Each week, the Record (using a script in R) randomly selects a student at the College for our One in Two Thousand feature, excluding current Record board members. This week, Gautham Narendar ’27 discussed the various places he grew up, his interest in urban planning, and his favorite board games. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Arleny Flores (AF): You have lived in Massachusetts; Pennsylvania; Chennai, India; and Paris. What were your experiences in each of those places  like, and which was your favorite?

Gautham Narendar (GN): Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, I only vaguely remember. I lived in Massachusetts from one to nine, and Pennsylvania from nine to 11. So, I have little flashes of memory. I really enjoyed my time in Massachusetts. Great childhood. Pennsylvania, kind of shit. Chennai was fantastic: My family is almost entirely in Chennai, and I was there when my grandparents on both sides were alive, so I got to spend a lot of time with them. Because of international school, I saw a lot of that region. I popped into Qatar, Taipei, Colombo, and Amman on school trips. It was nice seeing family, really getting to know them while I had the opportunity. When I initially went to Paris, I didn’t quite like it. The city smells like sewage and cigarette smoke more than other cities. But, after COVID-19 hit, it was genuinely kind of idyllic. The birds started to come out and I was maybe 100 meters from the farmers’ market which would pop up on Saturdays and sell pastries on the street and have really good, cheap pizza. 

AF: You’re currently at Williams-Mystic. How has the experience been so far? 

GN: It’s been fantastic. I’ve really enjoyed the field seminars, and the material has all been really interesting. It’s a very close-knit community. It’s also a beautiful town, which I prefer to Williamstown. I’m generally walking 30 minutes to an hour every day — up and down town to the library, down to restaurants on one side, getting tea and whatnot. It’s a beautiful place, and I really enjoy it.

AF: Will you be studying abroad in the future? 

GN: Yes, I’m probably spending the next year in Copenhagen. 

AF: What made you decide on Copenhagen? 

GN: I am considering graduate studies in Scandinavia, probably in Norway. I want to study urban planning and there’s practically no better place on earth than Northern Europe to study urban planning. The program I’m doing has a specific track on urban planning, and most of the courses I’m taking there have it as a primary focus. So, everything sort of clicked together.

AF: How did you discover your interest in urban planning? 

GN: I had a passive interest in it for years. I was initially planning on being a bio major and doing ecology. And then I looked at how much ecologists made for the first three years in the field, and it’s not enough to live on in most major cities in the United States. And I said, “Okay, what are my other options?” And urban planning — I realized it was a job, if that makes any sense. I was like, “Oh, it’s a thing that people do,” but it didn’t occur to me that was a job that made enough money to survive. And I was like, “Wow, I have a longstanding interest in this. I should explore it in more detail.”

AF: Which student organizations are  you involved in? 

GN: I was a leader of Beyond the Binary and I was a very active member of WARP. It technically stands for the Williams Association of Role Players, though that side of the organization vanished many years ago, and now it’s just a group of people who meet and play our extraordinary selection of board games. It’s absurd how many WARP has. 

AF: Which is your favorite of these board games?

GN: Oh, that’s a difficult question. Right now, at Mystic, I play a lot of Diplomacy, which is a negotiation war game. WARP played a lot of Avalon. If you’ve played Mafia, it’s like that. You have a group of people with no information and a group of people with a lot of information. 

AF: Aside from playing board games, I know that you also enjoy writing. Do you prefer academic or creative writing?

GN: Oh, creative writing. Academic writing is fun, but I don’t really enjoy it that much. I really enjoy my academic writing when I’m able to weave creativity into it, and make it seem a bit more flowery and metaphorical than is strictly necessary.

AF: Last question: What is something not a lot of people know about you? 

GN: I was born very late because I tangled my umbilical cord three times around my neck. My birthday is around Thanksgiving, and the doctors all wanted to go home for Thanksgiving, and my grandfather had to threaten to sue them in order to get them to figure out what was going on. Then my mother got a C-section, and they were like, “Oh, we figured out the problem!” It’s a bit morbid, but, you know, I’m here.