Why I write

 If I’m not curious, then what am I?

I didn’t pick up the pen in primary school thinking I would find myself face to face with this question. This question doesn’t come as a familiar friend nor as a disordered turn on the road, but here I am asking myself and everyone around me yet again.

 

If I’m not curious, then what am I?

 

Pen and paper were given as tools to fight. What was I fighting against, who was the one who gave me these tools and what was I now in this larger game of education, discipline, and churning out of people from one building of ownership to another? A younger me isn’t asking all these questions, but as I come to face this question that warrants an answer but doesn’t hand me over the tools to solve it, I ask in return;

 

If I’m not curious, then what am I?

 

The library period was perhaps better named an idea lab in my head. That’s where I read books. That’s where I read books, sometimes, for other people voluntarily. That’s where I sat down to be with myself or a group of friends, around a table with wobbling leg heights, and discussed our favorites of this week’s borrowed treasures with each other. Shelves of the library had volumes of history, encyclopedias, writers I couldn’t read and understand in one go. But you pick one up anyway, and with that traveling in your school bag with you, a new shelf opens up to you.

 

If I’m not curious, then what am I?

I’m curious, therefore I write.

 

I write to read, to remember, and reflect, I write to say things that my own voice fell short in saying out loud. I write to not get comfortable with my reality, to understand that even my reality is a story written by people I haven’t met. I write to understand my own place in this world and to move forward from there, into where my realities aren’t just an illusion for me to ponder on but a subject of active engagement and thought.

 

I’m curious, therefore I write.

 

The scene has now changed from pens and ruled sheets. It’s laptops, tablets, and phones. The medium has changed and with this change, there is a change in curiosity too. There is a buzz around you, beeps and vibrations, bent necks, burning eyes, and this itch. This strange itch. What is this itch? Some days it’s a buzzed notification of a Whatsapp message I can’t ignore (or so I tell myself), some days it’s the most terrible news, swiped away and under our consciousness just as something I feel bad about. It’s always there, not quite painful enough for ointments or remedies, but making its presence felt most annoyingly. I write to uncover these itches, these wounds that have a habit of being carelessly gauzed over. Remember that this world and its storms are my worlds too.

 

But, imagine this.

How terrifying is it to school a kid into believing that there are these boundaries she’ll never be able to understand or cross, and then bring her into a world of questioning those boundaries and opening out new ways of thinking? I can tell you that for me, the feeling was like being on a ride in the Ferris wheel when you’re right at the top, slightly swinging, waiting to see the sights of flat land again.

Curiosity gave me books in the shelves I wasn’t permitted to read from. Learning how to write again as a discipline taught me that there are no shelves, to begin with. It was all for the hands to reach and for my mind to be able to take apart and place it into my own world.

Curiosity gives me the wings to fly and let my mind wander with this freedom that thinking for myself allows me. Writing shows me what to do with that freedom, and if at all I’m ever truly free from the clutches of my own biases, my own problems, and my own mistakes.

Writing gave me the tools to read more, read better, and be even more curious.

 

Since I mention reading, I can’t ask myself this question of “why do I write” without talking about a few milestone books and texts that showed me the fruits of labor that I too was engaged in.

In one of the earlier semesters during my Master's, we read parts of a book called ‘Latitudes of Longing’ by Shubhangi Swarup and this semester, some of us read ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’ in an elective course. I won’t go in too much detail about what these two texts say but to sum up the experience of reading both of them, I can say that these two effectively decentralize concepts in the most lucid manner which the reader can absorb without feeling like they’ve lost track of the main idea of the text itself. The former is a fictional novel and the latter is a non-fictional essay. Both of them correlate to the question of why do we write.

 Writing has allowed me to find comfort in criticality, to be okay with a difference that may be wholly foreign to me, and it has given me the strength to go beyond my own bubble of limited knowledge. It’s armed me with weapons needed to reason, think and understand better and because of that, it has made me a better kind of curious.

 

Why do I write?

I write to always stay curious.