How I Began My Journey Into Writing......

I thought of recollecting how I began my journey into writing. I think it was when I was in 5^th or 6^th grade that my father (He used to teach science in the same school) wanted me to participate in story & essay writing competitions. We would get topics for the competition in the morning and my father would write down a story or an essay for me. I had to memorize and recreate this during the competition. I remember winning a second or third prize for all that duplication. That doesn’t pretty much sound like a beginning of the journey, Does it? 

Couple of years later, when I was in high school, I had another encounter with writing. My cousin Anupama and her brother Krishna would spend the summer vacation at our place. This was the time for lot of games, pranks and some reading. The house was filled with “Hardy Boys” & “Nancy Drew” books. One day the three of us decided that we would start writing a novel of our own. So we set off on an adventurous journey of writing a thriller. I kind of mixed many stories from the “Hardy boys” series and wrote a book called – “The secret behind the burning forest”. I rather call it a tribute to the books I have read. I also had my cousins go through the pain of reading it. Well, this still doesn’t sound like an exact beginning, so let’s move a little forward in time.

A few years later, when I was in my final year of engineering (2000-2001), I wrote a novel called – “Walking towards a new dawn?” During those days, I used to walk for at least an hour in the front yard of my house before going to bed. And during one of those nights, I had a thought of writing a story. Ideas don’t originate from nowhere; you got to have some inspiration, some starting point. That for me was a show aired on Discovery channel, in which a lady traveled around the globe and enjoyed the beauty and culture of so many new places that she visited. That’s when my interest in traveling began too. The excitement of traveling around the globe conquered me and I decided to capture this in my story (Because I knew that I could not fulfill this wish of traveling, in the near future).

This story was about a girl who rejects the Indian traditional values and walks away for a better life and goes through many ups and down in her life. The story was planned to be left open ended for the reader to decide, whether what she did was right or wrong. Well again, I never completed this book. But I did have a good friend of mine type the first few chapters of it for me. I still remember getting the soft copy in a floppy disk. If you don't know what that means, you can look up. 

This somewhere was a beginning. But to be precise my habit of writing began somewhere around the time of completion of my engineering. I used to walk to the sea shore almost every evening. And one day, I was feeling sad and lonely; the reason to which I don’t recall. Sitting on a rock by the sea, I framed my first poem. It’s called “Night and Day”. Even though my sister hated that poem for being depressing, I like it the most as it is, my first poem.

Then on, there was nothing to stop me from writing. Soon, I wrote my first short story called “Twilight”. This is about a father-son relationship; how someone can love another person even without complete understanding. I wrote my first “complete” novel last year (2005). It’s called “Miasma”. Soon writing became a need for me rather than a hobby. It worked like a medicine to put away all the unsaid, unspoken, suppressed thoughts. I write less poems these days and enjoy writing short stories and travelogues.

So, that is my story. And the rest, is here to be seen. Someday, I hope I shall publish my work. But for now, I do not see a need. They are mine to cherish.