Bringing Out The Writer In You

Read. Learn. Write. Share.

6 months ago if someone had told me, “I see a writer in you.”, I would have laughed it off, but here I am. I had totally different plans for my life, but 2020 threw us all in a way different ball game. While some people are lamenting about it, I took up a personal challenge. I started writing. Now, what's the challenge in that Adit? Read on to know my story…

Hello, readers and writers of ILLUMINATION, my name is Adit Daftary and I am a final year undergraduate pursuing my majors in Mechanical Engineering at IIT Bombay. Giving you a short background about my life, I was born and brought up in Mumbai (aka Bombay), India. As infamous as Mumbai is for its humongous population density and traffic, this city has a charm to itself.

Speaking more about myself, I would like to take you to my former days in school. As a kid, I have been an overachiever and a highly ambitious person. I loved Math and Science, but there was one subject I hated the most and that was English. I was and yet am more of an outdoor person and I never found reading books interesting. The only novel I ever read with much intrigue was the Harry Potter series and I would thank the films for that. Every English exam, I kept staring at the blank space of my answer sheet that asked me to fill it with a minimum of 100 words (Oh, I would write ten of them now!) Somehow I never managed to score a 5/5 in my essays which led me to believe that I lacked creativity in me, and that language isn’t my forte.

It’s easier to accept things in life than fight it.

And so I did. I became even more repulsive when it came to reading and writing and the apprehension for this language just escalated. I remember writing my last English paper in my high school and the relief was just inexplicable. I had all my other subjects’ final exams remaining, but it felt like it was the end of all. Post that period, every time I sat to write something I had a truckload of questions coming up in my mind.

‘Is this grammatically correct?’ ‘Is my vocabulary fine?’ ‘Will the reader like it?’ ‘What if it doesn’t get appreciated?’ and questions galore. There’s a huge notion which goes around writing and this is what I learned from my experience-

You don’t need to be a reader to be a writer

They say ‘Emotions make us more creative’ and the intensity of the emotion is reflected well enough. I was going through my breakup which is when I started writing for myself. Writing helped me channelize my thoughts and feelings to something more concrete. It helped me question my feelings and eradicate the unnecessary ones. From a naturally repulsive behavior to seeking serendipity in my writing, it was a significant transition, but a subtle one.

As time went by, my apprehensions started wearing away. I knew I could emote and articulate my feelings really well, but I never took that big step until now. So when the lockdown began, I shrugged off my fears and just took it upon me to start writing for myself again, but this time on a social platform. I started off with writing about academia and slowly built the courage to write about my life and my story.

I use writing as a yardstick for my personal growth. I am an extrovert on social media and after having interacted and spoken to so many people, I realized that every single person is itching to tell their own story, but then they have their own inhibitions in doing so. I consider it a personal accomplishment when I can fearlessly write about sensitive topics and my life experiences without worrying much about what society has to think about it. I am a part-time teacher and I like using analogies and here is one:-

Our life is like a chemical reaction. We as humans (reactants) are fundamentally the same, but the catalyst (environment around us) brings out a wide spectrum and different versions of ourselves.

And that’s why I find it essential to be a constant learner in life. So when life threw a lockdown at me, I knew I had to leverage it to my benefit in some way or the other. One thing I try to maintain and achieve every single time I write, is to keep my pieces as lucid as possible. I believe if a reader’s mind has to go and wander for the meaning of a word, it will never be able to focus on the story and that’s where one loses the majority of their audience.

As a writer, I am a strong believer in Quality over Quantity, and by quality, I don’t mean amazing vocabulary and zero errors. Heck, I recently had to Google the difference between the usage of its and it’s. When I write, I wish to provide a platform and a voice for my thoughts and that’s the quality I appreciate. In a chase for quantity, I can’t have my pieces devoid of the main motive I started writing for and so, I just shut my mind and let my heart write for itself.

Here are a few pieces written by me:-

Other than writing I am quite passionate for sports and music. I love traveling and am a certified scuba diver too. Now that I have got my writing going, I really hope to diversify into writing about my trips and underwater experiences in the coming future. The journey so far has been really good and with every blog I publish, a part of my life gets documented. See you in the next part ;)

Special thanks to Dr Mehmet Yildiz for Illumination. Each piece of this publication is awe-inspiring and I am yet to see any pub grow so fast!

~Adit D