First steps
For some time I have been meaning to blog about something, anything. It seemed like everyone around me was doing it. But there were so many different things swimming in my head, I didn’t know what to pick. I loved to travel, I loved reading about travel to the point of obsession. I liked technology and computing, reading and writing, reading about writing. I was always thinking of ways to challenge myself, to do better than I had ever done before. But most of all I was caught up with finding my place in the world, literally and metaphorically.
About four years ago, I felt this urge to write a novel, a work of fiction. It came to me that perhaps my inability to express all the stuff that was in my head was because I was trying to put a structure around an inherently amorphous thing. And what better way to loosen up and let it all hang out than to create something from the imagination. No rules, let it flow. As long as it is somehow believable.
I finally finished my novel, and just last week self-published it for the Kindle. It’s up on Amazon, and the title is “The Blind Spot”. And so now I feel I have a legitimate excuse now to blog about stuff, explore in wider and deeper ways the many questions that arose as I wrote. Where does one belong in the world, what is the influence of culture, family, religion on one’s life, what happens when you are cut off from your origins, is it possible to outgrow your past and build a new life?
I am a transplant from India to America, and I can’t think of two cultures that are more unlike each other on the surface, yet there are hundreds of thousands of Indians in America who seem to be doing just fine so I wonder if culture is just wiring in the head that can be reworked. Relocation and growing new roots is as traumatic for a human as it is for a plant. Reading books written by other transplants—dislocated, uprooted, seeking a place in the world—is a curiosity and I find that while they may not live in the land of their ancestors, they all have different perspectives on their foreignness in the adopted country, different ways of coping with cultural clashes.
Writers and readers are fascinated by stories, of course, and we are wired to learn by listening to them, or writing them. So I want to explore stories. I am personally drawn to tales of strange lands, people different than me, living novel lives, doing interesting things with their time. I like to hear about people who are multi-dimensional, who defy trends, who make their own path through life. I like to know about people who have dared to define success differently than the usual because that inspires me. I am hoping I can share these kinds of stories, and these kinds of lives in this blog.
So this blog is about exploring the idea of where we are at and where we want to be through stories. We’ll talk about books that dive deep into human emotions, desires, and ways of living, chat about travel, indulge in arm-chair philosophy, mess with amateur psychology and neuroscience, share thoughts about people doing out-of-the box stuff. It’s all about knowing yourself—where you are at—and finding yourself—where you want to be.
