The Begining

While most kids at the age of three played with their Barbie Dolls and G.I. Joe's, I started, what was to become, my love affair with words. As I grew older, I was continuously bedazzled by books and often got lost in the worlds created by Enid Blyton and C.S.Lewis. At around the age of five, encouraged by a book of limericks given to me, I ventured into writing poetry, starting with two liners and limericks. At the age of twelve, I wrote my first "grown up" poem that was surprisingly (even to me) deeply mystical, about dying and meeting with God. On reading it to my parents, they accused me of copying it, which I should have taken as a positive sign, rather than getting deeply offended and becoming a closet poet.  Since then I've realized though, I don't write my poems, my poems choose me. Very often I've woken up in the middle of the night, a verse aching to be released on paper, and after few minutes of frantic scribbling on my bedside notebook, have sat back and been amazed at the results. Not that they're always good.. but they are always amaze-worthy, if you get what I mean! I sometimes write every other day, or sometimes write one poem a year, depending on my mood. It's the extremes in mood that always makes me write more, so it might not always be a good thing.

In junior school in Dubai and in High School in India, I used to love to hand-make magazines and pass them around to my friends. With small tidbits of information,  games and cartoon strips and with pictures of cartoon characters  all carbon copied onto sheets of paper that would later be stapled together, I ventured into Journalism. These magazines also contained short fictional pieces and stories that I'd written. As I later pursued my A-Levels at Boarding School in Switzerland, I wrote for the school magazine there.

During my college years in Boston, I'd get extremely bored during my long breaks back in Dubai, and my parents suggested I get an internship with a local firm. Since Jumbo was the obvious choice, I interned there for a few weeks till my teenage mind discovered that selling gadgets was a LOT less fun than playing with them! I then transferred over to M&C Saatchi, the agency who were conveniently for me, handling our account and I learnt the inner workings of an ad agency. I got to work with some amazing people who were, I think, relieved that I was in possession of a brain and some creative skills, and decided to put me to use. It is there that I learnt the use of a computer, of photoshop, and most importantly, copywriting. If I had to choose my Dream Job, it would be that of a Creative Director at an International agency. 

On returning from college in 2000, I joined Jumbo again as a Management Trainee (albeit, I must admit, with a few perks) and then in 2002, became Director Marketing of the Company. My passion for writing and all things creative mostly took a backseat, while two years back, in 2008, I got an offer to do a column for the "Weekend" magazine of Khaleej Times. I wrote a monthly column for them for over a year, which they entitled "Kiran's Corner", till the magazine changed Editors and they decided to take off all the columnists across the board. This included brilliant articles by the illustruous Shashi Tharoor, so I really couldn't take it too personally, but I've really missed writing, and my "corner" ever since. I hence decided that while working (very slowly) on my first novel, I would keep my creative juices flowing and start a blog. What you are thus reading, is my juicy first entry.