Living Diagonally In My Parallel World!

  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...