Category: Updates

An older video capturing the time my novel The Forever Dilemma crossed thirty thousand words.

We are a product of circumstance, choice, and chance.

In this introductory post I reflect on how these forces of my production, have led me to a starting this blog.

The simple explanation is that I have started this blog to promote an upcoming science fiction novel. More about the novel later. More interesting than the simple explanation, is the story of the journey that got me to this point in life.

First, the CIRCUMSTANCES. Loneliness was a constant presence in my early life, largely because I was both an only child, and a third culture kid. Third culture life is not terrible by itself, and could be great with the right mindset. Preferring isolation to integration and predominantly befriending other expatriates is not the right mindset. It is a means to make an enemy of geography, and make a casualty of social satisfaction – especially as a child, whose mobility is limited. It also did not help that I was usually two or three years younger than my class average (I eventually finished my engineering degree at nineteen).

Our life conditions are only as interesting as the journeys they shape in our lives. This is where other circumstances helped – a home with a good number of books lying around, Mum regularly concocting original bedtime stories for me, and English teachers who cheered the creative energy I put into essays and composition. These made for fertile conditions for loneliness to fuel an active imagination.

Then there were CHOICES. As an undergraduate, I did not do much to be proud about, but two activities had a profound impact on my life – writing a poem and arguing with people on the Internet.

The poem I wrote (and rewrote) was based on an ancient Indian epic, The Ramayana. This poem was written over a period of three years, and comprised over seven hundred verses. I wish I could say I was proud of this work, but I’m not. I had written it at a time where I barely knew anything about poetic techniques. My only priorities while writing down the lines of this poem was to somehow create rhyme between two lines, and to somehow progress the poem at one verse a day. The work itself might be of poor quality, but for a procrastinator like me, it remained a comforting symbol of my ability to actually complete a long term project with slow burning persistence, drip-fed with daily discipline.

Many 90s kids would be familiar with Internet forums – the precursors of sites like Reddit. These were the meeting spots and battlegrounds of a fledgling horde of armchair warriors. These were formative days that exposed me to a lot of the political and social thinking that still rattles around in my head. A lot of the opinions I hold may have changed since those days, but those sites will forever remain the primordial soup from which many of my early adult thoughts emerged. Perhaps it is nostalgia speaking, but unlike the algorithmic echo chambers of modern social media, the forums of the ‘oughties shaped opinions in a more raw and organic way. I remember the feeling of reading through a thread, thinking the points made in one post were sensible, then finding that the very next post made me lean in a different direction. I also spent hours in written debates, honing words that would mould the minds of readers – or so I hoped. 

Anyway, what does this digression about the forums of the 2000s have to do with pushing me to write a novel? It was the spirit of armchair argumentation and activism, along with the pain of conflicts I faced up close in my personal life, that led me to the seeds of my science fiction book.

It was a simple observation: humans rarely changed, but humanity was ever-changing. It struck me that the reason for this was the constant procession of generations that allowed newer ways of thinking to come to the fore. Which raises an obvious question in the mind of a science fiction fan, what happens if people live forever? Will human immortality lead to humanity crystallised in an icy stagnation? And so, the premise of a science fiction book was born. A book I came to call The Forever Dilemma. 

Choices may also be negative – not in the sense of being bad, but in the sense of not choosing to act. Since my early twenties, my career choices were in a conventional career in technology that saw me write code in several languages, add an MBA to my qualifications, and work in many companies including a long stint at Amazon. Over the years, I had pursued creative interests in limited ways, writing a few poems, short stories, and building apps out of my ideas. However, none of them came close to the scope of the Rhyming Ramayana of my teenage years.

Why did I do such poor justice to my interests? Sure I was busy. There was work, there was family, there was our child, then another child, and all the reasons behind the modern middle class poverty of time. Most of all though, was my greatest weakness and shame – an utter lack of self discipline.

And yet, here I am with a completed draft of my novel, gleefully sharing it with people in the industry in an attempt to get it published. How did this come to be? That brings us to the final of the three ‘C’ forces – Chance.

CHANCE does not work in isolation, and can be shaped by our Choices. One such duet of chance and choice proved to be the elegy sung and the end of my conventional career. After seven years working at Amazon, my long simmering dissatisfaction at corporate life boiled over with a sense of finality. This dish was done cooking. So I decided to leave in 2022, and only take on any new roles if they offered the sort of empowerment and scope that I found worthwhile. To my surprise, such a role cropped up in a smaller firm thanks to a mentor I used to work with. I joined this smaller firm in an ‘intrapreneurial’ role. Ultimately, this role only resulted in further disillusionment with salaried work and was a final sign from the universe that I needed to make a hard choice. The universe proved to be impatient though, and made the choice for me, leading to my project and job getting terminated within this company. This welcome push that I received in February 2024 was the chance that let me make the final choice – I was not going back to any corporate role. It was time to take the path less traveled.

Here, my earlier choices had served to make the path more clear. As I had explained a few paragraphs back, I had been struck by thoughts of how immortality could deal a mortal blow to human change and progress. In 2017, I had summoned enough willpower to start writing a novel centered on this theme. The book had spent years wading forward between my busy schedule and undisciplined routines. Just before my career ended for good, The Forever Dilemma had reached a word count of 30,000. Now, freed from work, I decided to quiet the legion of creative ideas singing in my mind, and focus only on writing the book. A year of patchy progress followed, till February of 2025. The book had crawled past the fifty thousand mark, and I was on the verge of my fortieth birthday. In a moment of inspired action, I decided that I was going to turn on the afterburners, and get to a complete draft of my novel before I turned forty.

Some of the most productive weeks of my life followed, till I finally sat back and beheld my greatest achievement in two decades. 

Circumstance, Choice, and Chance had brought me the manuscript of my first novel, my long awaited answer to the call to write.