The Musings of a Lotus

I know you might be curious about the title, so I’ll get to that soon. But first, introductions!

Hi everyone! I’m Aravind. I’m an engineer with a penchant for creative activities that make use of a wonderful instrument - whose primary component is derived from sand - to convert photons to electrons which can then be shared with the world! Sounds fascinating? Or a bit confused? Well, it isn’t either. It just means I love photography. And I do a bit of videography on the side as well. I guess that’s all there is to know about me. Oh, and I love reading, though currently, I’ve been in a bit of a slump, which I’m trying to get out of. And Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings is my ladder out.

Now, about this newsletter. I’ve wanted to write blogs for a long time now (remember Blogger?). But I’ve never known what to write about or how to write. And along with that, I have a fear of putting myself out in public, and of being judged. So, that always ends up with me creating stuff - photos, videos, writings, etc - but never sharing them with anyone except for close family and friends. Which sometimes leads me to question why I made those in the first place. But to me, the process of creating it holds more value than sharing it, so I continue to create. And then lock them away in the various hard drives lying about in my closet. But I couldn’t do that with a blog, so I never started one. And since a newsletter seemed similar to a blog, I never gave it much thought either. Until I came across Ali Abdaal’s video on How to Start an Email Newsletter.

I’ve been following Ali Abdaal for quite a while now, ever since I came across his desk setup video from when he was a medical student at Cambridge. I was looking for inspiration on how to set up my hostel room when I came across this. His talking style and speed intrigued me and so I kept following his videos, albeit irregularly. I’d take tips and tricks from a few and integrate them into my workflow but I never paid much attention to his videos on creativity and entrepreneurship since it didn’t seem like something I’d do. But recently, I’ve been looking at avenues to improve my creativity engine and came across his video on the email newsletter. And I thought, why not give it a shot? Worst case is I won’t get a single subscriber, and I stop writing. All I’d have lost is a few hours every week. That doesn’t seem so bad, no?

And so, here we are. Me, writing down my musings, and you, reading them. This will mostly be a weekly thing as I don’t intend to crash-land into your inbox more frequently than that. It might stretch to biweekly as well, in case I’m caught up with studies.

Anyways, adieu for now. And as always, thank you for your time! I’ll see you next Wednesday.

P.S. About the title. ‘Aravind’ means lotus in Sanskrit.