This is essentially the 11th draft of a mind boggling blog that I’ve been writing for such a long time now. Frankly, this is an improvement. At least I tried to write 11 times! This sounds sad but that’s an achievement for me. 

Do you know who is a lazy ambitious person? As per Instagram these are the most difficult humans one can be, since they think too much and do nothing. I won’t say I am 100% lazy ambitious, but I’m definitely in the top quartile. 

The anxious over-thinking brain is always popping up one topic or the other every now and then but mostly those aren’t the ones that see the end of the day. My article mortality is very high. If the UN had a department for that I would’ve been red flagged on day one.

Nonetheless here I am, writing again. But what really got me into writing blogs? This wasn’t planned. I used to share lames-ass jokes on Facebook during my undergrad (yes I’m a millennial). And those got sufficient traction. Wait wait wait. Before all of this a very important context. Remember the un-cool nerd with weird spectacles, braces, over 90% in his scorecard and 0% confidence? That was me. I was only good at studying and didn’t have braces. I always thought being good in studies and having a social life was only possible in movies. I had apologetic social skills. Hated crowds and people with social skills. Basically extroverts. I never did any textbook cool thing ever. You got the idea right?

So, if you’re someone like I described above how do you cope up? Any guesses? Well I resorted to self-deprecating humour! Oh my God this is such a saviour. Do try it out. You crack jokes on yourself and others like you. It started off as a defence mechanism and now it is a habit. I now insert funny stuff in the wrong places or when I’m awkward. Afterall, man is a creature of habit.

Cut to engineering. I was determined to make the most out of my time there. First step was to stop being studious. And I succeeded. I was fairly laid back, funny and did a few textbook non-nerdy things which made me look normal. All in all, life was better. Facebook was the cool thing at that time. And I used to crack lame ass jokes there and many found them funny. That is where the morale boost came from.

One fateful day during a usual Delhi summer evening, we all were joking around when one of my friends told me that I should write the funny nonsense which we were discussing back then, in my blog. And that idea stayed. That’s how I started writing blogs. And my initial blogs were self-deprecating. Duh!

At this point you would’ve realised that the whole how-Abhishek-started-writing-blogs was such an anti-climax. And you’re right.  Probably this whole me writing stuff was never meant to be for you. This was an experiment which made me feel normal and cool in my own eyes. And you know the best part – my blogs kind of overcompensated for my weird personality in front of my wife much before we started dating. So it is not wrong to say that she liked me through my blogs!

Now coming back to the current reality. The endless train of thoughts stops for a while when I see words on my screen. More so when I don’t have an agenda – like in this article. And who am I kidding, the validation and feedback I receive for my writeups is a huge plus. I am a sucker for feedback and validation and I’m sure I’ve hounded you for one in the past. 

In spite of people liking my writings and me in turn feeling good about it, I am very inconsistent. I’ve written around eight stories of Ghanshyam and that has been my best attempt at creating something by far. Yet, I don’t follow up much with Ghansu baba as much as I should. Even for this article, I lost the steam half way through, yet I am continuing. Just like adulting. 

I initially wrote about my personal incidents and slowly experimented with other topics. Later I wrote in Hindi but finally after 7-8 years, Ghanshyam was born. I’ll admit that when I started writing about him, it was great fun for me and it received the most positive feedback as well. It was my best so far. But then after 4-5 episodes it started to feel like a burden to me. It felt as if I was not being able to give my readers the story they all loved (mind you, my blog has a very less readership. If any blog gets more than 100 views it is a blockbuster for me!) In spite of such malnourished numbers, writing had started to feel like a burden then. And with the void going on around me, the feeling only magnified.

Another incident which had a big impact on me was the fact that a few of my motivators / loyal readers (which I can count on my single hand’s fingers) disappeared. Yes, I knew them outside of my blogs as well, but they just disappeared out of my and my blog’s life. I never thought that this would affect me this much, but it did. Sad.

In between all this, I forgot that I started writing because I thought it would be fun to write. Yes, I still love the validation that I get from the readers who I almost force to read (sorry not sorry, I need my dopamine as well) but I needed to stop making writing a chore. It never should have been like that and all the validation is a bonus which I might or might not get.

I’ve been writing about random things since the last 2 or 3 articles and I’ve repeated a lot of things too. However, I am not going to stop here. Maybe I’ll write more about them, maybe I’ll not, Maybelline (gosh I’m addicted to this joke now!)

I will write only to remind me that writing makes me resonate with RaGa when he says