On Learning & Breathing— % &The year was 2016, the month April. I was living on campus at Ashoka University in Sonipat as an entrepreneur-in-residence.
The university had a lavish swimming pool. For the entire month, I kept showing up at the pool every evening, trying little by little to keep afloat, to not sink, to swim, only to run out of breath or have water slither into my nostrils like an eel—wet and irritable.— % &On the 31st day, I didn't try to swim. I had almost given up and I just lay down in the pool—head up, back on the water, my feet on the pool bed, ready to be swallowed by the water for one last time before I quit. But lo! I didn't sink. I trusted the water and it somehow trusted me back. The water cradled my head and no matter what I did, even when I lifted my legs, my torso wouldn't sink. When I realised I could backfloat and won't drown, it unlocked swimming almost instantly for me.
I'd try freestyle or breaststroke and whenever I ran out of breath, I'd flip 180° and start backfloating, completing my laps, unhurried, breathing normally. Slowly, I started completing laps properly without needing flips, as I learnt to breathe while swimming. — % &Observing my breath was quite explicit while learning to swim. It has become subtler while learning instruments. I have been learning sitar for the past five months since I came home. And today for the first time, I could play a complicated sargam my guru taught me without erring. The more I played, the more I realised what was happening. I wasn't holding my breath anymore. My breath was normal for a change, and my fingers moved on their own. My newfound muscle memory had taken over after months of unsuccessfully trying, failing and trying again. The breath seemed intricately linked to the muscle, which on second thought was obvious. I used to hold breath to provide oxygen to those very muscles—tense with all the work—as I played the notes consciously, from the mind, than subconsciously from the body (should I romanticise it by calling it heart?).— % &Like my time spent at pool for one month straight, I have been sitting for two hours with my sitar every midnight—sometimes to put my mom to sleep, sometimes to wake my neighbours up. The result: my breathing has become normal again. In my head, I'm not sitting with a sitar anymore but just sitting. The novelty of a sitar, and the resulting anxiety of a complicated lesson, is gone. Of course, more complicated lessons and more erratic breaths will follow as I advance as a learner, but this understanding provides me with the 180° backflip to complete my laps without giving up, as I did earlier when I lacked the consistency and discipline for riyaz.— % &Here's the simple truth: at the heart of it, learning anything new is a journey of breath—from panic to calm, from stress to rest, from doubt to trust. Much like we train our muscles by familiarising it with the same thing on repeat, we familiarise our breath by trying every new activity over and over again. That this sequence of notes, this underwater exhalation and overwater inhalation, that this new person who's making my heart flutter is going to be a part of my everyday life and the breath needs to chill the fuck out. Breath doesn't say okay right away. It waits. For that trusting surrender, that free fall into the medium with your eyes closed, and most importantly, for your persisting presence with everything that makes your breath race until it doesn't.
It is there, in that modicum of rest after holding one's breath for long, that the fundamental joy of pursuit resides. If you listen closely, you can hear that one last sigh.— % &-
MY APRIL GHAZAL
It is getting a little hot in April.
The year feels distraught in April.
Returning home in a drenched shirt.
Was it summer you just fought in April?
Sit under a fan and take out your pen.
Give this ghazal a good shot this April.
One-third of 2025 gone. Are resolutions
still fresh, or do you smell rot this April?
Enough! Tell one good thing now, Harsh.
Mango season is here, or not in April.-
April Ghazal
It’s getting a little hot in April.
The year feels distraught in April.-
We are the last thing we create.
An IIT graduate mentioning IIT in their bio. An employee highlighting the workplace in their bio. Or in simple terms, one gloating about their past achievement—immediate past or from childhood—often implies one didn't do or create anything worth speaking about after that juncture. That's why, I like people who simply put writer or artist in their bio. Away from all the other kinds of labels to define themselves, they identify as one who writes. By using a word like writer or artist or poet, without adding adjectives like prolific or award-winning to it, one frees oneself from the external validation cycle. It turns one inwards. From being one who was defined by last thing they created, it becomes about creating everyday, every moment.
We are the last thing we create. Unless we keep creating.-
Social media kindness is reacting ❤️ or 🤣 even to the 100th sender of a meme, without revealing you have seen it a thousand times, and thanking them for sharing it with you.
You know it isn't about you or the meme, but them remembering you upon seeing it—
which is so sweet.-
On Generalists— % &Of late, I have been freelancing with a friend's AI startup, besides running Bookmark and YQ. Unlike the latter two, where I don the generalist cap and put my nose everywhere, my role in the friend's startup is that of a specialist.
I help them with writing.
Everything I do—adding humanness to the AI-generated product copies, culling out the whys for manifestos and vision statements and writing soulful and readable LinkedIn posts—could come under the larger umbrella of content strategy, but at the heart of it, it is nothing but writing.
And it absolutely stumps me. I'll tell you why.— % &For the longest time, I have been calling myself a generalist. Many times, apologetically so. I thought I was good at nothing, and would often joke that if you're good at nothing, you are the perfect candidate to be a startup CEO. As a founder CEO, since one has to take care of everything—from product, accounting, legal, finance, operations, growth to hiring, I started believing that one cannot be a specialist in anything. But my freelancing experience has changed how I thought. It took me by surprise as it needed only the specialist side of me, the side that I had forgotten or never realised I possessed. That of a writer.— % &I call myself a writer but I so far believed that writing is something I did only for myself. In reality, now that I think of it, I have been writing everywhere and almost everyday. My text messages are also writings, properly punctuated, replete with full-stops. Most of them contained new ideas, and I am constantly trying to find the right words to express or emote something I have felt or observed. Either to a friend, family or to a fellow worker. If I trudge further, I find every initiative I am involved in is intimately married to writing, be it Cubbon Reads, Pretty Old Cars or Bookmark, or the mother of it all, YourQuote, which was built to help everyone write everyday from the comfort of their mobiles.— % &I never realised I had a specialisation i.e. writing. But when I consult teams, I see myself at an advantage. I see things in their write-ups which they don't. I have access to better words to do justice to what they want to say. It didn't need me to be great at writing, but simply be consistent at it, to find secrets about the craft that others will find only after spending enough time. Secrets that one might not be able to pick from a how-to-write book or a workshop, but by absorbing novels after novels where language takes the center stage and words seep into your memory as if
lullabies sung to you every night.— % &I believe only those people become great generalists who are skilled specialists to start with. A generalist is actually a specialist whose innate leadership didn't let them contain themselves to the role of a specialist. They assumed more responsibilities, out of desire of either serving more, or out of sheer vision of bringing a change to how other people experience what they specialise in.
Case in point, MS Dhoni, a brilliant batter but he chose to push his batting to the background to shape the modern Indian cricket with his captaincy and leadership, and not to forget, his unconventional but highly effective wicketkeeping. The result: a team that was original filled with mavericks, and ultimately, world champions. — % &One needs to know the game one is playing really well to move around all its aspects. It is simply not possible for someone without an inherent specialisation in the domain.
I couldn't have built YourQuote, the platform for writers, if I didn't have the itch to grow beyond just being a writer. I would have kept on writing like most writers do. But I wished to write everyday and that too on mobile, and also wished for the world to do it along with me. It put me out of my comfort zone as a writer, and forced me to reimagine the writing experience on mobile. It turned me into a product leader. Leadership didn't come naturally but out of the sheer need to build something for myself at first which the world could use. And when the world started writing on YourQuote, I had no choice but to listen to them than my own calling for writing. A generalist CEO became my responsibility more than a desire.— % &The specialist writer was pushed to the background, only to be awakened now, as I freelance as a writer after nine more years of running YQ as a generalist CEO, writing there all the while, almost everyday, like a hobby. The only solace—in all these years, I didn't forget that Dhoni continued to enjoy hitting those mighty sixes even though he batted sixth down as the captain. Just like how I enjoy writing every word here.— % &-
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