The Circle Of Good.

The Circle Of Good.§

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Over the past two years, I’ve contributed to the school’s Olympiads and external examinations more than anyone ever has.

That’s not what I believe. It’s what everyone else believes.

It all started when I didn’t give a single Olympiad in 8th grade. Due to some uncertainty, I wasn’t allowed to participate. I craved them, especially the English Olympiad, one of my favourites and one of the few where skill actually mattered.

Being held back from my favourite Olympiad infuriated me. So, like any rebellious teenager, I tried to sneak into one. Management found out. Their solution: help us conduct the Olympiads. I resented working under supervision and putting in hours of work, but it meant skipping class. And I loved skipping class. I pounced.

The first Olympiad I helped conduct was the IMO, the International Mathematics Olympiad, run by the Science Olympiad Foundation (SOF). It was the biggest one my school took part in, with 120+ people crammed into one hall.

I still don’t know why I was trusted with that. I think it’s because I’d given an unfathomable number of Olympiads in 6th and 7th grade, which apparently made me a “Trusted Adult.”

The main teacher, who handles everything with organisations like Silverzone and SOF, announced that I would be helping and that any questions could go to me, her, or the other teachers.

I wanted to protest that I was not qualified to answer questions. Too late. I was already helping people.

Some of my first questions came from 4th graders, who wanted to know if they had to multiply two numbers or divide them.

That’s when I realised these would be some of the longest hours of my life.

The questions ranged from the simple:

Bhaiya, what is 1+1?

to the harder:

How do you prime factorise 20313.12?

all the way up to:

Prove that if a line is drawn parallel to one side of a triangle to intersect the other two sides in distinct points, the other two sides are divided in the same ratio.

To which I responded with three firm pats on the back.

Those hours were weird. I hated doing other people’s work, but I also kind of loved having authority, getting asked questions, helping kids, and being the guy with the answers.

At the end, the teacher told me:

Vihaan. Thank you so much. This would not have been possible without you. If there is anything I can do for you, please tell me.

In the back of my mind, I wanted a diary. The teachers get them from the organisations, and I’d been eyeing one. But I’d only worked one Olympiad, and asking for a diary after one felt wrong. So I laughed awkwardly and said I didn’t want anything. Secretly, I was itching for that diary.

I could have asked for anything: an expensive pen, a title, some public recognition. But no. I wanted a diary.

Growing up, I’d only ever gotten one good journal, and never again. Even when I asked for a cheap one, I got shut down. Eventually I was handed an old planner from 2007, complete with dates, lines, charts, and a hundred other complications to write around. So yeah, I wanted a diary to fill that void.

Since I’d only helped once, I had no right to ask. To get it, I’d have to stand out. Going above and beyond was the plan.

So I started helping at every Olympiad, anywhere from 20 people to 120.

Somewhere around the tenth one, something changed. I wasn’t there for the easy excuse to skip class anymore, or even for the notebook. I actually started caring. I enjoyed helping the kids. Their smiles were all the reason I needed to keep showing up.

I watched kids I’d helped get an All India Rank of 2, State Ranks of 12, Zonal Ranks of 2, and plenty more. They were happy. I was happy. It felt like backseat driving, but the good kind.

When the year’s Olympiads ended, the teacher gave me a ticket to the school’s Annual Day function without me asking. She announced it in front of the whole class, saying I was getting it for helping with the Olympiads.

I didn’t want that. I didn’t want attention or applause. I just wanted a diary.

So I went to her privately and said:

Is there any chance that I can give this back to you and instead you can give me a diary that the teachers and Olympiad proctors receive from the organisations?

She laughed so hard. Then she told me to keep the ticket, because I’d earned it. And then she said the line that became the highlight of the whole thing:

I’ll get you your diary.

She did. And I put it on my bookshelf and never wrote a single word in it.

That’s when I realised the goal isn’t always the goal. There’s always something bigger or better to chase. And sometimes when you finally get the thing, you find out you didn’t want it as much as you thought.

This year, I’m back and aiming higher. I’m going for something that lasts.

A title.

Vihaan Vaghela → Director of Olympiads and External Examinations of ASIS.

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The diary thing kept bugging me.

I got exactly what I wanted and felt nothing. Not bad, just nothing. It’s been sitting blank on my shelf ever since, judging me quietly. So why did I want it so badly? And why am I now chasing a title I haven’t even earned yet?

Turns out I’m not special here. Psychologists have a name for this: hedonic adaptation. You want something, you get it, and within days your brain resets the baseline and starts shopping for the next thing. The happiness you imagined was a loan, and the interest was the wanting itself. People have noticed this for ages. The Stoics were warning about it two thousand years ago, and they didn’t even have Instagram to make it worse.

But I don’t think the diary was ever really about the diary. I wanted proof. Proof that I’d done enough to deserve something. And the moment someone handed it to me, the proof had been delivered, and there was nothing left to feel. The chase was the whole meal. The diary was just the napkin.

Here’s the funny part, though. While I was busy trying to earn a notebook, I was helping actual humans. Kids who walked into that hall confused and walked out having given it their best. Some of them went on to ranks I can only be happy for. At some point, without telling me, the diary stopped being the reason I was there. Nobody sent a memo. I just looked up one day and the reason had changed.

Which leaves me with a question I can’t shake:

Does an act have to start with good intentions to count as good?

Mine didn’t. I started to skip class. Then I stayed for a diary. Neither of those is exactly noble. If my motives were on trial, I’d want a really good lawyer. But the kids still got help. Their ranks were still real. Their happiness was still real.

Philosophers have been fighting about this for centuries, and they basically split into camps.

Kant would say my early motives don’t count for much. For him, an act only has real moral worth when you do it because it’s right, not because of what you get out of it. By that standard, Diary-Seeking Vihaan was a guy who accidentally did something good while thinking about stationery.

The consequentialists would just shrug. The kids got helped, so who cares why? Outcomes are the whole game.

Honestly, both feel incomplete to me. Kant makes goodness sound like a purity test almost nobody passes. Consequentialism makes me sound like a vending machine: help comes out, and nobody checks what’s going on inside. Neither one describes what actually happened to me.

The person who gets closest is Aristotle. He said we don’t become good by first having perfect virtue and then acting on it. We become good by doing good things, over and over, until they stop being a performance and start being us. You become brave by doing brave things while you’re still scared. You become generous by giving before you feel generous. The habit comes first, and the character follows behind it.

That’s exactly what happened to me. I didn’t start as someone who cared about helping kids. I started as someone who cared about skipping Period 4. But after enough Olympiads, I wasn’t pretending anymore. Somewhere around the tenth one, the fake-it-till-you-make-it part quietly turned into the make-it part. I never noticed the exact moment. That’s the thing about becoming someone. There’s no ceremony. You just wake up and you’re already there.

It reminds me of the Ship of Theseus. If you replace a ship’s planks one at a time until none of the originals are left, is it still the same ship? Now try it with a motive. If my reason for helping on day one was “skip class,” and by day ninety it was “I actually care,” is it the same act? Is it even the same me? I don’t think there’s a clean answer. But I do know the Vihaan who showed up for the tenth Olympiad would be a little embarrassed by the one who showed up for the first.

So I don’t buy that the beginning of a good act is its permanent label. We obsess over where things start and ignore what they turn into. A selfish start doesn’t get erased. I’m not going to pretend it never happened, because it did, and I’ve got the blank diary to prove it. But it doesn’t cancel the good that came after either. Both things are true at once, and I think people are allowed to be that complicated.

And it goes both ways. Helping changes the person doing the helping. I walked in wanting a diary and walked out wanting to come back. If kindness is a transaction, it’s a really weird one, because the giver always leaves with something too, and it’s almost never the thing they came for.

There’s also something I only noticed later: nobody was keeping score. The teacher didn’t hand out points for answering “multiply or divide?” for the fortieth time. The kids didn’t owe me anything. I wasn’t going to be paid back by a nervous fourth grader. Everything I got out of it, I got without anyone planning to give it to me. The caring, the confidence, the weird feeling of being useful, none of it was on the receipt. It just showed up.

Now, am I claiming I changed anyone’s life? No. That would be ridiculous. I’m the guy who responded to a geometry proof with three pats on the back. But for a few hours, I made somebody’s exam a little less scary. Somewhere in that crammed hall, a kid felt like someone was on their side. That matters more than it sounds like it should. When you’re ten and staring at a paper that looks like another language, a person saying “you’ve got this” isn’t small. It’s the whole room.

The thing about doing good is you almost never see where it goes. You help one person, and they might pass it on, or they might forget it by lunch. You don’t get to follow it. Most of what any of us does disappears into other people’s lives, and we never find out what it became. That used to bother me. I wanted receipts. I wanted to know it worked. Now I think the not-knowing is kind of the point. If you could see the payoff, it’d be a trade. Because you can’t, it’s closer to a gift.

And maybe that’s why the circle works. Not because every good deed ripples out into some grand chain of kindness, because honestly, a lot of them probably don’t. But because enough of them might. One kid gets calmed down, does well, and later calms down someone else. Or doesn’t, and it still counted. Either way, it’s out in the world now, doing whatever it does, and I don’t control it. That’s humbling. It’s also kind of nice.

The circle doesn’t need to start with a saint or a philanthropist. Sometimes it starts with a teenager who wants to skip class. Sometimes with a kid who wants a diary. The start can be selfish, accidental, or totally unremarkable. What matters is what it turns into, and who it reaches on the way around.

And you don’t need perfect intentions to begin. Waiting until you’re pure enough to do good is just a polite way of never doing it. If I’d waited until my motives were spotless, I’d have said no to the IMO, never helped a single kid, and been exactly the same person I was in 8th grade, just with more free periods and less to show for them. You can start messy. You can help someone for not-great reasons and end up caring about it anyway. Honestly, most of us probably do.

I’ll be real with you: I still want that title. I’m not going to pretend recognition doesn’t matter to me. I’m ambitious, and I have things I want to achieve. There’s a version of this essay where I act like I’ve outgrown all that and turned into some selfless monk of Olympiads, and that version would be lying. I like the idea of being Director. I like the idea of my name next to it. I’d be fooling both of us if I said otherwise.

But I get something now that I didn’t when I first walked into that hall. The diary was something I wanted to be given. The title is something I want to earn. And if I’m being honest, I’ll probably feel that same flat nothing the day I get it, because that’s how wanting works. What actually kept me coming back was neither of them. It was the students, the teachers, and the work itself.

Maybe that’s the real lesson of the diary sitting blank on my shelf. The things we chase end up on shelves. The things we do end up in people.

I went looking for a diary.

I found a reason to come back.