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'Vivi Atsumi' YouTube Channel: expressions of exploding curiosity
This is a long-overdue update video reflecting on what I’ve been up to over the past five months, including my research curiosities for graduate school. I’ve always been drawn to letter-writing (both in my academic studies and personal life), and I’m especially fascinated by the idea of framing a video essay as a letter to the collective. Letters come from a time before modern technology and were usually meant for just one person. But videos on YouTube, on the other hand, are hyper-modern and open to anyone who happens to click on them.
This video is based on a journal entry I wrote on New Year's Eve. I was thinking about starting this new year on Earth, and the excitement of finding new habitable planets and extraterrestrial life. While I understand that fascination, part of me has internally always felt a bit puzzled by it. As I’ve grown older and as I’ve learned more about history, I’ve become increasingly aware of how profoundly mysterious our own planet already is. Just looking back on Earth's past is a vastly complicated task. The remnants of human history found in old letters, books, and recordings are endlessly compelling to me. They convince me that the sense of wonder we often project outward already exists here. It's woven into the past we live with everyday, close enough to reach.
Our future together is long, and there's a lot to look forward to
Today I decided to shake things up and speak my writing to the camera...It's a bit out of my comfort zone, but also kind of exhilarating to try something new. Here’s a little conversation I’ve been having with myself about global turning points and the development of a global consciousness, mixed with some thoughts on medical doctors and the art of protecting people from emergency all over the world. It was very inspired by Dr. Pria Anand's book The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains as well as Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier's book Competing Visions of World Order Global Moments and Movements, 1880s-1930s. Both of these books have had a profound effect on me. On the one hand, they made me acutely aware of my smallness in the grand scale of things and the vulnerability of the human body. On the other, they ignited this urge to be useful in any way I can , to stand up and say "I'm here" wherever care/presence is needed. Lately, I’ve been thinking about this in light of what doctors are facing globally, especially in Gaza.
The longing for another normal day
I usually try to end my videos with a hopeful resolution, but this one is a little different. It’s not meant to be cynical about how much we can impact the situations around us. Instead, it’s a reflection on how fragile all sentient life is, and how often we realize that fragility way too late. Ever since I can remember, I've been gripped by this desire to keep people and places safe. If I could lay my hand over every endangered being and keep them out of harm's way, I would. If I could turn back time and step in before the damage was done, I would. I’m always aware of the things I can’t reach, and the places I won’t be. That’s the tension I can't stop thinking about.., the craving to do more, to know more, and to protect everything at once, and the painful truth that I can’t.
"The longing for another normal day" is what stays with me. It's the longing for the world to remain intact, especially in its most essential, most vulnerable details.
Writing my last Oxford essays & dreaming of round windows
A video based on some diary entries I wrote while finishing up final essays at Oxford. During these last few weeks of school, I wrote a lot about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and how much of its downfall stemmed from rigid, top-down systems of governance that were unable to adapt to the empire's diverse needs. These ideas converged with recurring dreams of round windows on ships and reflections on the significance of imagination & truth.
Finally back on track at Oxford | breaking out of a rut and finding new inspiration
I feel like expressing deep wonder for a certain book, especially if it’s an academic book, is a very intellectually vulnerable thing to do. Growing up, I was always a bit hesitant to do it because I tried to avoid sounding like a totally unrelatable nerd. But Oxford was one of those places where I felt comfortable doing that all the time, and I’m glad to have a place like YouTube where I can similarly be fully open about that curiosity as well.
Here is a video-essay about my past term at Oxford, mixed with a book review of R.F. Foster's Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923. I really enjoyed this book. It pulled me out of a rut and reminded me how meaningful historical writing can be...and how much I hope to contribute one day.
We'll always find our way back to each other
This piece isn’t about just one friend, but about all the friends who have lifted me up along the way — the ones who believed in me, even when I couldn’t believe in myself. They’ve shaped me more than they probably know, helping me become the person I am today. I know I don’t keep in touch with each of them as much as I wish I did, and even when I do reach out, the words "thank you" never feel like enough. But I take comfort in the thought that, no matter how much time passes, we’ll always find our way back to each other.
my thoughts from oxford
This video is essentially an ode to the tutorial system at Oxford.
Each week I read and wrote a lot, and came to my one-on-one tutorials with loose, unstructured conclusions. I think part of me marveled at the messiness of learning...the beauty of thinking aloud, of letting multiple ideas control a dialogue with an expert in the field.
Maybe the most exciting parts of class were moments when my mind could leap from the British casting tigers as vermin in colonial India to a French Mandate privileging profit over recovery in Syria. What I thought I could connect and articulate seemed to expand without limit. As long as I kept my curiosity about these histories, their truths continued to occupy my thoughts, long after the essay deadlines were over.
Preparing for an expansive year
A video-essay from the beginning of 2025, when I set the New Year's Resolution to keep my eyes wide open and spread myself as thinly as possible. Time to read without limit, look around and up, up, up!!
Quiet thoughts I save for someone far away
This is a video about women in Sudan, Congo, and Gaza—places torn apart by war and famine, far beyond their control.
I often wonder how much we have in common, more than the news could ever really show. Even though we’ve never met, their dreams for safety, education, and a decent life live vividly in my mind. I think about our very different pasts, especially the ones that shaped our lives before we were born. And, in an extension of that shared history, I hope our futures begin to move closer...toward something more peaceful and more equal than ever before.
Gentle Days at Oxford University | studying, meditating & dancing
This is the first video I ever made at Oxford. I look back on it fondly because I think it captures a moment when my thoughts were expanding in new directions. The video starts with a vision from my meditation, but quickly moves into real research I was doing—specifically, my findings in Indian history. I explored Nehru’s ambitious post-independence vision and how entrenched caste hierarchies, corruption, and lack of funding undercut his development plans.
The video’s structure mirrors my belief that writing is like music...moving between inner emotion and broader themes. I try to trace human understanding from the inside out. Here, that means pairing the vastness of a satellite view with the particulars of Indian politics, letting both speak to each other.
My big dreams of supreme inner strength
A video-essay from my summer trip to Italy. This was a very interesting time in my life. I was obsessed with mountains, swimming in lakes, and the idea of ‘supreme inner strength.’ I also watched myself more closely than usual...pausing in the mirror to straighten my back and underlining passages in Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying in my free time. I noticed shaky political situations in the news, like America’s looming debt crisis, and traced them back to my own personal insecurities.
Hiking the Alps for Ten Hours Straight | A Cinematic Journal
I hiked around the Italian Alps and it was amazinggg!! I wrote tons about it in my diary as a way to remember everything that I saw...This cinematic journal is based on those diary entries.
My obsession with the future.
This is perhaps my proudest and most vulnerable video on my channel. I made it at a time when I felt lost about which career to pursue, yet filled with a deepening wonder about the world. The video captures my desperate attempt to be less naive about adulthood, with a nagging inner voice that constantly shouted ‘grow up already!’ even though I barely knew how.
At the same time, I was rereading Robert D. Kaplan’s Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, with its argument that the ocean is a center of competition over maritime routes and resources. I was struck that such global rivalries could endure across the most fluid parts of nature. It felt as though my awareness of the earth and my thoughts about the future were growing together, each feeding the other.
This film was also featured in the Kyoto Historica International Film Festival.
What I read on a two-hour train ride
On the train to New York City, I reread Rana Dasgupta’s Capital: The Eruption of Delhi. It’s a stunningly written portrait of a city in upheaval, where dazzling wealth exists alongside people surviving in barely livable conditions...crammed into makeshift housing and navigating polluted air and broken infrastructure. Dasgupta’s book sparked in me a deep sense of care and curiosity, which I found myself connecting to my own Sanskrit studies.
how to give and heal at the same time
A few ideas about azaleas, forests, global religions, and the delicate art of giving & healing at the same time. I can write for hours after a walk around the Botanical Gardens. The scenery there inspires me immensely!
I just can't look away
A video-essay about making split second friendships in the gym and in New York City. Between skyscrapers and concerts in Central Park, the intimate meets the immense...
It didn't happen overnight
A very short video-essay inspired by my college seminar on Indian history. It explores Delhi, and how the British drained its resources across two world wars. Over time, the impact on Indian farms and markets was devastating: harvests diverted, prices distorted, shortages manufactured. In my free time, I kept returning to the idea of an architecture of ruin...how exploitation could unfold so incrementally, so lethally, until it seemed to extract the very lifeblood of a society.
Don't call it pointless
This video is called "Don't call it pointless," but ironically, I almost called this entire project pointless and scrapped it. I'm glad I persevered and managed to publish :)
The Center of the World is Here
My experimental twist on the traditional book review. I highly recommend Robert D Kaplan's book Monsoon if you are at all interested in the Indian Ocean region.
I still wonder about her.
Some reflections on Bessie, my great-grandmother, with scenes from the English Countryside, Regents Park, and a little Copenhagen.
I'll never get over it
A short film inspired by the nature scenes in Hayao Miyazaki's animated film, "Spirited Away" which was my favorite movie growing up.
college.
A short film about my semester at Wellesley College, which was quite a whirlwind!
Will this last?
A short film about heartbreak, and finding healing through friendship. inspired by a print of marc chagall's painting "the birthday", which hangs in my room
I thought I saw you waving at me | a film-letter
A film-letter about friendship and warmth in winter, inspired by Ursula Le Guin's book "The Left Hand of Darkness" and a chance encounter with a swan.
speechless | a film-letter
A film-letter for you, about my occasional speechlessness.
Photonic Beings - A Short Film
A short film about unconditional love for the individual and collective.
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