2CURIOSITY: Gitanjali Rao
“HI, I AM GITANJALI”. I hear a voice coming from the screen, look up and see Gitanjali smiling as she has just joined our video call. She is sitting in her bedroom in Denver, the US, and I am sitting in mine in Italy. This distance somehow makes me nervous: I love seeing people in person, observing their body language, chit‐chatting, and connecting beyond screens, especially for this type of an interview. I smile back, respond, “Hi, I am Gaia” and straight away try to catch some elements from what surrounds her—maybe to make the distance disappear. A poster of old airplanes, a college flag, and a copy of a van Gogh painting. This takes us up to 7 seconds, the fatidic time to gather a first impression of a person—according to a Princeton study—which seems positive: smiling into our screens, the distance feels already gone.
It's Sunday, January 2023, and by the time I join the call, it's already getting dark outside. I have just come home after a long hike—during which I checked several times that I had got the nine‐hour time difference right—combed my hair, changed out of my sports clothes, and sat down for the interview.
“I literally woke up 20 minutes ago”: it's 8:30 AM for Gitanjali and I tell myself that nothing would have gotten my 17‐year‐old self out of bed before 10 AM on a Sunday morning. But she is fully switched on and ready for the day, ...
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