Living Diagonally In My Parallel World!

The chill of January in Pune was subtle, not the biting cold of Delhi or Shimla, but a gentler coolness that settled over the city like a shawl. The mornings carried a mist that lingered over the Mula-Mutha rivers, and evenings were filled with the scent of roasted corn sold by vendors outside Fergusson College. It was in this season that Professor Raghav Deshmukh, now in his early sixties, walked into the Oncology wing of Rashesh Multispeciality Hospital. His  cream-colored  kurta, slightly frayed at the edges was paired with a woolen Nehru jacket that had seen better days. He had been a philosopher at Pune University, known for his lectures on existentialism and Indian metaphysics, admired for his books that blended the Upanishadic thought with modern dilemmas. But today, he was not a teacher. He was a patient. The MRI results lay on the desk of Dr. Arvind Kulkarni, head of the palliative care unit. Arvind was a man of quiet authority, his salt-and-pepper hair always...

  Anurag Mishra was thirty-two, a software engineer at a mid-sized firm in Baner, Pune. He wore his conservatism like a neatly ironed shirt—buttoned to the top, tucked into beige trousers, and paired with brown shoes that had seen three monsoons. Raised in a very traditional Brahmin household in Banaras, Anurag had inherited a worldview shaped by rituals, restraint, and reverence for hierarchy. His father, a retired Sanskrit professor, still began each day with an hour of pooja and ended it with a sermon on duty.  Aparna Deshmukh, twenty-nine, was everything Anurag wasn’t. She wore her liberalism like a breeze—flowing kurtas with oxidized earrings, a tattoo of a crescent moon on her wrist, and a laugh that didn’t ask for permission. Her parents, both professors at Ferguson College, had raised her on a diet of poetry, protest, and possibility. She believed in love before marriage, in tea over coffee, and in questioning everything—including Anurag’s silences. They had first ...

Writing is not easy. Writing is not difficult either. It is perhaps the single most surreal experience one can undertake. To write, is to wrestle with language, with thoughts, with the invisible weight of expectation. It is to confront oneself in the most vulnerable way possible, because every word on the page is a mirror reflecting not only what we know but also what we fear, we do not know. I write as well, though not as often as I would like. I stall, I hesitate, I delay. I do not put pen to paper when I should. And most of the time, I am simply scared of how it will turn out. This essay explores my point of view of the paradox of writing—the tension between difficulty and ease, fear and liberation—and reflects on why some of us stall while others embrace the craft with courage and are successful. At first glance, writing seems deceptively simple. After all, it is just words strung together, sentences formed and paragraphs built. Anyone who has learned a language can, in theor...