This feels like a giant step. I am in my living room, filled with the delicious aroma of mutton wafting out of the kitchen from a pressure cooker and the comforting sound of classical music from my TV, hunched over my laptop placed on the coffee table typing out the first words of what seems to me like an impossible project that I probably shouldn’t have taken up.
Growing up, I imagined, as I’d think many would have, my future self in several different scenarios of fame. These daydreams were quite vivid, detailed, and also varied—from something as common as becoming a cricket superstar to obscure fantasies of being an anonymous philanthropist. One of these fantasies seemed quite achievable at the time despite the general discouragement of any big dreams and the perceived practical hurdles to achieving them: being a writer of some repute. I even made some initial efforts towards it by writing a short story (that won an award and got published in the college yearbook) and a few poems (that I cringe about and have conveniently been lost) in Kannada during my teenage years. However, this promising start didn’t get any subsequent push required to turn it into a streak. College was a time for taking in the joys of being unbound by family and religion; the twenties were full of financial anxiety and work-related exhaustion; the thirties brought in improved finances and enhanced confidence, and consequently the pleasures of life afforded by them. The pursuit of literary fame lost its spotlight to the mundane essentials of the adult life and got hidden away in some remote corner of my consciousness.
The urge to write was reawakened recently by a combinations reasons with origins in varied dimensions of my life. Interestingly, the craving for fame seems to have subsided although hasn’t completely vanished. It doesn’t appear to be the primary objective anymore of any supposed literary undertaking I might allow myself to indulge in. Instead, writing now seems like a useful tool in navigating different aspects of my life hereon and also hopefully in realising some of my aspirations.
Some painful events in 2021 forced me to reflect on my past and take a closer, harder look at my behaviour patterns, my motivations, and my own conception of self. The outcome hasn’t been pretty. It turned out that the desirable qualities in me were overestimated and the parts that required serious work were consistently ignored. It’s evident that I am shallower, pettier, more insecure, more selfish, and several other such things more in magnitude than I had thought or I am now willing to admit. I am working on these things. I am aware that some of these qualities, insecurity for instances, may never be completely overcome, but they can be contained with awareness and reflection.
Writing, I believe, could be useful in this attempt. I’d also like to publish, and not just keep them as private journal entries, for two reasons. First, the idea of sharing my views on things as seen from the depths of my depravity anonymously with a bunch of strangers seems easier than dealing with the awkwardness of discussing them honestly with my friends. Second, I still am nursing the ambition of being a writer someday. Having spent all of my adult life away from my hometown, my views on my childhood and the community I come from have changed in a more charitable direction. I hadn’t appreciated my relatively unusual background and my unique perspectives as a consequence until I got to contrast them with the tedious homogeneity of background and culture of most of my peers. So I believe, there is a lot of interesting things I can share in literary mediums, such as short stories and blog posts, which would also serve to satisfy my itch for writing. I am hoping that making a commitment to write here regularly would create the necessary push and help me sharpen my writing skills.
If you are reading this, it’s likely that you would consider this grand plan a result of some unearned confidence of a noob. Let me confirm it for you: it is! But, it also is an undertaking built on the comforting answer to the question, “What have I got to lose?” Even if no one reads my ramblings here, I honestly don’t have much to lose.
I am reasonably satisfied with how this piece explaining the origins of this blog has turned out. If you have got this far, Thank You! I’d appreciate it if you left a word of advice, critique, encouragement, or feedback.
Cosimo's Confessions 