What inspires you to write?
An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory. ~ Franklin P. Jones
Background:
I was born in a North-Indian family that has modern outlooks. With a master’s degree in sociology and literature, my mother was my first gateway in the world of reading and writing. She has always been an avid reader and used to encourage me to read a variety of genres. This was my first baby step into the world of writing, and in no time it became one of my favorite hobbies. Our family used to travel on trains frequently. Mother often talks about the time when I was a small kid and could identify political leaders featured in newspapers.
The co-passengers used to be amazed when I would point out a picture and say ‘Rajiv Gandhi’ or ‘Indira Gandhi’. My mother would laugh and clarify that I could only recognize the pictures and not read.
Time flew by and I was half-way through primary school. It was 1996. The School session was about to end, and everybody in my class was excited about going for summer vacations. Our class teacher, Mrs. George, gave us an interesting homework assignment for the two months vacation. We had to make the maximum number of new words using all the letters of the word “Constantinople”. And I, being the obedient frontbencher, spent almost 6–7 hours everyday thinking and working on this assignment throughout my vacation.
I had a beautiful blue covered Oxford dictionary, and I used to just love smelling the pages every day. For this assignment, I kept flipping/ checking its every page so religiously that its front cover tore out in the process. Eventually, the school reopened, and with a lackadaisical tone, the teacher asked how many of the students tried completing the assignment. It didn’t help me earn any brownie points that I was the one who had made the efforts to finish it. However, on a subconscious level, it planted in me, the seeds of voracious reading. It taught me the first lesson of patiently sitting with a book for long hours and cherishing the process.
The Nineties:
The next step in my journey down the road of reading/writing came when dad asked my sister and me, to start writing down news headlines daily. In the ’90s, there was no cable network.
There was just one national TV channel, which covered all domains right from the news, entertainment, music to sports. Primetime news would start with 30 seconds of top headlines flashing over the screen as the newsreader read them out loud with a strange accentuation of climactic urgency.
Dad would ask us to report on it later (post-dinner). This was essential practice for us as we approached high school since a major part of the classroom methodology was the teacher hurriedly dictating lectures while we struggled to jot them down in our horrible chicken scratch.
The late ’90s were probably when I started realizing my love for reading. A significant part of my day was spent in the school library, which fortunately had a collection of a variety of genres. Till now, I wasn’t a writer but just a reader.
It’s like as they say, speech is silver but silence is golden. In fact, even now, I’m still not as good of a writer as I am a reader — I love consuming knowledge. Reading is something, which teaches you to shut up and listen to the other person: It makes you a good listener; it develops patience; it develops empathy.
Reading books, as they say, is like glimpsing into the minds of those kindred spirits and taking a dip into the fountain of knowledge, passed over to generations over the years. One of my uncles gifted me the book “Tell me why- Encyclopedia Britannica” during the late 90s, which probably was another trigger to my voracious reading appetite. I used to enjoy looking at the pictures and gradually realized how much of a visually driven guy I was, and still, I am.
The Singularity called Internet:
This ecstasy is something I couldn’t get in writing. I don’t even remember when I wrote my first letter. But then came 2002, the year Internet surged in India.
Suddenly everybody you knew was social networking. There were umpteen numbers of chat rooms, and you merely had to log in to make friends with any person sitting in any corner of the world. This was my novice encounter with writing, the “typing-furiously-over-the-keyboard” form of writing. Making friends, starting conversations with the signature “asl” (age/ sex/ location) and sitting there all day chatting with some interesting characters around the world.
Benefits of reading:
It was during this year when my cousin visited our place.
He was working with a big MNC and was considered the “guy who has figured it all out” in our family. He adored me a lot. One day he took me out for dinner, and there he gifted me The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. He said,
“Do this small favor on yourself. Once you start earning, buy at least one book every month. Read it, understand it and see what difference it makes in your life.”
I’ve practiced this ritual consciously till date. However there had been times I’ve faltered and that ‘monthly’ has got changed to ‘quarterly,’ but as long as I’m reading a new book, we’re good.
And what have I attained after all these dog years of reading?
▪ Developed a good habit,
▪ Gained knowledge on varied topics,
▪ Retained a decent collection of life-changing books to refer,
▪ Better vocabulary,
▪ Being empathetic,
▪ Thinking outside the dodecahedron
▪ Made me a better conversationalist (and so much more).
By the time I was in my teens, I was lovestruck like any other guy. I wanted to approach a girl and thought of penning down my feelings by writing a letter.
Perhaps, this was my first piece of serious writing, as the reactions of the person reading my letters mattered.
And she liked it! She was undoubtedly impressed. As they say, language was invented for one reason, boys — to woo women. Words did their magic, and the first time in my life I realized that it’s not always about reading others, it’s not always about listening. Sometimes, if you need something strongly, you need to stand up, make your point and let it hit the right ears. You must WRITE your thoughts to be heard correctly.
Write recklessly, like an old cat with seven lives left.
From here there was no looking back. Every year I purchased one good annual planner and used it to pen down my daily thoughts about series of events that happened; things I learned that day, things that could have been fixed, blunders, achievements, compliments, everything. Till date, I’ve been maintaining this habit. It’s good to go in the retrospective mode once in a while and see how your past helped shape your present. It’s always good to learn from your mistakes and what better way than having it penned down in black and white?
Inspiration from other writers:
I still shuffled between reading and writing, giving both their due respect each time. Came across some fantastic authors like Ernest Hemingway, Robin Cook, Simon Singh, and Jug Suraiya. Each of them with their own style.
Ernest’s direct style (maybe, because of his early newspaper training) made him a master of expressing emotions without the flowery prose of his Victorian novelist predecessors. Robin’s futuristic novelty kept me binged on all of his medical thrillers. Simon’s rational approach due to his cryptography background and Jug’s observational humor and informal style kept me inspired. Their signature panache always made them stand out. It was like, even if their words are read aloud to a well-read blind lady; she’ll just smile and say, “Yes, why not? This has to be him.”
Then came the 2010s, the time to prepare for competitive exams and make serious career decisions.
In India, the education system is pretty screwed up. Either you have to be rich enough to afford anything you chose to study, or you need to have the brains to reach there on merit basis via entrance exams. The latter still isn’t a sure shot entry though, because the former easily makes a way to seep into every possible void of the education system.
For MBA entrance, the two subjects you must master are mathematics and verbal ability. Not to mention that you will necessarily have to write an exciting ‘statement of purpose’ too for every individual university you’re applying to. This period gave me an excellent platform to hone my writing/ reading skills. We used to have this competition of reading maximum words in a minute, and I scored the highest in class at that time (550 words per minute). I learned a lot, and when the results were out, I had managed to score almost full (99.99%) in the verbal ability section of the competitive exam (CAT).
Penning down a book:
But getting admission to a business school was just the beginning. The curriculum had lots of unrealistic deadlines and hectic schedules. Watching TV series was another bug that bit me during this phase. My first shot into this new addiction was the TV series named Californication.
The show follows New Yorker Hank Moody, a troubled novelist who moves to California and suffers from writer’s block. He doesn’t care about critics, write what he feels, people drool over his words and he makes tons of money doing it. He’s a guy that says,
“Look, life is difficult and we’re making choices here, and some of them are the wrong ones. Yet we can’t not make those choices.”
I never thought a weird script like this would impress me, but yes it did, it did in the best possible way.
All this while I was still writing letters to my friends and they could see it in the content. I was improving, no doubt about that. So in the end, it was not because of a book, not because of the way I was brought up, but just because of one silly television series. It may sound funny, but that was when I decided, that this was the right time to pen down a book.
So that brings us to the next chapter of my life. My 2nd attempt at some more serious forms of writing. Yes, that’s how I started a book and AM almost halfway through it. On a personal level, I appreciate observational humor, sarcasm and small details of everything that the major crowd won’t even notice. I have tried to plug in some of these minute but essential observations in my book. Let’s see how it shapes up in the future.
But I must admit the respect I have for writers. I feel writing is not something you can force yourself into. It’s more like love. Either it exists, or it doesn’t. It can strike you in the most unexpected of circumstances and hit you real hard, but you can’t shove yourself into it.
There’s a rule, which says any craving you have, lasts for 20 minutes and if you can outlast that, it’s gone. I guess the same principle applies to writing. One needs to override all those distractions, have monk-like mindfulness and keep scribbling. It amazes me to see what comes as an output when we can pen down all our nasty, dark, serene, funny, weird thoughts without any external interruption.
The Writer’s high:
In fact, I feel we can draw up an analogy between writing and run. I’ve been an avid runner since last two years (thanks to my ex-boss). I observed that whenever I start running, be it on the treadmill or random trails around my place (which is lucky to be surrounded by lavish greenery and rocky hills inviting you for trekking and running early in the morning), after a certain while, say like 40 mins, you hit that high, formally called as the “runner’s high”.
It’s that feeling of euphoria you accomplish when your body releases certain endorphins, and you feel like you should never stop. Similarly, I can coin this term called writer’s high.
And here’s the formula for getting it:
The more often you’re able to successfully pen down your thoughts and finish that great piece you had wanted to, the more often you’ll experience the writer’s high.
Simple, right? I carry a pen and small notepad at times to pen down my thoughts and later produce it on the computer. Although I just use the selective bits that won’t incriminate me.
What Next:
This brings us back to 2015, the year I joined Zoho. It has been a fantastic journey so far.
I was hired as the product marketer for a social media management tool, and then they realized that since this is a product that manages social media why not just let this guy handle social media marketing for Zoho.
Benefits? Well, I would call this a sort of a symbiotic relationship- I can get hands-on experience with the product, and my team receives live feeds on important product bugs too.
So this is what I have been doing so far in the last four months I joined Zoho. Of course, this is also when I realized that writing is often a benchmark of a person’s professional success. One can be a gold medalist in marketing (which I’ve been lucky enough to be) but unless you’re not producing any quality content and writing something worth reading once in a while, you still need to make continual improvements to be a good marketer.
A good marketer must be a good writer, and this is my lesson #1 at Zoho. In the long run, I’m sure it will be an amazing learning experience.
