I started reading books by the time I was 2 years old. Books always filled our house. Dad would tell us stories about Mahabharata, World War, European history. Mum would tell us stories about Gerald   , James Herriot, two men who loved animals. We kept reading Enid Blytons & Amar Chitra Katha, and it formed a large part of every day life.

Maybe that was my first trigger to write.

Reading Robert Newton Peck and Dave Barry, made me a sucker for subtle humour writing. In 7th standard, my English teacher asked us all to write a letter. I tried adding humour to it. She asked me to read it out to everyone, and when I did, the whole class erupted with laughter. For a 11 year old boy, it felt wonderful, this newfound, random ability to make people laugh. From then onwards, every letter/essay I wrote in school, I would add humour to it, and every time I was asked to read it out to class. If I read them now, I cringe.

I hated IT. My 1st job. To cope with the hours in office, I started writing blogs. And the employees started liking them. My blogs would garner a lot of comments and those messages became the happiest part of my days, during my IT phase. “Write a book” the messages would keep saying. I cringe when I read those blogs now.

When Dravid retired, I wrote a piece about him. The piece reached his wife and she mailed me saying it was her favourite article about him. That meant a lot. The very same day, my mum & dad told me they loved it. They had never told me that before. Mostly they had always smiled and nodded their head when I showed them my letters and essays in school. Such bad actors they used to be.

I quit the corporate world and became a full time traveller in 2013. I met wonderful people everywhere, I chased adventure,& kept writing. “Write a book”, my Facebook post comments would say. “I shall, soon”, I’d reply. For years.

Then the pandemic came. I was forced to sit at home. That’s how I wrote my first book.

Like my friend said, “It took Neeraj a global pandemic, the whole world to shut down, to sit at home and write a book”. I hope it takes lesser for me to write the next one. Thankfully, I’m still not cringing reading the first 😉

~By Neeraj Narayanan