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After nearly 50 weeks, it’s time for me to close my career break and re-enter the familiar highs and lows of full-time work.

I went into the break imagining long, uninterrupted silence. I expected the solitude. I didn’t expect to miss talking to people as much as I did. For someone who sits slightly on the introverted side of things, it was a surprise to realise how much my mind depends on conversation—on that small spark that jumps between people when the right question is asked. It was also one of the reasons I felt ready to return. I’m in the prime years of my working life, and I want to spend them immersed in collaboration rather than orbiting it from a distance.

During the break, I found myself rethinking the work of a technical writer in a year filled with noise, speculation, and small pockets of clarity. I now think of technical writing as something shaped by humans and machines, each with their own strengths. I had a chance to talk through those early thoughts and write a little about them.

This was also a year of watching the fear and confusion around technical writing and AI. My view remains simple: AI is a tool. Useful when used well, unhelpful when not. I saved time with it, then spent twice as much trying to make it understand what I wanted. Strangely, I was more patient with the machine than with humans. I’m still thinking about what that says. It was a reminder that tools change—but the craft, and the expectations around it, still need human judgment.

Somewhere in all this, I finally learned to relax without guilt—a life skill I wish someone had taught me much earlier. I made space to feel the sting of rejected applications without letting it define me. That discomfort became a quiet tutor, nudging me to reassess what a technical writer really does and what kind of writer I want to be.

I let myself chase ideas without a roadmap. I vibe-coded whenever something caught my attention or when a small itch needed scratching. I built a Readest-to-Readwise highlights importer, a LinkedIn carousel builder that uses Markdown, and a Google Sheets–to–JSON converter to clean up my book library.

I read a lot of books in my yearly pursuit of a hundred, and an unreasonable number of web novels—mostly in the litrpg and xianxia genres. I binge-watched K-dramas and anime, and at 1.7× speed, discovered that Japanese sounds strangely soothing and mellifluous to my ear in a way Korean doesn’t. A highly specific discovery, but a delightful one.

And on some mornings, I took post-breakfast naps, the kind of indulgence that only makes sense when you have nowhere urgent to be. Somehow, the post-lunch siesta never caught on.

All of this taught me to let life unfold without forcing it. It reminded me that being a small fish in a big pond is often the healthiest, happiest place to grow. It quieted that background hum of “What next?” that had shadowed me for months.

Now, as I return to work, I’m stepping in with clearer intent, grounded expectations, and a renewed respect for the simple act of showing up, connecting, and doing the work with others.

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This morning, I wasn’t in the mood to write. Instead, I found myself spelunking through an old external drive, hunting for something specific: some old writings from nearly 25 years ago, little fragments of who I used to be.

And then, a folder titled Arena caught my eye. Teenage-me thought calling it “Games” lacked sufficient gravitas. I opened it, and there it was: my collection of favorite games — Age of Empires.

In a flash, I was back there again. I remembered my first encounter with The Rise of Rome, its demo tucked into an issue of Chip magazine1, the monthly bible for computer geeks like me in the late nineties.

The demo was a hard nut to crack. There was no Save option. Quit, and you had to restart from the beginning. It featured the First Punic War campaign: three missions, Carthage against Rome.

I spent hours wrestling with that campaign in a single stretch. It was then, though I didn’t have the language for it, that I stumbled into a flow state. I didn’t know the term yet, but I knew the feeling.

I can still feel the urgency, the way my pulse quickened as though history itself depended on me.2 The music wasn’t just background; it was the pulse of the game3, the rhythm that carried me forward.4

We all experience flow in different parts of our lives: that intense focus when we’re deep in a piece of work, the way pages turn themselves late at night, or the quiet, almost automatic shifts of gears on a long drive with music and conversation in the background.

Today, decades later, I slipped back into the game and into that same deep focus, where time stretches and the world shrinks to the size of a screen.

When I finally closed the game, I wondered if we can step into flow at will. Could we slip into that blessed state as easily as opening an application? I doubt it. Most days, we live in the noise, catching only glimpses of that quiet current.

So I returned to the distractions of daily life, grateful for a few hours when time disappeared, when I was that boy again trying to save Carthage one more time.

  1. Chip eventually closed shop and morphed into Digit.  ↩

  2. Maybe this is where my love for historical fiction began.  ↩

  3. The sound designers of the game talk about the music of the game at The Life & Times of Video Games podcast episode.  ↩

  4. I still listen to the Age of Empires soundtrack when I need a boost of flow.  ↩

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I closed my laptop, walked a dozen steps, and plopped myself on the bed, when the words “I'm a big, big girl in a small, small world” appeared in my head, complete with a piano soundtrack. I didn’t know the artist, but a quick search led me to the song (earworm::Big Big World by Emilia) on YouTube. What amazes me is that I remembered the exact tune, the lyrics—everything was perfect in my memory.

A twinge of curiosity tugged at the edges of my thoughts. When had I last heard this song? I was confident I hadn’t heard it in the last decade—yet Last.fm told me otherwise: July 3, 2023. Hmm… Months had passed. What caused this song to resurface now, of all the countless tracks I’ve heard since then? And why now? I tried retracing my path through my thoughts. The thread vanished somewhere in the labyrinth of memory, a Theseus without Ariadne to guide me.

An hour later, I still didn’t know why the song sprang to life. I smiled, letting it be what it was: a fleeting, playful proof that thought and memory are never entirely ours to command. Maybe an errant misfiring synapse. Yet a reminder too, of some strange delights hidden in the quiet flicker of memory.

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Last Saturday night, Max and I were watching a movie. It was already a bit past 10:45 when we started the movie. We were shifting between watching on TV or the laptop. We snuggled up on his bed with pillows piled up, snugly ensconced in blankets and began watching.

As the movie played on, we talked about scenes, characters, and dialogues. I pointed out the lore and he asked questions or asked to rewind to watch a missed scene or two.

About midway through the movie, I noticed his breathing pattern had changed — deepened. He had fallen asleep. I called out his name to verify that he was fast asleep. I slowly extricated myself from the intertwined blankets and proceeded to arrange the bedding around him when he woke up.

He wanted to continue the movie which I refused as he was sleepy and groggy. I told him we could watch the rest of the movie later. As I was tucking him in, he said, "Sorry pa" and "Good night," and fell asleep.

As I returned to my bed, his words were still on my mind, 'Sorry pa'. And it took a long time for me to fall asleep as I kept on thinking about it.

Was he sad because he fell asleep or was he sorry that we couldn't have the father-son bonding time?

Countless other thoughts kept circulating in my mind. I ran through all of our interactions throughout the day — words of praise (He had yet again got 97% in his music theory), words of frustration (at each other), words of advice, words about word origins (we had a discussion on why science usually uses precise terminologies to mean something) — and words unsaid.

The next day at church, we're sitting together and I asked him why he said sorry the previous night. He was embarrassed and said it was something he doesn't remember saying. As he turned away after complaining about his too-tight shirt, I remembered a poem by Wordsworth about fathers and sons: "O dearest, dearest boy! my heart / For better lore would seldom yearn, / Could I but teach the hundredth part / Of what from thee I learn."

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A couple of days back, I was reading a story where a high school teacher asks her students to write an essay on the opening line of Moby-Dick: 'Call me Ishmael'. Not on Melville's style, not on the voyage or the whale, but on the name itself. Why Ishmael? Why not Bob, or John, or any of the thousands of other names that could have stood in that place?

The next day, I remembered the phrase 'stranger in a strange land', and it pulled me straight into Heinlein's novel of the same name, with its protagonist Valentine Michael Smith. Smith, the plainest of surnames, is a mask of anonymity attached to a figure who was anything but ordinary.

Together, the two encounters left me turning over the question of how much weight a name can carry. A name is never neutral. Ishmael suggests exile, wandering, survival. Smith is just Smith, which is almost the point. Names can be riddles, or half-hidden prophecies, or sometimes just a joke slipped in by the author when you're not looking. Before we know anything of a character's deeds, their name already speaks.

And then I caught myself wondering: what is my own favourite fictional name? I remember listening to Snow Crash during my commutes, grinning every time the narrator announced 'Hiro Protagonist'. The name was so audacious, so perfectly ridiculous, that it made the Chennai traffic around me feel a little less grim. By contrast, when I first encountered Severian in The Book of the New Sun, his name struck me like something unearthed—ancient, weighty, stark. I was reading it whilst my mom lay in the hospital, her sister newly gone, though she never knew. In that silence, Severian's name became more than fiction; it felt like an invocation, heavy with memory and meaning.

Perhaps names are the oldest form of worldbuilding—and the first spell an author casts over us.

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I read Naval Ravikant's post Be Incompressible - Naval's Archive, and I found myself thinking about personal mythology. Not the grand, heroic kind, but that quiet narrative shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us.

Taste, I've come to see, is more than surface preference. It's the visible signature of who we are in the music that stirs us, the books that linger in thought, the ideas we return to. But taste doesn't exist in a vacuum. This signature is shaped by personal mythology, the inner story quietly guiding our choices.

Becoming "incompressible" feels less like a fixed state and more like ongoing practice. A continual aligning of outward expression with inner truth, refining both taste and story toward authenticity. Maybe this practice is our best defense against being replaced by algorithms that can replicate tasks but not the deeper narrative that makes us who we are.

The question becomes: How do I deepen this alignment so that what I create reflects the story I truly want to live?

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Last night as we finished our pre-bed ritual of Wordle, Max said, 'Appa, did you know that you would be called a Xenial? You belong to a generation that grew up without the internet but became its first users. And then there is another group between Millennials and Gen Z called Zillenials.'

"No, I didn't know that," I replied.

As he decided to read a chapter or two on his Kindle before he fell asleep, I made my way to the bed and looked it up. He was right! I can be termed a Xennial (with a double n).

That led me down a path of reminiscence.

The best moments of my childhood coincided with the twilight of a world before the internet; I remember clearly that such a time existed, and it had its own unique benefits.

I thought... Of friends who drifted away from me and ones I drifted away from. Of faded memories of playing football and cricket on streets, dried lakebeds, and unoccupied plots of land. Of places, now changed beyond recognition, once familiar, now strange. The past is indeed a foreign land and its customs bizarre5.

Later, after I've tucked Max in and the house has settled into quiet, I return to Joseph Jebelli's The Brain at Rest. Reading about boredom as a neurological necessity, about how the unstimulated brain actually works harder, creates new connections, solves problems we didn't know we had—I think about those long afternoons of my childhood. The ones that felt endless, oppressive even. Hours spent staring at ceilings, wandering empty lots, waiting for something, anything, to happen. What seemed like emptiness was actually my brain at work. I wonder what Max's brain does in those moments between stimulation, if such moments even exist for him anymore. He hates being bored.

🎶 Background music whilst writing: Music to write Faster & Better (YouTube)

  1. The opening line of L. P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between ↩

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Today would have been her seventy-third birthday. Twelve years now since cancer claimed her—twelve years of birthdays marked by absence rather than presence.

I sit outside the church, the priest’s sermon about vigilance carrying through the open doors—about being ready for the master who may come at any time—and I find myself wondering about the mathematics of grief. How we measure loss not just in what was taken, but in what was never given the chance to be.

She never held any of her grandchildren—never saw their first steps or heard their laughter echo through rooms she would never enter. I sometimes think about how she would have delighted in each of them, told them stories about when we were young, spoiled them with that particular tenderness grandmothers possess. It’s all enshrined in a life that never unfolded, a life I wander through only in my mind.

The distance grows in both directions: we drift from those we’ve lost just as surely as they fade from us.

In those first raw years, I dreamed of her often, as she was before the illness took hold—moving through familiar spaces, speaking in that voice I was desperate not to forget. But the dreams come less frequently now. The details erode: I have to work harder to recall the way she laughed, or the precise inflection she used when saying my name in exasperation.

Maybe this is the cruelest mathematics of time—how it heals by slowly erasing, how it grants us the grace of moving forward by making the past ever more muted. We don’t mean to let them fade. We simply cannot bear the full weight of their absence with the same intensity forever and still manage to live.

I wonder what she would think of who I’ve become. Would she recognize the adult I am now, shaped by a dozen years of decisions she never witnessed? Would she approve of the choices I’ve made?

Sometimes I wish I could slip sideways into that other life—the one where early detection meant everything, where treatments worked, where seventy-three candles illuminate a room filled with her voice and laughter. Where grandchildren climb into her lap.

But wishes are just another form of mathematics, and the numbers never add up the way we want them to.

Instead, I stay here with these memories, the sermon’s words carrying out to where I sit. I think again about the mathematics of grief—how the equation is never solved, only reckoned with over and over.

Love doesn’t require presence to endure. Only the willingness to keep adding to it, year after impossible year.

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Yesterday, I was looking for a topic I knew I’d written about before. But I wasn’t sure if I’d ever published it. So I went searching — through my vault of old drafts, partial posts, abandoned ideas, and half-finished pieces. Organizing that vault has been on my "someday” list for a while now. I keep putting it off.

And then I started reading some of the old drafts. It felt like walking back into a room I used to live in, one I hadn't entered in years. A room that I could navigate with the lights off.

And there it was—the piece I'd been looking for, sitting among all the others I'd abandoned. Which made me wonder: why had I left so many of these unfinished, unpublished?

I’d tell myself I was too busy. That the ideas had gone stale. That I’d moved on. But really, it was a quieter resistance. The kind that doesn’t announce itself but just lingers.

Writing, when it happens in the moment, feels fluid. Like catching a thought before it takes a more concrete shape. Rewriting, though — that’s different. It’s not just editing words. It’s stepping back into the mindset that made them.

That’s when I understood: rewriting isn’t polishing. It’s time travel with consequences.

Reading old writing isn’t just revisiting the words. It’s meeting the person who wrote them. The turns of phrase I thought were clever. The tone I thought struck the right balance. The ideas I believed were solid, maybe even worth sharing.

Sometimes I nod along; sometimes I wince. I catch myself wondering, not “What was I thinking?” — but “Who was I trying to be?”

Rewriting asks for more than a better sentence. It asks what’s changed, not just in how I write, but in what I believe.

Some pieces I revisit and think, “Yeah, I still mean this.” Others… I hesitate. The words are fine, but the person behind them feels distant. And that’s the hard part.

Editing, when it’s honest, isn’t just improving. It’s letting go.

I still don’t love going back. Some drafts feel like fossils. Others feel too close, like they’re still breathing. But I’m learning to treat them with care.

Revisiting those moments isn't just about cleaning them up. It's about listening to who I was, so I can respond with who I am now.

Each one holds a version of me — what I noticed, what I believed, what I thought was worth capturing.

So yes, rewriting is time travel with consequences. And one of them is meeting yourself again...

Banner image is Saint Jerome in His Study by Albrecht Dürer.

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Today, Max asked me to look at his descriptive writing assignment from school. He didn’t really want help. Not really. He just wanted a quick fix. A skim-and-sign-off.

But he chose the wrong parent.

He flopped beside me on the bed, reluctant. I scanned his draft and saw the usual: a decent attempt, a few bright spots, but mostly scaffolding, words and phrases repeating. It read like someone trying to finish a thing, not someone trying to say something. To show something.

I quipped, “Writing’s easy. Rewriting is the hard part. And it always takes more time than we want it to.”

That didn’t go down well.

Luckily, his book had a passage from Jane Eyre. I asked him to read each sentence out loud and then tell me what that sentence was about and how things were described. His reading was flat, each sentence dropped like a stone. I could tell he wasn’t listening to himself.

“What does that sentence say?” I asked. A shrug. “Something about... the unoccupied bedroom?”

IMG_20250728_202710

Later that evening, I kept thinking about it — not just the parenting part, but the writing part. That kind of descriptive writing — the kind that wraps an image around you, the kind that slows you down — feels rarer these days.

Outside of fiction and the occasional well-written essay or newsletter, you don’t find sentences like that often. Even in long-form spaces like newsletters and blogs — places without social media character limits or Instagram's visual priorities — writers seem to default to shorter, punchier sentences. Shorter paragraphs. Shorter sentences. Quick hits. Fast reads. Sometimes that’s good writing. Often, it’s necessary. But something gets lost in the speed and efficiency of it all — the layering, the rhythm, the careful unfolding of an idea or a scene.

Maybe our attention spans are to blame. Or maybe we’ve been trained by character limits, previews, and scroll-friendly design to read in blinks and fragments.

I found myself wondering if I was witnessing the end of something almost medieval — the notion that a sentence could be a dwelling place rather than a thoroughfare, somewhere you might pause and unpack your thoughts like settling into a favorite armchair, letting clauses accumulate and ideas unfold in their own unhurried time, the way this very sentence insists on taking the scenic route while Max's generation has already moved on to the next notification, the next swipe, the next dopamine hit.

Quick, clean, done.