Why I Write Daily
Before I end this series, I thought I should address a question I get asked often is – why do you write daily? There are two parts to the question – why do I write, and why I write daily.
I write because it helps me think better. I have been writing for as long as I can remember. I had a daily diary in my teens. At the end of each day, I would write about the highlights or lowlights of the day. I continued this habit in IIT. In the US, I wrote occasionally. When I was feeling happy or sad, writing was like sharing with a friend. Especially when I was feeling low. The writing would get it out from my system, free the lonely mind from negative thoughts and let me look ahead. I don’t have too many memories of writings during my early days of entrepreneurship after I returned to India. From around 1999, I started writing on my blog at emergic.org.
I had started then with what I called “Tech Talk” – I would take a topic and cover it in short posts over a week or two. I would also post links to what I had read. Many years later, it come down to just my own post daily. And then, I stopped writing on the blog in 2012. I had started work on the Modi campaign, and decided that I did not want to become a target for something I wrote which could distract from the objective at hand – of ensuring a Lok Sabha majority for the BJP in 2014. I still wrote privately.
As I look back, it was a mistake for me to stop writing publicly for as long as I did – until April 2020. I should have started writing again much earlier. But I did not. I was learning new things so perhaps felt that I did not have fully formed ideas and was wary of writing half-baked thoughts. And so a break of a few months became a hiatus of many years. I did do the series of political and economic writings and videos in 2018. But it wasn’t the discipline of daily writing on my blog.
It took the botched lockdown announced in late March 2020 to get me to re-start. I was angry, and I needed to tell someone! So, just like that, I started writing again. And that discipline of writing daily has continued.
Writing is a way for me to organise my thinking. I have never bothered about who is reading. I write for myself. But I write publicly – as a sort of record of what I am thinking. I have never deleted or retracted any post that I have written. I have changed my views over time on many topics, but I have let the writings stay. Each post has a context – it is at a date and time. I try and be as candid in my writings as is possible. Because if I cannot be honest, then there is no point in blogging.
I write daily because it inculcates a discipline. I like the idea of short posts daily rather a long essay periodically. There is something new to look forward from me each day! And just maybe, this blog can become a utility in the lives of others – a daily habit. That is what it had become for many in the first decade of my writing.
Writing daily is a process of self-discovery. It makes me think how I should express myself. It makes me clarify my own thought process. It makes me little better each day. And I hope that process continues!
