On Writing 
			    
If you asked my old self that would he adopt the hobby of writing in the
pursuit to overcome his inner fears, he would have blatantly denied it. In the
past, I have never written outside my academic life and honestly, never planned
to either. I mildly resented the idea of writing, and the fact that something
as simple as words would help me tame my demons would have seemed absolutely
ludicrous to my past self. I viewed words and the whole idea of writing to be
nothing more than a way of communicating facts and opinions. Although most of
the school faculty encouraged me to adopt a reading habit, I never quite
listened to them because the very act of sitting in one place on hours end to
read someone else’s thoughts and fantasies sounded unbelievably exhaustive. My
school had a reading period where we were taken to the library for a whole 60
minutes of reading books. The library mostly comprised of fiction and
nonfiction stories and were completely destitute of the genres that I could at
least tolerate for 60 minutes. Nonetheless, I would pick a book and put an
honest effort into reading at least 20 pages of it but my lack of curiosity
prevented me from doing so. Although I would essentially read the words,
I could never comprehend them due to my lack of interest. I kept going back to
the same paragraphs and finally would somehow manage to read 10 pages expending
a large amount of energy in 40 minutes. The rest of the time me and my friend
used to talk about world politics and conspiracy theories which was genuinely
curious and enjoyable. The rest of my school life was just as mundane as those
40 minutes with intermittent bits and pieces that could be defined as somewhat
interesting. I academically excelled in most of the classes with occasional bad
performances. I was docile and submissive and never transgressed the golden
rules instituted by the administration although I secretly despised them. By
the time I was on my 9th grade, I was completely deprived of curiosity and only
did things the teachers wanted me to do. The questions I asked during class
time decreased substantially due to the faculty’s insistence to follow the
curriculum and finish it in time to prepare for the all prevailing board exams.
I performed very well in my mock tests and subsequently in my board exams too,
but not very well in English ironically, with which my school life came to an
end.

The discovery of my fondness for writing ,which was preceded by an increase in
toleration for books, was not so long after I quit conventional schooling.
I have always despised the traditional education system and finally made the
decision to learn on my own. It was terrifying in the beginning because it
entailed a huge amount of responsibility and the fact that I decided to
separate from the herd ensued a feeling of isolation. But as time went by, with
the help of the internet I began to satiate my ever expanding curiosity.
I started to read about math which consequently lead to the application of
complexity science in economics. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s antifragile was the
first book that I perused in the means of understanding the fallacies in
conventional economics. Taleb’s approach on uncertainty and his advocacy to
embrace randomness rather than endeavouring to minimize it was intellectually
stimulating. His particular style to explain concepts using philosophical
analogies lead me read the works of a prominent philosopher named David Hume.
With beginning to understand the basic axiomatic framework of math, I found
myself reading books from various disciplines ranging from economics to
psychology in the means to thoroughly understand the works of my previous
authors. Learning transformed from a chore in the pursuit of earning a living
to a joy that I gained each time I knew I got closer to understanding the
world. And like that, I adopted the hobby of reading with which followed the
act of articulating the elusive parts of my mind.

I was overwhelmed by a sense of reluctance when it came to formulating my
ideological perspectives. I have always thought that I was under qualified to
even have opinions about certain complex matters let alone put them into words.
The fact that I was aware of all the things that I haven’t read constantly kept
me at bay from writing because it implied that I lacked sufficient rigor to
talk about sophisticated matters. But with given time, I managed to foster the
courage to articulate my peculiar insights and subsequently revealed them to
a select few that I could trust. Not all of them agreed with my propositions
because it required a complete revision of their fundamental preconceptions but
nonetheless, they were convinced enough that I made a reasonable argument in
propounding my opinions and furthermore encouraged me to keep writing. The fact
that I lacked sufficient knowledge in certain areas to write about caused me to
read even more books and the knowledge I derived from them kept me in
a perpetual loop of writing and reading. My ideas about the world substantially
increased and I finally understood that I have been distracted by mere
semblances all my life. That things were much more than what they appeared to
be. In retrospect, writing is perhaps one of the greatest discoveries that
I have ever made about myself.