My name is Mandar and I am a writer. But my heart still belongs to the skies. While my friends found their professional calling at an early age, I found myself running bare foot with open arms, stretched like wings, in our front garden. The moist grass felt like soft clouds on my naked soles.  I liked to keep my eyes shut, so I ran in circles. Every now and then I’d jump, and then jump again and like the space between the two trapeze, there was nothing in between for those brief moments, just the wind passing through every inch of my body-swiftly, gently. I couldn’t wait to grow up and fly like a muhfugga. Soar the skies and loop the clouds in a string of knots with my Newton defying maneuvers.

 

Growing up confronted me with a lot of choices, and the hardest one was perhaps facing Quadratic Mathematics. Mathematics obviously won the brief, rather one-sided battle, leaving behind an elusive dream and an aviator staring hopelessly at the bright blue sky.

 

I was lost, distraught and in distress as grades fell like paper planes of disappointment. I lashed my feelings out in a love letter I ghost wrote for a friend. Page after page, I bled ink, smearing that textured, rather expensive paper in the black of what was once my passion and it felt good. My feet felt lighter, and my heart became warm again.

 

Between then and now a lot has changed. I’ve gone from being an aspiring aviator, to an avid rockster, to an almost attorney, but the one thing that has remained constant in this journey is writing. I have learned a little bit about everything along the way.  From being a ghostwriter, to earning freelance stints, to actually working for Tribal DDB India, I was not born to write, rather, I fell in love it.