Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time–proof that humans can work magic.”

― Carl Sagan

“Why should I read the blog of a teenager?” That’s a good question. You probably shouldn’t. You probably know more than me. In fact, if you don’t know more than me, then you will be much better off if you look at other resources online. The internet has everything you need to know and everything you don’t need to know. I know. Crazy place. Absolutely bonkers.

However, before you leave, let me make my case. I have to learn how to effectively sell myself. So, here is my shot at doing so.

1. I am interested in a very wide variety of topics and find myself drifting from one curriculum to another in efforts of figuring everything out. This wild curiosity keeps me up at night, making flowcharts in the air above my eyes, connecting absurd ideas to one another. This helps me in knowing more about the world and the tiny person like me who exists in it.
2. I have been scolded for waking up in the middle of the night to make frantic notes of my midnight epiphanies. However, as a result of this annoying habit, I have collected a vast collection of notes, memorabilia and incoherent theories. This site is an attempt to record these observations in a more professional manner.
3. I am a voracious reader and my blog might become a gateway drug to some of the most powerful thinkers of human history. This is because I quote them and steal passages from their books rather generously. Consider me to be more of a scribe. My personal ideas or opinions are expressed in my essays as explicit doubts but my beliefs are all borrowed from The Great Thinkers.
4. So, what exactly is this website? It is self-help. Except, the only “self” I am helping is myself because I am young and stupid. If you are also young and stupid, join me.
5. So, just another self-help website? Not exactly. *pauses for dramatic effect* *animated cartoon voice* It’s much more than that! I hope to include brilliant ideas from fields of science, psychology, philosophy, literature, history, politics and even (brace yourselves) mathematics. You can’t find the truth in a single place.
6. I am from New Delhi, India. I may not share the same cultural vocabulary with people from around the world but I have discovered that a common human spirit dictates our whims, imaginations and actions. I hope to reveal that to you with my writings: “Nothing human is foreign to me.”
7. In a world where each of us is alone in our own bedrooms, fighting our solitary battles, I hope to create an online community. Together, we can build a shared vision of our ideals through our collective imagination, storytelling and insights and inspire each other to take effective action.
8. I also write poems. So, there’s that if you are interested. I am constantly trying to develop myself as a writer. I would be grateful if I receive ruthless feedback on what I write. This could be your good deed for the day.
9. I am running out of reasons.
10. It’s free of cost. All in all, this is a pretty sweet deal.

I hope I have effectively guarded my position as a teenage blogger. Writing this blog post made me feel more sure of myself too. I am extremely grateful if you have chosen to further engage with my website. Welcome aboard.

Thank you for reading!

Dikshya Mohapatra.

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

I have often wondered whether the claim about the eternal nature of the human spirit had any legs to stand on. Scientists have stopped trying to search for heaven and anything akin to a God, for in the eyes of those empiricists, what cannot be measured does not exist. As a citizen of the 21st century, I have to nod my head in agreement. However, there is a golden string that one’s eyes could graze upon in the pages of Dante and if you pick it up with your fingers and trace it’s origins, it takes you on a journey through Milton, Shakespeare, Keats, Woolf and all the way to the postmodernist critiques of today, crossing through the border of time and space, transcending the immutable features of mankind and elegantly revealing a theory of the nature of the subjective human experience. How could one look at books and not see the eternal human spirit? The existence of books is so fundamental to the human race that we have decided that history began when human beings started writing. What is writing? It’s putting your hand against a cave wall and painting the sides to make a silhouette of your palm. It’s a mark on the cold hard rock, which screams, “I was here.”

And so, the story of mankind and the story of books are intertwined together by our own admission. We wrote down what we could feel in our hearts but couldn’t quite string together in our own minds. Books made our intangible feelings real. Eventually, it became much more than that. We wrote, not just to validate our feelings, but to write about reality. Johannes Kepler wrote about the delusion of the people in his century who believed the sun goes around the earth by writing the first science fiction. How terrorising his words became that his own mother was tested for witchcraft. There must be something powerful, even destructively so, in our books to elicit such a response. We pay a price for the truthful books we write. But, all the witch hunts are worth the exposition of the truth. And so, with shaking hands and crushing uncertainty, a writer stares at en empty page and decides to fill it with words. We have to get to the truth, More accurately, we have to write our way to it. As a writer, it is akin to inching in a dark tunnel trying to touch a blinding light and hoping it doesn’t char you with it’s heat.

And what about you and me? The readers? In The Great Human Conversation where Freud discusses the sub-personalities in our own mind and Jung talks of the archetypes found in popular fiction, where Einstein radically reconfigures the very structure of reality with his theories and Emily Dickinson gives a brand new vocabulary to explain the paranoia of a modern woman, where do you and I stand in this mass of geniuses? We have, nothing, but these books to join the dinner party. Fitzgerald tells his wild and miserable stories, snatching the dignity of his past lovers each time he opens his mouth. James Baldwin writes on his experience as a queer black man and I am wiser because now I know. I am clinking champagne glasses with old, dead men and women and throwing myself in conversations with these shining, luminescent demigods who have filled my mind with stories, theories and dreams. I have friends, both serious and fun. Charles Bukowski tells me the price for genius is cruelty. And Plath and Woolf, they console me when I am in the trenches all alone. Women, my ancestors, they are all alive in these texts. Their words are still here when they are gone. How can I be lonely when I am surrounded by the wisest, most interesting people who have ever lived? How can anyone dispute that the human soul isn’t eternal?

And what of God? Tell me the purpose of religion and I will elaborate how books fulfill that place for a modern man in a non-dogmatic fashion. If religions tells a man his place in the world and the role he has to play in it, books could easily fulfill the same conditions. When we witness a hero in our fictions or get awestruck by an elegant scientific theory, something grips put minds with an intensity that the mundane occurences of daily life never do. We don’t choose what interests us. Instead, it is the interesting thing that chooses us and holds us in our position. Our eyes become transfixed on the page and we are filled with awe, curiosity and if you are honest enough to admit it, envy. Think of heroes riding into the battlefield. Romeo confessing his love and affection for Juliet as she stands on the terrace. Jesus being crucified on the stake and his last words being “Forgive them, they do not know.” The one who returns to his kingdom after an exile. Brothers, the archetypes of evil and good, fighting for land. Books, with these eternal stories, accurately grasp the fundamental conflicts that exist within our own mind. The fight between evil and good, man and nature, man and man, love and duty, we hear these stories and pick our heroes. We worship these heroes. Think of the reaction to the Marvel comics and how the heroes are put on pedestals and billboards and tell me it isn’t a modern religion.

The magic of books doesn’t end there. After all, we seek to imitate who we worship. And if all the benefits of books weren’t enough to justify it’s position in the world (the continuity of the human history, the tangible memory of the human race, a storehouse of wisdom), the most important function of books is to make gods out of mere mortals like us. Books are the penultimate source of all imagination. Who does your conscience berate you for not becoming? Who defined the ideal that puts all of us to shame? The books we read and the art we witnessed did. We get inspired to become heroes when we read about them. Books, therefore, are our call to adventure, the gentle whisper in the winds: “Hey, Kid.” these books seem to say, “You can be better than you think you can be. Yes, you.”

Pick a book today. Here’s some popular book lists, listed on Brainpickings, by the incomparable Maria Popova:

(https://www.brainpickings.org/tag/notable-reading-lists/)

So, I am back to the source,

with the mother who raised me,

amidst fields of maize.

I find pieces of me scattered

on the byline,

beside the cot where she gently

lulled me to sleep,

and by the fire where we read

the books out loud.

I’ll be safe here,

safe in the motherland,

where I don’t have to be brave

or young or old or glittery.

I’d have to let myself flow

like the river which flows

across my motherland.

I’ll sit and turn to stone

if I lived here forever

and I won’t ever catch on fire

or turn blush-red like blood.

So, I cut out thin strips of myself,

make paper ringlets out of my soul.

I string myself across borders,

and touch all corners of the earth,

until my dear soul snaps in half

and I become homeless after all.

I am back in LA,

but it’s exhausting to unravel.

So, I sit on the dance floor,

illuminated by the mirrorball,

surrounded by wolves,

and curl my body like an infant,

until I can grow a maize field

right here, in my bones.

– Ringlets, by Dikshya.

People, often, shirk away from the act of caring. To care for something is to put your heart out for display, inviting people to trample on it. This holds true whether you show care for a person, or a project, or an idea. So, we learn to live lives in solitude. Even when we are surrounded by people, we keep our best thoughts to ourselves. Of course, one may even go a step further. The perceived fear of public humiliation and personal failure can kill any rose plant which breaks the icy surface of our carefully crafted, rock-solid personas which are built to last in the “real world” to the point where creativity, itself, is considered poison. Follow the rules.

I was thinking about love. I was thinking about how we don’t use that word in our daily life, that much. Indian people are complex, multidimensional who lead rich inner lives but even our movies seem to externalize our feelings as dance sequences. There are no somber conversation about psychology, about broken hearts and broken dreams in daily parlance. Why is it so? Do we run out of love if we utter the word itself? Is practical rationality the only mode of thinking which is intelligent?

Perhaps, quoting the Shakespearean tragedy of Romeo and Juliet won’t help my case here and if we are being honest, I don’t know which side I am defending but this sentence has been running through my mind for the past few days.

“My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite.”

I wonder, if it is only Juliet, a mere teenage girl who has the luxury of having infinite love in her heart. If love is infinite, why do people run out of it? What do we do with our beating hearts when we grow up? Do we store it all away in the back of our minds, give away pieces of it when we are feeling kind, and go through the years, one examination after the other, academic or otherwise?

I turned sixteen last month. I am on the precipice of adulthood and I wonder if I will have a choice to decide the type of character I want to play in the stage that is the world itself or if the truth is more insidious than that. “All the world’s a stage/ And all the men and women merely players” except the Real World isn’t just a stage. It’s a character too, the biggest player of them all.

Who should I let decide my actions? My beating heart or the mammoth that poses itself as Real? There is no reconciliation, thus far, only more questions.

Thin skinned waters, drifting away,

terrible and bad things she says,

and I was on the same boat,

rushing along that great ocean,

playing songs and dancing.

Moonlight breaking my dreamless sleep,

I witnessed a light passing beneath,

the watery surface of paper-like sea,

a single luminescent jellyfish,

and silence became holier than music.

I wanted to break free,

from that rickety wood to dive in.

I entered the realm of beauty extraordinaire,

and came across the bearers of children,

and liberators of slave, in deep discussion,

on the nature of truth.

Their words revealed their hearts deep,

their bodies didn’t cut through my haze,

nor did their garden extravagant,

but consciousness broke through the smokey glaze.

I glanced across the soul of a suffering man,

my eyes were lit with fire anew.

When the moon had vanished into a fog-like morning,

strange voices brought me back to wood,

where laid my best friend, her voice still ringing,

incoherent speech rushing out.

She screams, utters, curses, affirms,

her words, a curtain to a show that wouldn’t perform,

and I stared, quizzed, asking questions that bruise.

She spoke until I broke her tune,

her rhythm and flow, now obstructed from walls

I grew for separating wheat from chaff.

I brought a flaming sword to a mystic’s garage.

I told her of the suffering man,

the hearts which had revealed me information,

of beauty, uncorrupted and light flashing though,

angles cutting at perfect right angles, architecture.

The ocean is a gift, ancestors singing,

their voices ranging from truth to truth.

I told of absolute perfection, and on the brink of death,

the Self which Becomes by giving itself away.

She gazed unashamed, her arms centimetres away,

her eyes looking right past, to a lighthouse,

and drumming along, incoherent music

not meeting my eye.

What strange, stranger, she become,

not grasping freedom laid,

only beneath her heel,

like elixir of life inches from the lips,

and this wooden boat, a jail.

She sung again, a beat I grew to hate,

her hair a blue halo around a moonlike face,

so I grabbed her shoulders and pushed her in the ocean,

holding down her shoulders, her mouth submerged,

and her body below mine,

and when she arose, broken and ashamed,

the look of betrayal on that glorious face.

What misery inflicts she,

when she sings a sad song,

doesn’t know or doesn’t care,

and yet, happiness deludes her,

perhaps, unsaved is the saviour.

A ship arrived thrice as big, with sailors marked by the eye,

on their forehead, witnesses to the crime,

a best friend drowning another best friend.

Die and come to heaven with me,

I said, when she left, shivering.

The jellyfish arrived to carry my pain,

she left me alone in paradise.