About Me and My Blog
It was about 6 years ago, when I had just gotten into grade IX, that I made a new friend in the school bus called “Adithya”. This man—who was a senior of mine—is someone I will forever cherish for building in me an interest for a lot of what I do now as a “grown up”. Every evening, as I would sit in the school bus—a place where I would otherwise just doze off till my stop would come—after a tiresome day, this was the man who constantly kept me awake: a knowledgable soul who would rant to me from everything about tech, to polity to history. Only little did I know then of how much those “rants” would come to influence the then “introverted” Eshwar.
It was about 6 months from that day that “introverted” Eshwar would go on to attend his first Model UN Conference—the first exposure this kid would have to others of his age: speaking and listening to them on topics he so dearly loved.
As poetically overexaggerated as it sounded until now, this kid grew up to be me: a semi-grown-up dude who still loves to do the very same “MUN” stuff: stuff that many have called me “amateur” and “childish” for.
You see, I joined engineering (I am a 3rd year student now)—barring the stereotyping, it is a field I actually do very much enjoy studying and working with. Nevertheless, it is—I am sorry to say this—not at all a place where I can in any way nurture my love and interest for fields like polity and history: hence, as I realised very recently, I ended up finding solace in things like debates, and MUNs: places where my love for these subjects in one way or the other persists in staying alive.
This blog, which is just an attempt at something new, is something I hope plays out as a better exercise, and a place to nurture the very same interests of mine.
A completely parallel timeline—I was never a reader as a kid: I still joke around with friends about how I tried reading the first Harry Potter book, and after reading about the first 15 pages, ended up just binging on all the movies (for I did not have the patience to sit through months of reading to only get the same plot in a few hours of movie binging). As much as I hate to say it, my disdain for fiction-based books has persisted ever since: honestly, it was the conception of books in general that I ever so hated.
Given the disdain for books in general, I never put in a huge effort to “read” about the subjects “I so dearly loved”—a lot of my “absorbing” hence was literally from YouTube videos and podcasts for about a good few years. Speaking of YouTube, for about 2 years i.e. 2022 and 2023, my algorithm gave to me a person who inspired me for much of the time to come. Now that I come to think of it, it is a man, whom I have come to ideologically disagree with on many aspects, yet owe a lot to for nurturing my interest in certain subjects I would have otherwise never delved into—J Sai Deepak. While some might call him a “Hindutva fascist” (I won’t go into that debate), his lectures (not the half-hour TV debates that are constantly put on YouTube reels which give him super-natural laser eyes) on matters like Kashmir and Article 370, and most importantly his scholarship i.e. his 2 books—stuff I still believe are underrated for they are heavily masked by his public identity and debate appearances—have had a phenomenal impact on me as a student of these subjects.
Further, the works of authors like Arun Shourie, Manu S Pillai, Rajiv Malhotra, Vikram Sampath, and Richard Eaton—people who are broadly painted as both “left” and “right” winged—have helped me shape much more nuanced views of polity, and history alike over a period of 3 years.
Coming back to me: the concept of a blog is something I felt—for over a year—is something that I really need to begin for myself. I genuinely don’t know, or expect this exercise in any way to attract readers or benefit anyone—this is a space where I just want to put my work out—at my own pace— whether anyone wants to read it or not. The days ahead for me shall definitely be tough—I have my college starting in about a month, and subsequently my “final year” project among other things: I don’t envision myself being clocked regular to this blog i.e. the gap between each post may be either a week, or a few months—but never will it (by gods’ willing) “stop” as an exercise. This blog—as I envision it— is just a space where I want to post when I “get the mood” for writing something—a “mood” I get fairly often these days.
Basically, I have no hope of this being a “successful” exercise. If anything, it is an attempt—an attempt to catalogue (or put somewhere) my thoughts, my limited knowledge, and stuff that I enjoy learning about: an attempt that shall not stop; something that “introverted” little Eshwar would be happy to see his older self do.
Now (barring this narcissistic rant I just gave), coming to what it is that I plan on putting here—well, there are a bunch of ideas that I have going ahead. While my blogs shall occasionally talk about tech, and current day polity, the main goal of this blog is to talk about history—not history as an academic exercise, but historiography as a “myth busting” tool to allow to draw into the present. History is an imperative in any discussion in today’s day—no political discussion today is free from the so-called “academic exercise” of history and the narratives that surround it: in the next post I shall detail on these ideas specifically—so do STAY TUNED.