I was a visual artist, before I was a condensed matter physicist, before I became an oral historian and community archivist. Today I work to document oral histories from the largest mass displacement in recorded human history: the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. I work with my team to continuously innovate and evolve new techniques for crowdsourcing and archiving crowdsourced oral histories of Partition.I am one of millions whose family legacy was shaped by Partition. To help us unravel this great tragedy of the last century, so that as a global civilization we may move forward on a more informed footing, I have helped build a platform for documenting individual witness oral histories to discover the nuanced bigger picture of Partition. The platform is called The 1947 Partition Archive. I believe the end goal for a thriving human civilization is to live compassionately. Only through an honest and critical understanding our past can we strive to make sound decisions in the future.Before working on Partition, I completed a postdoctoral fellowship as a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I absolutely loved my work (discovering nature is infectious and exhilarating), but because unsolved problems in physics were always going to be there, while Partition witnesses were aging and wouldn't be with us for long, I decided to give up my career to focus on documenting and immortalizing witness voices.Before any of this, I was a visual artist and somehow managed to win numerous awards by the time I graduated high school. To me, pursuing mathematics and physics are extensions of art... another form of creative expression. I feel the same about my work now, as an oral historian, community archivist and curator of digital public histories.