Writing

 I am planning to write something everyday. That's a difficult job when there is so much stuff to take care of. But, writing is important. It is difficult to write something that is catches a reader's attention. My first year in the US, we had some friends over at our house and one of them forgot their first three books of Harry Potter at my home. The next day me and my roommate were going to the library to study.  I was waiting near the door for my friend when he was collecting his stuff. As I had nothing better to do (there were no smartphones at that time), I picked up the 1st Harry Potter book. I had barely read a paragraph and I was hooked. There was no stopping then. I ended up reading the first six books and eagerly waited for the last one to be released. That's the power of writing. I have always felt that one important thing that kids should learn early is how to read. If one has the ability to read and comprehend, then they have to power to get back in their studies if they are behind. But, I now feel that along with a good ability to read, one should develop the ability to write coherent essays early in their childhood and should continue to write. That's a great skill. A typical research proposal is 15 pages long, but it is so difficult to write. A reason is that to write the research ideas that you are still cultivating, you need to understand what has already been done. That requires a whole lot of reading before you start writing. Once you have the ideas in mind, you put them on paper - something interesting happens then. The mere act of writing the research approach that you have in mind allows you to scrutinize the idea. Something that appears clear in mind often comes out muddy when written. It is something like introspection. We do not introspect for most hours of the day, but we almost always have some thoughts in our mind. So, most of our thoughts are never scrutinized. And so one never evaluates the subconscious emotions behind those thoughts. Nor one evaluates the biases hidden in these thoughts. If we write all our thoughts, we are making them more concrete, and revisiting them slowly. That's when the thoughts get evaluated. A friend of mine is a painter. He asked me, "do you know how many paintings did Picasso paint?". "No idea". He gave me some numbers to work on - suppose one paints X paintings per week, then how many paintings will the person paint? What he was telling me was that Picasso was Picasso because he had painted some insane number of paintings in his life. Some became masterpieces. But, you do not start by painting masterpieces. You paint and paint, like a running train. You get better and better at it. Your paintings become deeper and more elaborate. There is no act of humans that does not require persistent work.