Earlier this year, I had an epiphany. It started with a thought mid air as I was paragliding. I looked out into the endless horizons, and thought to myself, from up here, the beauty of the ghats around Pune is truly something else .. I began to wonder who created all this grandeur, where did life come from, what is the source of our existence?
Pretty distracting thought I’d say when you are 300m in the air and really need to focus on taking turns, keep sight of your glider and maintain path to your landing zone.
I was taking a refresher course in paragliding, 12 years since I last flew. It’s almost like learning it for the first time but with some muscle memories. It’s actually quite dangerous to know you were decent at something like gliding and then going back to it 12 years & a few knee surgeries later. At least I was cognizant of this danger and kept convincing myself I know nothing.
After a few ground runs on day 1 and a mouth watering lunch, we sat in theory class. Our instructor Vinayak taught us basics of how a glider works, the way the wind creates the natural fuel for its lift and the art of leveraging it. Physics 101. It was an unusual Friday afternoon. Typically I’d be on a Teams call or responding to Outlook emails.
This felt worlds apart. I had to pause, to think, to understand and apply. It’s life and death, every atom in your body pays attention when it’s like that. But it also made me go into the dungeons of my mind. Looking back, I honestly feel I activated parts of my brain that were lying defunct.
Over the next few months, I had been feeling this unexplained uneasiness. I couldn’t tell what it was but I had this fleeting feeling of unrest. I had slowly started to realise I had been wasting too much of my time on social media/OTTs and consuming pointless content. It took me many months to first accept it, but when I did.. I felt like an addict.
Over the next few months, I went back to that existential question that popped into my brain mid air. The questions expanded to what is our purpose in life, what does it mean to live and eventually to die? I started watching a few podcasts, but didn’t really feel satisfied, plus in the sea of content just consuming more audio or visual content was simply spamming my mind.
All this inspired me to pick up my first book in 8 years.. I did some research and felt like philosophy might be the best genre. When Breath Becomes Air. I breezed through it in a day, and now have finished a couple more in similar genre with a fast building pipeline of writers & books I want to read.
Somewhere in the age of social media, I had lost my ability to read, especially books. I was unable to focus, to sit with a few words and think about them. I had forgotten what it felt like to let your mind into a book.
I asked a few friends and colleagues, beyond the emails and an odd article, when was the last time you read a book? A said the same thing – they have lost the ability to stay captivated by a book.
Up until recently, I too was part of this guilty brigade. To think I went from the boy who would queue at 5am outside bookstores for the latest Harry Potter book to reading only Tuesdays with Morrie between 2015-2025, I feel embarassed.
I remember somewhere in 2018 or 2019 Mohit Joshi, who was then President at Infosys, had started a personal campaign to read 100 books in a year.
To me, it seemed unfathomable. I couldn’t even read 2 pages of a book.
I haven’t researched the scientific impacts that modern media has had on our brains to reach this state of consciousness, but I’m sure it pretty much tanslates to a slow rot.
In stocicism, which I’ve grown fond of lately, they talk about how the pursuit of knowledge & wisdom is what will keep you on a path of continuous self growth.
It’s left me wondering if reading and writing can classed as dying forms of art and expression.
When I was in BSchool, me and my dear friend Adam, had started our own online magazine. We had 50 authors contributing. We both wrote ourselves. Nowadays, he is more in love with biking which he learnt at the cost of my beloved old TVS Apache.
I hope that he’s a better rider now. But more importantly, I hope he starts writing again. He was funny.
When I decided to open substack a few weeks ago, I was really struggling with drafting. This is probably my 5th writeup since. And the process of writing, it certainly feels a lot easier.
Perhaps reading & writing aren’t dying.
Reading requires us to sit still with someone else’s thoughts. Writing requires us to sit still with our own. Fragments of thoughts, penned down. Then you come back later to your first draft, then to your second, and many more drafts later you have a finished piece.
Think about it.. if we can consume or create without thinking… what happens to the part of us that was supposed to do the thinking?
Maybe the real thing we are losing isn’t the ability to read or write.
Maybe it’s the ability to sit with a thought long enough for it to become our own.
And somehow, for some inexplicable reason, paragliding seems to have unlocked the thinking for me
