My dadi would tell her friends — slightly exasperated, slightly proud — that my mind was a one-way street. Once something went in, it didn't come out the same way.
She meant it about the way I talked. I would hear something on the radio, or read something in a book, and then repeat it back in a form that was barely recognizable. Not because I was being creative — because I couldn't help it. The idea would pass through me and come out reshaped.
This turned out to be useful, eventually. But I didn't start out as a writer.
Starting weak
My early relationship with language was not promising. In Rajkot, Gujarati was home. Hindi was school. English was something you were tested on.
When I first tried to write in English — really write, not produce sentences for a teacher — what came out was stiff. Formal in the wrong way. The ideas were there but the words weren't carrying them.
I did the only thing that has ever worked for me: I wrote more.
Four or five pieces a week. Short stories, mostly. Some of them were terrible. I showed them to everyone who would read them — friends, teachers, my mother, eventually strangers on early internet forums. I wanted feedback, any feedback, including the feedback that something wasn't working.
The showing-to-strangers part was important. When someone who has nothing to gain from your feelings reads your work, they tell you what's actually there, not what they wish were there.
What improved
A few things shifted when the writing started to work.
The first was rhythm. Good writing has rhythm — a phrase I'd heard and didn't understand until I could feel it in my own sentences. When I read back a paragraph and something felt off, it was usually the rhythm. I started reading my work aloud for this reason.
The second was specificity. Early writing is often too general. It says "the room was crowded" when it should say "three people were squeezed onto a bench that fit two." Specificity is where writing comes alive. It's also where it becomes honest — vague writing can mean anything, which usually means it means nothing.
The third was trust in the reader. I had a habit of over-explaining, of making sure the reader couldn't possibly miss the point. The writing got better when I started trusting the reader to make connections I'd left deliberately unmade.
The Gujarati prize
I won a national writing award in Gujarati that I'm more surprised by than any other recognition I've received. Not because Gujarati is harder (it's my mother tongue), but because the competition was among people for whom Gujarati was not just a language but a culture and a literary tradition that I'd been away from for years.
The piece I submitted was about the gap between the Rajkot I grew up in and the Rajkot I found when I went back as an adult. The geography was the same. The feeling was different. I was trying to write about what it means to belong to a place that no longer quite fits you.
I found out I'd won by a call I almost didn't answer. I remember standing in the kitchen in Bengaluru, holding my phone, genuinely confused.
Why I still do it
Writing is the way I find out what I think. Not the way I record what I think — the way I discover it. The difference is significant.
When I write about product problems, I often arrive at a position I didn't hold before I started writing. The writing forces a clarity that conversation doesn't. In conversation, you can gesture at the idea. In writing, you have to commit.
This is also why I blog, and why I'll keep doing it even when I'm not sure anyone is reading. The value of the writing is mostly in the act of it. The reader — when they exist, when they respond — is a bonus.