It takes chutzpah to proclaim that you’re a writer. To pretend that you are qualified to lay claim to a few minutes or hours of another person’s time. And yet, here I am, claiming to be a writer. I’m astonished. But, I have my reasons for it.
I’ve always loved to read. I suppose when you do a lot of something, it can go one of two ways: you either love it or hate it. I happened to love reading books. It’s the reason I fell in love with stories, the English language and its words, which led to a love for writing. My parents were very keen that I read. They started on me early, in first grade. At first, they led me to Enid Blyton. Anyone who grew up in India will recognize that doyen of children’s books. By the fifth grade, I had graduated to the Greek tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles and had nearly exhausted my dad’s curated collection of books in our home. Between the sixth and ninth grades, I spent the summer holidays in the British Council Library in Chennai. Say what you will about colonialism, the British built the best libraries. It was a very large airconditioned building (the perfect antidote to Chennai’s searing heat) and had all sorts of incredible treasures. Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, GK Chesterton, and countless other luminaries who told tales that captivated an eleven-year-old boy from a different age. During that period, I read literally every book in the library. I’ve read countless books since but those summers remain to this day the most influential period of my life.
I started writing in my early thirties. At first, I wrote to make sense of the world. Arranging words neatly on a page was my way of dealing with my emotions. I recall when the tragedy of 9/11 struck, the words just came to me. My grief took the form of essays. Why did those people have to die? What causes men to kill other men? I recall writing a series of letters to friends and family. Putting pen to paper lays bare your inadequacies, fears, biases and bigotry. And it rids you of them. Catharsis is often a precursor to transformation.
Later, I began writing just to have some fun. I started a blog named What Ho! around 2007. I was living in Bangalore at the time. I wrote about the absurdity of the human condition, convinced that humor and satire were my only weapons against an incorrigible world. You can find it all at on my website. Being human is profound and divine but is also frequently marked by the absurd and the profane. To my surprise, What Ho! became a hit. At its peak, it had 35,000 subscribers. I stopped What Ho! around 2014, when I returned to the San Francisco Bay Area. It was time to drop the humor act and get more serious.
In 2009, I wrote a novella called 3 Lives, in search of bliss. It starts off with a cab driver (Ray Cordoza) in New York City, who lies dying in an alley shot by a drug crazed passenger. As the rain pelts his face, Ray asks the question every human being has asked since the dawn of time: Why me?
3 Lives was my attempt to convert abstract Eastern philosophy into a tangible story. To make the ideas of ancient savants more accessible. I wrote the book in three weeks during the Christmas break. I had no idea how to tell a story. I wrote up a collection of my thoughts and pretended it was a story. The few publishers who I approached set me straight. They liked the premise but they didn’t think it was a novel. I had much to learn about story telling. Undeterred, I self-published it on Amazon Kindle. To my surprise, it became a hit. Till date, the book has sold over 30,000 copies. There are days I think I understand why this happened. Most days, it’s a mystery. Success is much harder to learn from than failure. It blinds you in ways failure doesn’t. I suspect the most tormented people are the successful ones.
But the words of the experts stuck. I was stung by the criticism. For the last fifteen plus years, I have been teaching myself to write a novel: learning what makes a good story and how to tell it. Here I am, ready to tilt at the windmills yet again.
Reading is a gift my parents gave me. Writing is a gift I gave myself. At most times, I am a jumble of thoughts, ideas and emotions. I have found writing to be a useful way to organize the jumble into something more coherent. If I cannot explain relativistic mechanics in words, then I must not understand it. So, I believe. Not knowing if I understand the things I want to understand terrifies me. Writing has helped me lose this anxiety, even rid me of it.
And there is writing fiction. For some of us, this world we live in isn’t enough. We want to be free of it for at least a while. We seek new worlds. We want to meet new people. This is why we read or listen to music or take in art. To give vent to our imagination, the greatest power in the universe. Greater than even the gods and yet given to us by them. Imagine creating new worlds. Imagine birthing new characters. It’s the closest I will ever come to empathy, to occupying another mind and seeing the world through their eyes.
My appeal to you: Write. Daily or weekly or just occasionally. The words don’t have to be pretty. The ideas can be ill-formed. None of it matters ultimately. What matters is you must go on this journey.
Let’s say you’re wandering through an alley when you hear a haunting melody. It calls out to you. Intrigued, you follow it. You want to find the source of this beauty. Who could it be? You twist through narrow streets, sidestep the potholes, and walk hurriedly anxious to not fall behind. At long last, you find yourself entering this little courtyard. The sun chooses to come out from behind the clouds at that moment. You come face to face with the singer standing right there in the middle of it. It is none other than yourself.
Writing is the song. It is the quest through the narrow alleys. The courtyard. You, my friend, are both the seeker and the sought. What greater adventure can you ask for?
Have a great weekend.
If you’d like to read my novella “3 Lives, in search of bliss,” you can find it on Amazon Kindle here:
Book description
3 Lives, in search of bliss is an inspirational fable of a New York city cab driver who, upon his unfortunate and sudden death, finds himself being offered three chances at redemption and finding happiness. The book is about the 3 lives he leads, the choices he makes in those lives and attainment of eternal wisdom and bliss. After his death, Ray is offered three lives, each designed out of his choices, to find happiness. What starts as a journey towards wealth, health and knowledge turns into a discovery of eternal wisdom and ultimately leads to bliss. Exotic, evocative and haunting, the tale of Ray Cordoza’s three lives will make you ponder the choices that you make in your own life towards the pursuit of happiness.
The book is a celebration of the beauty of this wonderful universe and our lives as human beings. It falls into the genre of spiritual fiction – a format in which a fictional narrative is interlaced with philosophical and spiritual concepts. It could also (easily) be categorized as inspirational, self-help and motivational, depending on the perspective of the reader. 3 Lives is a product of inspired passion which aims to present eastern and western spiritual concepts in a manner that demonstrates the one-ness of everything in this world that we find ourselves in. That we all share the same fears, desires and aspirations. And, that we all have the same questions. That we share, at a fundamentally spiritual level, a deep and abiding desire to find and hold onto happiness.
Whether you’re looking to be inspired or to comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible pain and disappointments that come our way in life, this short novella is bound to leave a deep and lasting impression on you. Happy journeys!
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