Blog – Ariba Khayyam

The Elective

It all began when schools started devaluing cursive instruction to prioritize science and technology.

Now, in 2026, cursive instruction has been mandated in 27 U.S. states, up from 14 states a decade ago.

This exact pattern is happening all over again. And the subject being quietly set aside is not handwriting. It is the arts.

The devaluation didn’t happen because the arts were useless. It happened because their usefulness was harder to measure.

The exact knowledge that was once framed as superfluous is now the most sought-after advantage in the room.

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I had gotten too good at simply thinking. Leaving a polychronic culture and moving to the west changes your perception of time more than anything else could, suddenly you might as well be competing with light.

I felt stagnant. Despite the knowledge I had spent years developing, I was standing still. What I understand now: there is a kind of knowledge that only comes through making. The hand knows things the mind hasn’t figured out yet.

The loop only breaks one way. You begin.

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Taste is Key

We didn’t just hand vertical thinking to machines. Quietly, the same logic crept into creative work too and what emerged wasn’t creativity. It was the silhouette of it. Output that follows every visible rule of good design while missing the thing that made those rules worth following in the first place. Technically correct. Spiritually inert.

The genuinely new, the genuinely resonant, still has to come from somewhere else.

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Notes from In-Between

Liminal spaces are disorienting because they resist definition.

It’s been 9 months since I graduated. That’s enough time to have forgotten everything I learned, and enough time to have built something from it.

Here are 9 things I noted down over the years for any student who needs to hear it.

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Circles, Not Ladders

Throughout university, I witnessed a steep rise in student-led organizations and communities, not just on campus, but across the city, province, and country. These weren’t just clubs. They felt more like villages forming in real time. Small, high-intensity, value-aligned groups built not by institutions, but by the people themselves.

What student-led communities are modeling resembles something far older than startup culture: reciprocity.

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Intro: Kaleido

Kaleido comes from kaleidoscope, rooted in the Greek words kalos (beautiful) and eidos (form), reflecting the idea of seeing beauty through ever-changing perspectives.

In a world as unpredictable as shifting sand dunes, how do you plant a marker, not in the sand, but in the sky above it – to move alongside the wind?

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