I wrote my first little something when I was 9 or 10, a 4th std student (I think?) at Air Force School, Jamnagar. It was a story about a ship heading to Australia that runs aground in Africa. The geographical issues with the plot aside, it got me a visit from my class teacher who was convinced I had copied it from somewhere. I had not, I had written it myself, fuelled by the reams and reams of adventure novels I devoured during summer holidays in Pondicherry. The culprit was a lending library close to my grandfather’s house.
The first book I remember owning, and rereading compulsively, was an abridged version of RL Stevenson’s Treasure Island (the connection between this book and my first attempt at writing is pretty straightforward). I loved it, and I read it so many times I could quote Long John Silver (and Captain Flint) from memory. Also, quite evidently, my parents had no time to supervise what I was reading. Between service lives, annual holidays, managing their jobs, and two kids, they had their hands full. Plus, my Dad was, in a very Tamil way, a literary man, and had no qualms in letting me read anything I wanted. So I did. He got me comics to start off with, but thanks to the library I now had access to, I graduated pretty swiftly to American genre writers, mostly action and thrillers (my favourites were Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, but I was also partial to Robin Cook). My only regret is that for some reason I didn’t get to Stephen King.
Somewhere down this road, as we moved back down south for good, I started to become articulate on the page. But because of the education system we have that is so science-oriented, no one noticed this. Well, except a few of my friends who understood that my English, in terms of grammar, was almost perfect. I did not know a single rule, but could tell if a sentence was correct or not at one glance. This meant that instead of looking at a dictionary, my friends would just ask me what the meaning of a particular word was, or whether something was reading right or not. This was the only superpower I had in an overachieving boys school.
But of course, this did not mean that I could write well. It just meant that I could write correctly. And I simply wasn’t writing enough to know how good I was. I wasn’t even thinking about it. That changed around 2007, when I was about 19, when I started a cricket blog on Wordpress, and started writing regularly. I have always been a passionate cricket fan, and it was the only thing I was interested in at that time (I definitely wasn’t interested in my engineering degree). Friends encouraged me enough to keep writing, people actually read and commented. It was at that time when I first realised I was good. The English cricket journalist George Dobell, then at Cricinfo, sent me a note appreciating the blog, and I understood that I had some talent.
As things happen, life fast-forwarded, and I found myself in business school, age 21, where too I kept writing, and used that one skill I had as a way to grow up. It became my way of thinking about myself, the world, and everything around me, a technique I still employ. My professors encouraged me, told me that there was potential in my writing. And it was the blog I kept then that gave me my first break at a startup called Freshworks. I was around 24 then, and it was then that I started harbouring real, tangible dreams of becoming a writer.
I acted on that dream a couple of years later. I told Girish, my boss, that I wanted to write a book about my hometown, and that I needed to quit to do that. He was gracious, as usual, and bid me good luck. I spent a year and a bit motorcycling around Pondicherry, writing in the French library, having coffee at KBS, and drinking beer at whatever shady bar I could find. In the end I had 40,000 words to show for my effort. But I'd ran out of money, and though I hate to say it, patience as well.
Writing and publishing books take more time than you think, and I didn’t even have a publisher, I was just going for it. I was disappointed, but had to move on.
I came back to work, and had a couple of wonderful years. This was the time that set my career up, so I really couldn’t complain. But the dream tugged at me, as did the words I had written and not touched for a while. When you nurture a dream that long, and put a bit of your life on the line to make something of it, it hurts to ignore it, wantonly or not.
But I don’t come from money, and nor could I ignore the responsibilities that arrive as you grow older. So I kept that feeling to the side, and continued working. I kept reading though, as a reader always does, and all of those books fuelled me, kept a bit of that hunger alive.
Which meant that I couldn’t completely keep away from writing. During the pandemic, I started writing a marketing newsletter, a result of my inability to keep away from putting words on a page. I had been keeping a personal blog on and off as well, the final avatar of which is this space you are reading now, but it was the marketing writing that gave me rigour and routine. It hit a chord, and the readership and feedback have kept me going. For 6 years now.
Two years ago, the newsletter attracted the attention of my now-editor at Westland. And that conversation, and two and a half years of writing and editing led to my book, which released this week: Super Cool Startup. It has taken me 14 years to go from quitting my job to write, to actually having my name on a book.
I will tell the story of the book itself in the newsletter, but here, in this more personal space, I wanted to take a second to reflect on how much it takes for a dream to come together. In the beginning: the encouragement, the support, the belief, and then: the courage, the effort, the persistence, and finally: the circumstances, the resilience, and finally, luck. As John Collison of Stripe once tweeted: "..only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. The world is a museum of passion projects."
As a much younger man, I had the idea of wanting to be a writer. It took me way more time than I thought it would, and at many points along the way, I thought it would never happen, that I would never be able to write anything worthwhile, that the dream I had harboured all my life would remain just that, a dream.
But no, here’s my first book, and here I am.