A few years ago when I told my family, friends and colleagues that I was giving up my nineyear- old, successful IT career to pursue something more meaningful and satisfactory in life, there were two kinds of responses. The few who wished me well thought I was courageous and encouraged me, but the rest were happy: they thought I was finally losing my mind, going into a state of delirium.

I don’t exactly remember when I made the decision to take up writing and journalism as a career. But, I remember the exact moment when I realized that I could not continue in the IT industry

It was during the spring of 2002. I was driving my black Camry along the interstate freeway I-285 from my office in Dunwoody, Georgia to my home barely two exits away, on a warm Friday evening when my boss Jason. K called me.

“We need to talk something important,” he said. I pulled over to the curb and called back.

The next few weeks were the high point of my IT career. For the first time in the history of software solutions wing of the California-based IT giant, a contract was written with a name printed on it. My bosses had called me to find out if I was okay with it.

The client, a large telecom company in the south east United States, agreed to pay my company US $600/ hour for two months, only if I agreed to transition the project. Normally, they paid just US $300 for a support manager and US $ 150 for an engineer. I was just an engineer at the time, but worked for the client for six weeks at $600 an hour. The following month, I received the employee of the month award, again a feat for my standards.

For software engineers who loved programming and who wrote software for the sheer joy of writing code, this achievement of mine might sound inane. But not for me, peer recognition and money was all I sought, in the job. And when I had it, I was happy but not excited. Looking back, the happiness was because it reinstated a belief in my capabilities.

could clearly see the life ahead of me, had I continued that way. Someday, I would be the proud owner of a huge five-bedroom bungalow somewhere in posh, suburban America with a home theatre and a bar in its basement; have teenaged kids who were desperate to leave home but were stuck to me because of their ‘Indianness’; take an expensive membership at a golf club where I would go merely to find an excuse to get away from the wife. Most importantly, I would pay mortgage for thirty long years for a the software industry.

She was cool. “Just hang on to the job at least till we get married. Then, you do whatever you want,” she said. I don’t remember talking to anybody else about it.

It took me another four years before I was in a position to finally quit my job. During this period, I rarely put my heart into my work. I spent hours reading self-help articles on the web and everything else that the Internet could offer about identifying a job that one loved. I read about philosophers, writers, actors and almost anyone who loved their jobs and on how they found their vocation. But, all that reading led me nowhere.

During those days of introspection, I discovered that the only activities I always enjoyed doing was reading and writing in English. I had good command over the language and fared well in essay writing competitions since childhood. At one time, I had even loved reading Shakespeare, Keats, and their ilk.

I also figured out that I never liked hard work. My job had to be something that gave me a lot of free time and some two to three hours of work. The only people who managed such a career successfully were the creative folks -- like writers, poets and artistes in general. Or so I thought.

I believe most of us do not have a clear understanding of the meaning of the word ‘career’. Especially, ones like me who grow up in families where both parents could not afford higher education and settled for clerical jobs with the government, soon after school. For them, the search for a stable career ends the day an employment letter from the government is received.

And that is exactly what my parents thought would be the best career for me. However, growing up as a child and teenager in the middleclass neighbourhoods of Chennai made one believe that money is the most important factor in choosing an occupation. That is, if one were to set aside the childish aspirations of parents who dreamt of making their children engineers and doctors.

I can confidently say that I had no ambition as a child. When I did my final year in high school, all I wanted to do in the higher secondary was to transform my image from a studious schmuck to someone cool, whom the girls would like. I did not care about anything else.

During high secondary, my only two wishes in life was that I grow a little taller, at least, and that all the pimples on my face somehow vanished. I don’t remember spending any time on wondering what I wanted to become as an adult. And by the way, neither of my wishes were fulfilled through school.

By the time I passed out of college, my ambitions made a little more sense. I wanted to get a job that could afford me a motorcycle, an agreeable-looking girlfriend (with expensive dinners and lunches included in the package), and a ‘pleasant’ family life, as was shown in the Hindi soap operas on Doordarshan at the time.

During the mid 90’s, which was when I graduated, the surest way to realize such ambitions was a job in the IT sector. So, for the first time in life, I joined a course with the intent of having a career in that field. Getting a placement was easy back then, as the industry was just beginning to boom. Even if you were just a little ambitious and hard working, it could take you all the way to the United States with a cushy salary.

Exactly two months after I turned twenty-five, I left for the US on a H1B visa. And by the next birthday, I had realized all my dreams. I was on a longterm contract assignment with Hewlett Packard, owned a beautiful black Toyota Camry and my girlfriend, also a techie, lived two blocks away from home in Atlanta, Georgia. It was all I had wanted until then.

So, I wanted to be a writer. And, it was such a beautiful thought. After all, I was always good in English. After a gap of several years, I purchased books that were not related to software. I read novels, short stories and even non-fiction by great English writers. And when I could not resist the urge to write, I started writing stupid poetry and articles for online magazines that published any trash that reached them. Looking back, that was the most foolish phase of my life.

Encouraged by my early success at getting articles published in cheap, free contribution websites and the few positive comments I received from other frustrated professionals who too thought they had it in them to be a writer, I tried to write my first short story. And I have to say, it read like a class three student’s composition essay. Obviously, I was disappointed.

So I joined a short story writing course at the Long Ridge Online Short Story Writing Program and diligently turned in their assignments on time. The first few weeks were good. My mentor, a published writer, even said that I had the ‘gift of fiction’. After the first few short stories were reviewed by the mentor, I realized that although it gave me a basic understanding of the structure of a modern short story, it was taking me nowhere. If the Long Ridge could teach one how to write short stories, then all their students would be short story writers. I quit the course half way.

After many more months of pondering over where to start my writing career, I joined a novel-writing course at the University of California, Los Angeles. Of course, it was parttime. And during the 12-week course, I managed to write the first fifty pages of my first novel. But that novel never reached the 100-page mark as I could not add even a page more to the manuscript after the course ended.

Somewhere during this period of keeping the IT job and struggling to learn good writing, I had turned 31 and had already spent six years on H1B visa. It was time to quit.

It was early May and the heat was scorching when I returned home to Chennai. The beautiful thought of becoming a writer that I drowned myself in, sitting in a cozy apartment in suburban America, did not seem so beautiful from down here. The cold stare that beggars on the street gave me while I sat inside my air-conditioned car, the tales of sick neighbours with no money for treatment and of relatives who are on the verge of poverty after losing a job which I was fed upon in a single instalment, the Kollywood films that exaggerated corruption and lawlessness to unreasonable limits, all of them did scare me.

I wondered if it was such a good idea to even try to be become a full time writer. The few people that I talked to about this idea thought it was a stupid idea. “If you’re creative, try cinema instead,” they said. Or stick to what you know.

I feel that the only thing that Chennai is so starved of, besides water, is good fiction writers in English. The last successful writer from down south that I remember was R. K. Narayan. Most of the others who followed him, like Arundhati Roy, Anitha Nair and even Timeri Murari never had any need to make a living out of their writing. And it was a scary thought.

After remaining scared for six months and, obviously writing nothing, I decided to work again. But this time, one thing was clear: I would only write for a living. So, after almost a decade of leaving college, I joined the Loyola College here for a post graduate diploma in Media Presentation.

Sometime during that period, I met a benevolent journalist who offered me a job and I started writing articles for a salary.

It’s been four years. I still write for a living and, like a good journalist, have evidence to back my claim. A couple of years ago, I was offered a job with a rival newspaper and when I had gone for the interview, the editor asked me what my ambition was.

“I just want to write well and make a living out of it,” I said.

He chuckled and asked me, “Does that even sound real to you, who makes a living out of writing these days?” Well, I don’t know if it sounds funny, but I’m going to try it anyway. After all, all I have is this ‘one’ life

By Vedanth Damodar