I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.

- Anton Chekhov in a letter to Alexey Suvorin, 1888

The answer to "why" is evident from the title of this page: amusement. I write for my own pleasure, and hence so far have hardly got it published. Hence I haven't been part of any literary circle, formal or informal. Though frequent feedback from close friends, to whom I gift some of these pieces, has given me inputs to continuously improve my writing skills. My first tentative writing in 7th standard was a limerick, arising out of derision. Some feedback that I got then is what I cherish most, since it made me think seriously about writing.

Writing for amusement also does not mean that I write in free style. In a typical old school style, I am pretty fond of formal methods for creating various types of literature, and success of my lone play also has a lot to do with one such formal method adopted. I have also tried to transplant a syntactical style element from Hindi to English in poetry, but don't know how well it has been received!

The motivation to write partly belongs to my family such as grandpa, and training in Sanskrit(mother of most Aryan languages) from early childhood. The other part is due to the fact that I did significant part of schooling in UP board of education, where Hindi was the most gruelling and rigorous subject in the curriculum between 6th and 12th standard. Of course a good collection of random story books/novels/compilations at home, along with my appetite for reading, helped me feel about literature in general. Though I still think of myself as a writer in Hindi primarily, I also started writing in English once I moved to South India. There are pieces that I have written and gifted to my pals at certain occasions, as Hindi would just not go down their throats. What a pity for this national language!

As you may see, I have evolved from writing fancy to writing about reality. As Shakespeare aptly put it,

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

It is a natural evolution path, and the more I learn about social situations, the better writings will hopefully become. My Idol here is the inimitable, legendary Hindi novelist Premchand, whose style has been debated to be realism-evolving-into-idealism by various critics. I also administer a group in his name at popular social networking site, Facebook.

Some of the sites I regularly visit are:

• Bartleby for English Poetry
• Kaavyalaya for Hindi Poetry
• Kavita Kosh for Hindi Poetry

Happy surfing!

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