Human biology limits what we can remember from our early days. Most people have a fuzzy recollection of what it was to be a 3 year old but still some episodes are as clear as day. For me one such event was my teacher being shocked as I held a pencil in my left hand. I was bamboozled (it didn’t take much effort) as if I had sinned. So even before I could write, my mere preparation to write was met with an act of apprehension. What was to follow was an odyssey that continued to pile up my animosity towards writing.

First came the efforts to make me ambidextrous, followed by years of being told how bad my writing looks; all this was sprinkled with systemic use of unauthorized force. Naturally, I developed a dislike for written form, it felt like a duty to avoid punishment rather than a form of exchange of ideas. As everything was going south, mathematics and science became my silver lining, probably because logic and truth transcends anthropological squiggles on a surface. Not the primary driver but, somehow my hate towards writing influenced several of my habits and life decisions. Slowly but eventually, the amount of writing that I did declined over the years to the point that I was only “physically” writing on shagun envelopes and signing on official documents. This was partly helped by the digital age where you can go without using a pen and paper for years. In today’s day and age AI has taken up most of the writing and does a much better job than I ever could.

So why this post? why “write” this now that I choose to not write this? Something changed towards the end of 2024; as I was writing applications for business schools, I wondered why there is such an important emphasis on writing, language, story telling in the application process. I have made my peace with an explanation, which you may or maynot like and you are welcome to critique this. The explanation goes that writing is still fundamentally a mode of information exchange, Eureka!! Now, I hear your inner demons shouting, well thats pretty obvious Nimrat. Let me explain the nuances, information exchange can happen on a spectrum of ambiguity. Exchange of logical information bits (just like computers do) is very defined, bounded, structured and efficient. An example on the other end of the spectrum is noisy, unstructured, unbounded, inferred exchange through something like hand or physical gestures, perhaps body language interpretation can be considered as one such medium.

Written communication sits somewhere in the middle of the spectrum where it balances structure, definition, efficiency with a meta of creativity, character, uniqueness; facets which my non creative mind couldn’t comprehend growing up and I now I realize their importance.

Even as I write this piece I am trying to find traces of these elements in the nooks and carnies of my mind. Am I happy with the output? No. Did I stick to the outline that I had thought? No. Do I have a million thoughts fighting each other in my mind? Yes. And that to me is the beauty in it. My writing is raw, natural, personal, insightful, might I even say bad. But all that is me! I didn’t want to show all this but thats what I ended up doing. I am glad that I started writing again and I already feel good about it. This piece shall continue to serve as the marker on my journey. I will evolve so will my writing and you are welcome to read it along. Even if you don’t this is going to live on the internet where it will be consumed by AI and it might turn out that this is the piece that teaches it, what it is like to be human.

— NSB (25 Feb 2026)