I’ve written nearly every night for over twenty years.

In all that time I published exactly one novel. It did better than I had any right to expect — a few awards, and strangers writing to me about it, which is still the closest thing to magic I’ve come across as an adult. Then, as far as anyone could tell, I went quiet.

I didn’t go quiet. I just stopped showing anyone.

When I was thirteen, I noticed something that has bothered me ever since: most things around us are built from the maker’s understanding, not the user’s. History textbooks are written to cover what must be told — never mind how a fifteen-year-old actually receives any of it. Houses get designed by people who will never cook in that kitchen. I remember deciding, with all the seriousness a thirteen-year-old can muster, that I’d work the other way around. If I ever wrote books, I’d write them the way a reader needs them, not the way a writer wants to sound.

Mathematics, of all things, later gave me a method for this. At IIT I learned that some problems can’t be solved in the space where they live. You move them to another space, solve them there, and carry the answer back. That one idea pushed me, unexpectedly, toward psychology and philosophy — I went hunting for books that were deep enough to matter but simple enough to actually hold in the mind. I couldn’t find them. And that search hardened into a rule I’ve followed ever since: I only write where I find a gap. A subject no good book has served. A story nobody told the way it deserved. When a good book already exists, I leave the topic alone, gladly — somebody bridged that gap, and the respectful thing is to cross their bridge, not build a second one next to it.

So that’s what the nights were. After the day’s work ended and the house went quiet, I wrote into the gaps, in English and in Hindi. The pages went into drawers. The drawers turned into shelves. Somewhere along the way, without my quite noticing, the shelves became the largest thing I’ve ever built. Also the least visible.

Here’s the trouble, though. A story unread is a coin unspent. It keeps its value, technically. But value was never the point of money, exchange is.

So this is me correcting course. Every two weeks I’ll file a paper here: an essay or a story, on work, on the machines we’re learning to live with, on the India I carry, on psychology, philosophy, movies, and above everything storytelling - why stories work on us, and what they cost. The books will come in their own time, done properly. This is just where the drawer starts to open.

If you’ve ever kept your best work hidden, and more of you have than will admit it, you already know why I wrote this.

The next paper arrives in two weeks.

— Pawan