Re-Introduction!!!

Hello everyone, I am getting back to writing after a very long time (my first & only post here was in 2008!!!) and thought that in this post I ought to re-introduce my amatuer interest in writing to all by giving a brief walkthrough of my short journey as an amatuer writer :-).

Reading & Elocution were always my hobbies from my young days, they became the base for my interest in writing. I first got introduced to writing in my school, we had a school magazine (Dehiscence - if I remeber correctly) and I had the privilege of being on its editorial board for two consecutive years. That was the first time I had written some articles of which two were published in the magazine, one was a Hindi Poem on soldiers & the second was a English article on the entry of educated minds in the world of crime, both recieved good response from our teacher who was heading the editorial team as well as my fellow members on the editorial team.Following this I didn't write anything for a long time till the great social networking revolution called "Orkut", I started participating in discussions on the communities on various topics; this caught real steam when I got involved in the Anti-Reservation Protests of 2006; I was just out of college and literally sitting at home so writing & reading orkut communities became a daily addiction.

This protest campaign was my first major introduction to the real power of blogs, I used to read many blogs which openly wrote & argued about the pros/cons of reservation. I understood that a blog could give a larger platform for putting forward ones ideas/views/arguments/grievances etc. But even with this understanding I only satisfied myself by replying in small debates & arguments on the community forums or venting my anger in front of the television debates of "eminent" panelists, never could really muster the confidence to write my own blog. Soon the protests died & my entry into professional life took out all the steam in me, writing became just a thought.

One fine day, just happened to think of a storyline which I thought to be interesting & surprisingly I sat down to write, this was the first short story I wrote. I had it circulated to a close small group of friends & relatives for their honest reviews, being my first attempt many improvements were suggested, but interstingly the response overall was quite positive and many people whom I spoke to genuinely appreciated my attempt with a caution that i need to build on this & improve myself. The positive reviews made me come up with an "ambitious" plan to start writing of many short stories regularly publish them on a blog, the idea behind this was that I would improve with each story I write & the readers of the blog will be able to analyse the difference in my writing from my first story to the ones I would write later.
So, I started this blog & published my first story "Till I'm Alive", this was time when I had just moved to Mysuru for my job. Following two years were so hectic that I didn't have time to think of anyting to write.

Now, I am back in Mumbai & have been thinking for a long time to start writing again, but this was not happening partly due to work & partly due to my extremely lazy nature. But over the past few days a few of my friends have gotten into blogging like Mihir, Tanuja etc. (thanks ppl) & thats what gave me an insipration to decide writing again and thankfully have some good topics in mind.

I hope that this time I shed my laziness & continue writing good articles worth reading; I also would request all my readers to give honest reviews on whatever I write or have written so I can also learn & improve in the process.
God Speed.

Regards,
Ashish Shekhar Kirtikar