Half done

It's a whole different story as to why my insignificant words live on via an ancient medium like Blogger, when there's modern blogger tools like Medium. That's not a very interesting story, though. I've not published here for the better half of a decade, but that's not because there's been a dearth of interesting stories - there's at least 5 from the past 2 years that lie catching dust in my drafts folder.

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After a lot of pointless thought since I last posted here, I'd decided to practice in my writing three often-opposing tenets: catch the reader's attention at the beginning with an intriguing opening, encapsulate the essence of the story in the same opening, and call back to said opening in the conclusion. In short, well-begun is half done. So, what I have in that drafts folder is what I think are at least 5 good openings to a story and no complete stories. C'est la vie, I guess.

As recently as December 2020, I wanted to tell you about the influence of Shah Rukh Khan's movies and the surrounding pop culture on shaping a Delhi kid's values, all aboard the Chaiyya Chaiyya train. In March 2019, I was about to draw parallels between my undergraduate cohort's emergence from adolescence to Sasha Grey's career trajectory - both of which had more jerks than usual. Going further back to August 2015, the winding roads up the eastern end of the Himalayas in North Bengal were generously littered with the Border Roads Organisation's hilarious signs, but I wanted to tell you how the joke was on me, forlornly staring at them while grappling with loneliness on my first job.

If I were being poetic, I'd say something to the effect of "But, as adulthood intervened, those promising openings remained unclosed chapters in a book filled with bluster and promise, but no end-result." However as I've lamented before, I am no poet. In words I'm a lot more comfortable with than I'd like: there were a lot of unmet OKRs w.r.t. my writing output.

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Good writing tends to prosper in virtuous cycles. Remember when all you people featured on the right pane were prolific bloggers? Reading well-written pieces begat further good writing. Even though I've failed every single Goodreads Reading Challenge I've signed up for in the last decade, I've still managed to read some excellent long-form writing that's flourished online. I'm pretty certain that every time each of those openings were written in the wake of reading a great piece on the Guardian Long Read, a recommendation from the brilliant Pocket community or anything by Samanth Subramanian.

Just this morning, in fact, I read a banging oral history of Panjabi MC's Mundian To Bach Ke Rahi. The story opens by exploring the opening of the song - "that infectious ting-titing-titing-titing tune that carves itself into the brain" -  I was immediately engrossed. So, there it was - in the middle of a working day, a 30-year-old boy who hadn't written anything substantial for at least 5 years, frantically trying to remember the URL to his blog, to put down another great opening to a story he had in mind. All he could remember was that it was hosted on Blogger. Why his insignificant words still lived on via that ancient medium was a whole different story...