Part 1
How often can you change your profession?
Though “inspirational” posts on LinkedIn will tell you otherwise, adding a hyphen and another skillset to your professional repertoire is painful.
TL;DR: I was a coder, a journalist, a coder-journalist, and now a content marketer.
If I hear just one more time the statement, “Oh, journalism is also writing, content marketing is also writing, close enough,” I’m seriously going to lose it. It’s not. But before we get to that, let me tell you my story.
Real-life ain’t Marvel, so as origin stories go, mine is bland in comparison. Aarambikkalangala?
It’s 2003-04, and I’ve just realised I can write stuff. What an exciting time, when you find that you have a spark, and you can get a fire burning. I tried to get into the official school magazine’s editorial board but was denied entry.
I’ll create my own magazine then, I decided. And so it began. I had my own original poems or short stories, a few puzzles, and classroom humour thrown in.
I asked a couple of friends to do the illustrations (Thanks, Naveen aka Chikobeh and Jayanth). I printed one copy and then photocopied how many ever more copies my “pocket money” allowed me.
I don’t know if the magazine was a success in general, but I did get to talk to a lot of people in the process. More than anything, I was just happy because this was something new and unique, and my peers would always remember me as “that guy who created a magazine” (never mind how bad it was).
For a guy who really liked writing, you’d expect me to have delved into commerce, just finished my 12th, and gone into English Literature or Journalism.
Turning point 1: Taking “science group” in CBSE when your interests are clearly oriented towards something non-sciencey.
I really loved computer science as a subject and chose “science group” just so that I could do more computer science. I should have considered:
Maths: It was going to align my life in the wrong angles.
Physics: Currents that would shock me.
Chemistry: Formula for failure.
(To be continued)
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