On Writing and Living

I came to writing the way most people come to anything that matters — not by choosing it, but by finding that I couldn't stop. It started as notebooks filled on trains, then documents no one was meant to read, then slowly, reluctantly, a blog. Writing, I have come to believe, is less a skill and more a method. A way of forcing yourself to actually think rather than just nod along to the stream of feeling and opinion that passes for thought in ordinary life.

I write about ideas — the professional kind, the kind that sits at the edge of disciplines and refuses to be tidy. I write about my personal life, though carefully and selectively, because I believe honesty has value only when it costs something. And lately I write about fatherhood, which has been the most disorienting and clarifying thing that has ever happened to me.

“How do we know what we think until we see what we say?”
— E.M. Forster

My son is a toddler. He is at the age where everything is a question and every question requires a full answer. Watching him encounter the world — its colours, its textures, its inexplicable injustices like being told it's time to stop playing — has made me look more carefully at the world myself. Children are the closest thing most of us will get to fieldwork in pure wonder.

I think about attention a lot. We live in a time that profits from distraction, that has turned fragmentation into an aesthetic. I am not interested in being efficient with my attention. I am interested in being present with it — in reading slowly, thinking slowly, writing slowly, and accepting that the things worth understanding almost never yield to the first reading.

What this blog is

These pages are not a portfolio. They are not a newsletter. They are not optimised for growth or engagement or any of the metrics that now govern how writers think about their work. They are, as simply as I can put it, a place where I write what I mean and mean what I write.

Essays — Long-form thinking on professional ideas, culture, books, and the things I cannot stop turning over in my head.

Reflections — More personal. Quieter. The kind of writing that is harder to explain and easier to feel.

Fatherhood — Dispatches from the floor, from bedtime, from the long slow work of watching a person become themselves.

Get in touch

I love hearing from readers. Write to me at hello@saikrishna.com. I read every message; I reply when I can.

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