same concept of ghosts as deceased spirits, jinns—supernatural beings made from smoke—are frequently mentioned.

These symbols—ghosts, witches, or other paranormal phenomenons—which first originated as ethereal answers to ethereal questions, mainstreamed as they clung onto religious contexts. How they came to exist everywhere today, in a growingly agnostic world though, can be attributed in part to the Lindy effect (because something has survived a certain number of years, it is more likely to survive even longer), but also simply because we like seeing familiar symbols in our media.

One explanation for the creation of Casper the Friendly Ghost is that a father attempted to soothe his young daughter who was then terrified of ghosts, likely because of the stories that were told for centuries prior. It did well in the mass audience because this juxtaposition of a traditionally evil apparition, turned comical and jovial, was not only helpful for other parents trying to pacify their young children, but because this dichotomy was intrinsically entertaining.

These symbols have now mostly become comical caricatures of the monsters they once were, but certain symbols still scare us into a sort of reverence for the things we still do not know or fully believe the ‘explanations’ for.

So when it’s time, I could tell my kids that shooting stars are just space debris burning up in our atmosphere, but wouldn’t it be far more fun for us all to believe in the whimsy of aliens zooming by Earth to grant our wishes?

Read the poem “Now I Become Myself” by May Sarton. When do you become yourself? (350 words)

Many of us claim that we like “deep conversations”, expressing our disdain for “small talk”. But colloquially said, small talk tends to make big talk. Conversation is art, conversation is creation.

Especially with strangers, it’s like a dance; when, ‘tête-à-tête’, we’re both vulnerable, mid-tango—trying to place our hands and feet and stay on beat, riffing back and forth. These strangers become friends when we find connection, when we both move to the same eight-count. I hear them, I understand them, and they become my friend. After all, isn’t “to be loved to be known”?

I become myself when I find a similar conversation with myself—one of curiosity and a desire for connection. Having grown up as a Boy Scout in Northern California, one of the first places I found a dialogue within myself was when I was isolated from my parents, learning about archery, or pulp and paper, or wilderness survival. All to eventually lay in a hammock with my best friends gazing at the stars, or playing cards late into the night at the mess hall.

I learned more about myself in the boundless classrooms of the woods than in a traditional schoolroom, and that has remained the case.

A year or so ago, on a trip with my family to Alaska, dusk started to fall, and I took on a ‘chore’ that brings me joy like no other: building a fire. As I chopped the wood with a hatchet left for me at the cabin, with the neighbors’ labradors running up to me, hoping for a stick to be thrown, I felt as though I was truly a part of this Earth.

But becoming yourself is not simply reaching a parasympathetic state—a quiet mind does not necessarily equate to a fulfilled soul, although I believe they have a strong direct correlation.

The awareness to find the state of mind, where you become yourself—as May described—takes Time and many years and many places, and is likely a perpetual journey.

Is it always better to suffer injustice than to commit it? (450 words)

We’d love to believe we’ve always been on the right side of justice—the right side of history—but we’ve all done wrong.

We’ve also all been afflicted by pains not in our control, and suffered when it felt as though there was no possible meaning that could be ascribed. I’ve lost friends decades before their time should have ended and been told (albeit with good intentions), “she’s in a better place” or, “God had His reasons”. Their words made me even angrier. How dare they try to rationalize a loss—to ascribe meaning to a tragedy—that could not, and should not, be explained?

Humanity has suffered for millenia, and aside from the masochistic cases wherein people intentionally choose the path of suffering in hopes of finding meaning, most suffering can’t be controlled—those who suffer devastatingly, have no choices in the consequences they were subjected to.

The 10,000 children who drank highly lead-contaminated water in Flint, not only were unaware, but had no escape, and will experience long-term neurological damage. The hundreds of thousands of families in the West Bank who were separated, burned alive, and dismembered had no choice. To lose your autonomy and face the consequences of a decision made by someone you don’t know, epitomizes the worst parts of the human condition.

Those who have not experienced pain are quick to romanticize it—arguing that beyond suffering being a necessary part of life, going through suffering in and of itself has value. Oftentimes, the people on this side of the argument haven’t experienced true suffering and instead draw from their own diminished version of suffering, similar to how some of the extra-wealthy, in an attempt to make themselves more ‘common’, will argue that there is nobility in poverty. Those who have experienced suffering extensively wouldn’t consider a wrong action as ‘committing injustice’, but rather a form of vengeance—they are owed retribution and reparations for having suffered.

Because, or in spite of this, we also commit wrongdoings, sometimes believing it was deserved, or arguing that any missteps are inadvertent—and we hope that to be true, because it would mean that we’d be cleansed of any malignancy. Some find comfort in pure intentions, or in confessing after a misconduct, finding solace in an interpretation of the Bible, “confess your sins to one another . . . so that you may be healed”.

We have all been both the perpetrators and the victims of injustice—but it’s the intention behind the decisions we make that dictate our righteousness.

The ones who knowingly commit injustice, with conviction and intention—the transgressors of the societal contract—are those that we loathe, and fear, as they are far more evil than their unsolicited victims.

Prove you are not AI. (200 words)

This might be frightening to you—or perhaps you already know it to be true.

In a purely text-based interaction with you, it’d be impossible to prove I’m not a large language model.

Sure, off the shelf models have tells, like emdashes and antitheticals, but those stylistic attributes can be prompted out, nullifying their value as clues.

I, on the other hand, may caress you with an arguably-excessive fondness of commas, but not an all too frustrating piece that repeats “it’s not just X, it’s Y.”

You might think to ask about the human condition. What love feels like, what death hurts like.

And now, where I’d hesitate, the robots with trillions of transistors of computing power and trillions of tokens worth of training data wouldn’t skip a beat.

Where you’d get an impeccably mundane answer on these prompts from your model of choice, I’d tell you about how my parents’ divorce and my best friends’ relationships have influenced my understanding of love.

Text-based proof simply doesn’t suffice.

While the legitimacy of the following is also quickly fading, the only evidence I can show is a picture of myself alongside two dogs in Seward, Alaska, deployed on my website, yashgodiwala.com.

Tell us about a book that changed the way you think. (200 words)

If you knew you had between 6 months to 6 years left, but you weren’t sure quite how long how would you change your life?

In When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi, one of the world’s leading neurosurgeon-neuroscientists, faced this question head on—as at 36, he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer.

While mortality, and even ‘unforeseen death’, has been written about ad nauseaum, it was through Dr. Kalanithi’s captivatingly complex narrative that I realized we have been conditioned to try to divide our life into ‘clean chapters’, with clear transitions and throughlines between each. Paul didn’t have the privilege of doing so, and that’s what made his story so harrowing.

On my first read, I flipped between pages of what I believed to be one of the penultimate chapters, thinking surely I had a defective copy—an entire section of the book, his life, was missing. But, that was it.

Paul didn’t have a “The End” moment. He died. Slowly, then all at once.

It was because of Paul that I truly understood “agency”, to act upon the things that matter most, as there is no more genuine prioritization than while a man stares Death in the eyes.

Read the President’s Letter to Potential Applicants. Given the nature of the Deep Springs program, why do you want to come here? (300 words)

Reading President Zink’s letter, I can think of no better term than “rehabilitation” to describe the fundamental objective Deep Springs, as an institution, serves: to revive the untold capacities, lying dormant in my generation of young adults. Although it started out as a medieval Latin term to indicate someone’s reinstatement to a given rank, it broadened to mean ‘to make fit again’.

In thinking of making oneself fit, I’m reminded of the Boy Scout Oath I took over a decade ago. I had sworn to do my best to stay physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight—and I’d be lying if I’d said I’d stayed as mentally awake as I’d like to be.

I dropped out of college for an amalgam of reasons, but many of them can, indeed, be traced back to the materialistic nature of the universities. The tuition, all said and done, could cover down payments on a house in affluent parts of the country. The dorm selection process felt akin to choosing a hotel on the Las Vegas Strip I’d stay at—“this one has better views—oh, but this one has a better dining hall!” And for all the fees I’d paid, I couldn’t even choose the classes I’d like to take.

This capitalist-induced phenomenon—the act of sacrificing taste and beauty in favor of speed, efficiency, and productivity—isn’t solely attributable to the modern university. It’s plagued many things around us.

In spite of this, I’m reminded that the most enriching parts of life are the moments we get to spend close to the Earth, enjoying the fruits of our physical labor, and investing in the relationships with the people around us.

Now, I’m looking for rehabilitation—a way of life that has more craftsmanship and more community, and I believe I’ll find that at Deep Springs.