While most of the world was depressed counting the number of corona cases and deaths every day, Sandhya, the college student, had celebrated 2020 writing a blog every day of the year. This was her New Year Resolution on 31 december 2019. Yesterday she wrote, "366 days and 366 posts. I have written so much, so widely- exploring books, thoughts, experiences, food, and much more! The journey of blogging everyday has been a happy spark in the otherwise dull year." She says, "I've been experimenting now with not just book reviews, but other subjects like movies, interesting ideas that bounce around my head"
Sandhya started her blog in April 2010, when she was twelve years old. She wrote 295 posts till 31 December 2019. She has now added an incredible 366 in 2020. It is not just amazing in quantity. Her blogs are inspiring, moving, educative, thought provoking and entertaining.
She is a child prodigy. She had devoured books eagerly like the kids go after ice cream and chocolates. She relishes poetry, novels and non-fiction, besides her own subject of law. She studies law at the National Law Institute, Ahmedabad.
Her reading list includes PG Wodehouse, Charles Dickens, Steinbeck, Ayn Rand, Crichton, Harari, Che Guevara and Einstein. In her own words, " I read fiction and non-fiction, classics and contemporary writing, thrillers, humour, sci-fi, tragedies and comedies, poetry and prose, and quite a few plays. I read new authors, and old ones. I read books on shoes, horses, rabbits, beasts, bandits, and humans; read on businesses and their success, and one even on its failure. I read fantasy on one side, and memoirs on the other. I read the small ones, the medium, and the big, covering the popular ones and the barely known. I read some history, and some chemistry, and a little lit of law, too". She has read over sixty books in 2020 and hopes to cross hundred in 2021.
She started serious reading since when she was five. Eloor library in Chennai was what nurtured her reading. She says, " I remember going there every weekend, and picking up four or five books to read through the week. In fact, that is the library that has literally seen me grow into the reader I am today. From the Beetle series, that had just a big picture and a single small line in a page, to binge reading series like the Famous Five, Amelia Jane, Sleepover Girls, Harry Potter and Hardy boys, to slowly exploring H G Wells, Robert Stevenson, and the children’s classics section that held Heidi, Hans Brinker and Silver Skates, Treasure Island, Little Women and the likes, to obsessing over the racks of Agatha Christie, Perry Mason, Robin Cook and Dan Brown, to graduating into Shaw, Dickens, Tolkien and the likes, as I grew older, the library has given me everything!".
She loves short stories. She says, "Short stories are wonderful. I love them. They can introduce you to a new author, they can turn a day around, they can make you marvel at the clever narrative, and make you fall in love with some of your favourite characters all over again"
She wrote her first novel " Wizile" in 2012, when she was in school. She has written two more novels (Much Of A Muchness and Sir Antiquarian) and another book on football.
Sandhya has a gift of English language with a rich vocabulary. She writes fluently and spontaneously. But what is more interesting is that she has developed strict discipline and focussed mission with which she lets her talents to flourish and soar.
On her record of 366 blogs in 2020, Sandhya reflects, "This year has been all about me writing my way through my thoughts, and anything at all that comes to my mind. Sometimes the thoughts are deep, sometimes just off the surface; sometimes the thoughts are original, sometimes borrowed (with due credit always given); sometimes it's ranting, and sometimes there are solutions. But, 2021 can't roll the same way for me- it's high time I move on and focus more on the content in the coming year. So, writing regularly for a year now has made me realize what I want to focus on writing more about. Of course, the books, the thoughts, the fun rants- they're all here to stay, just that I look forward to regulate them more so that I plan out time to write the stuff that I have been meaning to, more often."
Sandhya is not only a reader and writer but a guru too.. She advises five lessons for aspiring writers :
1. Don't be scared to start
2. Focus one day at a time.
3. Set small landmarks, and celebrate small victories.
4. Roll with it.
5. How you see things around you, changes when you work on yourself.
So what are her plans for 2021? Having succeeded quantitativly exploring many subjects, now she wants to narrow her focus this year to write stories and academic posts. She ' loves writing short, concise, thoughtful academic posts in law, and even on academics itself'. She has asked her readers to give suggestions for reading and writing and welcomes comments on her blogs in the website http://sandhya.varadh.com/
I will go beyond Sandhya’s 2021 plan with the prediction that she has the promise of a literary figure in the future. My favourite author Mario Vargas Llosa has written a manual for aspiring writers in his book " Letters to a young novelist". In this, he says, " a person develops precociously in childhood or teenage a penchant for dreaming up people, situations, anecdotes and worlds different from the world in which she or he lives, questions real life ( raison d'être of literature) and become rebellious. Such inclination is the first sign of a literary vocation. But there is an abyss that the vast majority of human beings never cross between the propensity to retreat from the real life into imagination and the actual practice of literature. Those who do cross and become creator of worlds with the written word are the writers, the minority who have reinforced their penchant with an exertion of the will called as ‘Choice’ by Sartre. I believe that Sandhya has exercised this ‘choice’.
Sandhya is my inspiration for 2021. Happy New Year...
No comments:
Post a Comment