I started 2025 with a simple goal: to improve my writing skills and begin the journey towards mastery of expression. A lofty goal. I was glad, though. Unlike most times in the past, I was aware of how challenging this goal would be. That awareness helped. When I was younger,…
Exercise 4 — Emotion Without Labels Goal: Convey emotion via action, perception, somatic detail, and thought — with zero emotion words. Prompt: Receiving life-altering bad news over a crackly phone line. Target Length: 1,200 words I had been sitting on the couch all morning, staring blankly at the bare walls. Whenever lucidity came…
Exercise 3—Biased Observation Goal: Demonstrate how worldview filters description; what the POV omits matters as much as what they note. Prompt: Walking through a night market in a foreign city with a secret agenda. Target Length: 1,000 words Some things are unchanging. Flipflops clapping, shoes tapping, heels clacking, children’s feet shuffling, four-legged creatures…
Exercise 2 — Voice Deep Dive Goal: Create a narrative voice inseparable from the POV character — diction, rhythm, metaphor, syntax. Prompt: Return to the childhood home after years away: meticulous, control-obsessed POV. Target Length: 1,000 words I turned the corner and expected to see the banyan tree, but only a fat stump…
Exercise 1 — POV Purity & Sensory Anchoring Goal: Absolute discipline — no POV violations, no floating camera. Build trust through strict sensory filtering. Prompt: Packing a suitcase after a breakup — the other person is in the next room, silent. Target Length: 1,000 words I can hear her bare feet shuffling across…
A first look at the cover for my upcoming hard science fiction novel—set in a near-future India where physics, geopolitics, and deep space engineering collide. Zero Dimensional Space – Book 1 begins not with warp drives or alien signals, but with a physics anomaly in a Casimir force experiment at a…
I don’t think Rajeev’s secretary understands what’s sitting on my desk. For weeks I’ve been sending papers, abstracts, and “short write-ups” to help her “brief him when he has the time.” Each time I send one, another request comes back. He’s a busy man, I know—but this isn’t a Mars…
Imagination Comes First It still amazes me how much joy I felt simply imagining it—ISRO, India’s space agency, not just building rockets or launching satellites, but becoming a true spacefaring force. I’d sit for hours on my couch, eyes half-closed, imagining Gaganyaan lifting off with the sun rising behind it, imagining…
There are some characters I hesitate to describe — not because there isn’t much to say, but because too much would be lost in the telling. Lata is one of them. She humbles me. She unsettles me. And sometimes, without warning, she angers me. That’s all I can say, for…
From the very beginning of writing this story, I was fascinated by the idea of engineering silence—what it would mean to construct a chamber so quiet, so perfectly insulated, that a human mind might begin to touch something truly unknown. This is the evolution of the Meditation Core as seen…