A Small Story of Writing, Rejection, and Finding My Voice

A Personal History of Rejection and Return

I have been writing since I was twenty. I cannot say any of it was good, but it was the only thing I did that did not belong to the syllabus. Where I grew up (in many towns of Rajasthan) anything outside the curriculum was treated like a grand act of self-sabotage. The bright ones were told to chase competition exams. The rest were advised to slip into some private job and migrate to a city where the real badge of honor was a plastic card hanging from the neck, swinging like a tamed snake that opened office gates. Poems, stories, and essays were considered proof that you had already surrendered in the economy of success. That is the education the towns gave me. From there came my interest in the idea of losersim, the condition of which roughly meant people who are following activities deemed useless by society. Or as the title of one Hindi poem goes “Duniya ki raftaar se bahar khade hue log. “ ( People standing outside the wheel of progress)

The interesting thing about not being busy is that you can study the people who are. All art begins with observation, and you can only observe when you are not sprinting to some destination. That is why a little boredom becomes useful. I slowly became aware of this boredom because I was always stuck in the wrong places, waiting for each phase to fade.

In class twelve I chose the hardest stream in our town, the famous PCM combination of physics, chemistry and maths. I had no interest in any of them. I did not know what I liked apart from reading magazines, newspapers, and watching films. But I was locked into that phase and there was no exit. All you can really do is let the storm run its course and hope a phase that means nothing to you slips away on its own.

One of the quote that stuck with me was from Murakami (whose writing bored me later in life)

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about

I somehow cleared my 12th and then stepped into another bad phase. Or as the character in Big Lebowski says, You are entering into the world of pain, my dear friend. I had no interest in any subject in that ridiculously traumatic and humiliating stretch called engineering. The trauma was so steady that I still get nightmares about it. I accepted it as fate, something I could not control. I mugged books, memorised subjects, and tried to survive a world I deeply disliked. It felt like being wrapped in a plaster of disgust and forced to continue like that for four or five years.

I had no idea what lived outside that world. Until then I had never stepped out of Rajasthan. Actually, I had been to Bengaluru once, which at that time was sold to us as the final dream city where all the cool things happened. The best engineering colleges, fashion, pub culture, Hard Rock Cafe, and most importantly, a place where people spoke in English. It carried a strange glamour back then, almost like an international utopia and no wonder it was even named as silicon valley.

I went there after telling my parents that I needed to improve my English and that there was no better place than Bengaluru. I said I would join a spoken English course and practice with locals, back in those pre compulsory Kannada days. So I roamed around the city, doing nothing, just absorbing everything, and of course I never joined any class.

During the final days of engineering college I started writing. I wrote short stories, poems, and movie reviews in a hostel diary. Then I would walk to each room and hand it over so they could read it. This was the Orkut phase of the internet and very much the pre Substack world where you could not simply upload something and feel heard.

One of my teachers eventually read a few of these pieces. He was a misfit on that campus too. The college had placed him in the placement cell with the title ‘personality development faculty.’ His task was to give students a small breather from engineering misery and help them improve their English and communication skills so they could get placed in companies like TCS or the humble ones like Infosys.

After going through my pages he told me, Anurag you are creative but you need to work on your English. But yes, you are creative. Those lines kept echoing in my head like a caller tune of your lover. I tried to understand what a creative person does and what that even means. If I was creative then what was I supposed to do next?

My family had capital but no cultural capital. No one around me had ever stepped into the world of arts, not even remotely close to it.

He then asked me if I had heard of FTII. I said no. He told me that in the next internet period I should search for ftii on google.com. We had only one internet class on weekends where we were allowed to surf the world wide world of internet.

After engineering I worked in a call center for a short while. The main idea behind doing that useless job was to improve my English and buy myself some time to think about what I wanted to do in life. It did improve my English to some degree, although one teacher kept scolding me because I said Jaipur as Jaipur and not JAYAPOR (by rolling my tounge in an international accent). I am from Jaipur and I always believed Jaipur is Jaipur. But that experience taught me something important about urban spaces, about how people will later appropriate your own story and gaslight you.

After the call center, I moved to Mumbai to become a writer. By then I had written a few scripts that I carried to producers and emailed to small production houses that had mushroomed across the city. I used to go to a cyber cafe to send the scripts, then return the next day to check the emails that said, sorry, it does not fit what we are looking for. I paid around thirty rupees an hour for the daily ritual of rejection.

But I wanted to write and publish something of my own. So I began writing what I called street poetry. These pieces came from observation, from walking through the city, from love, breakups, odd moments, and the absurdities of urban life. The poems were loose, but the passion was real. One poem was about a lonely man in a new city who runs around trying to catch a pokemon, which was the game everyone was obsessed with at that time. In the poem he accidentally meets his ex at one of the spots. The pokemon becomes a symbol of their loneliness and the ache they carry, the things they are trying to find in life. I decided to publish the collection under the name Love in the Time of Pokemon.

I put the manuscript together and went to Hariom Printers in Andheri, a small Gujarati led print shop. They told me they only printed in bulk and that the minimum was one hundred copies. I had a money problem, as usual, so I borrowed from a friend and got it printed. I figured out the process of putting it on Amazon and setting up the delivery system, and finally the book was ready.

But when the copies arrived, I realised the entire manuscript was full of spelling mistakes. That was the moment I understood that you need an editor before you publish anything. I gave it to a friend who was good with English and asked him to clean up the spelling. The first batch went straight to waste. Then I went back to Hariom Printers and got the whole thing printed again. The sisyphean saga continues.

The thing with self publishing is that you have almost no way to market the book. So it died its own slow death with four or five sales, and the rest of the copies piled up in my rented room in Versova. My house help would often say that if I did not need them, I should give them to her so she could sell them to the local kabadi shop and buy her child Kinder Joy Chocolates. I gave her money to buy Kinder Joy and told her to wait for a bit before we throw these copies away.

I also sent the manuscript and copies to several publishers, but everyone rejected it or never replied. I read many publishing blogs and realised that poetry is the least favoured genre. So I shifted to fiction. I spent almost a year (2017) writing a collection of short stories on dating encounters, partly inspired by my own experiences, and titled it I love you only on weekends. This time I wanted the cover to look better and I hired an editor in advance so that my copies would not get wasted. For the cover I hired someone on fiverr dot com, where many freelancers work for very cheap. I found a broke Italian designer who made the cover at a very cheap price for me because one of the poem reminded him of the girl that broke up with her in Florence.

Finally the book got published on Amazon. But like most self published work, it got no traction. I went to bookstores and asked if they could keep a few copies. They told me it does not work like that and only publishers can do it. They said they cannot place random books like mine on their shelves. I even went to JLF to see if I could somehow put my book there, but I learned that there too all stalls are paid stalls and there is no way to casually slip a book into that world.

Next I realised I should connect with editors and publishers and build a directory of their emails. So I made a PDF of fifty or sixty pages with all the contacts I could find and emailed each one of them. All the replies were rejections. One reply stung more than the rest. Sorry, these are not poems but random musing of a bored person. We can’t publish such stuff.

This went on for three or four years. I realised I had no idea how any of this publishing system worked and there was no point trying to break in like this.

In 2019 I even called my friend Amit Dutta and told him that I feel sad that had posted about my book launch (self published) on Facebook and received one like. I had two thousand friends and still one like. He told me to keep going and not think about results. There is one rule of success in this field : stay consistent and enjoy what you are process of improving your craft.

But at that time I felt hopeless about writing and I began to believe that someone like me could never build a career in this field.

But in 2019 something shifted. I started making videos on the internet. I changed my Instagram page name from new age poetry to Anurag minus verma. The videos began to go viral, the podcast picked up, and people slowly started recognising me. A small traction began to build. For the first time in my life I felt a bit of reach, a bit of power, and a little confidence in whatever I was trying to do.

After one of my articles went viral, the one about whether a Dalit can wear H & M or Zara, I started getting a few writing offers. It was a piece about how the idea of how a Dalit should look is deeply embedded in the Indian upper caste psyche and especially in the imagination of upper caste filmmakers. That article opened a few doors in the media. I began writing for several alternative platforms, especially in print, for places like Newslaundry, The Wire,Times of India and others.

And around that time the one of the biggest literary agent of country (Kanishka) reached out and asked me to pitch an idea for a book. I finally pitched one on internet culture because that is the world I understand most. By then nearly every publishing house was interested in the publishing the book. The tide had shifted. For the first time I felt I had some control of choice, which felt strange considering where I had come from.

That is how the book began. I also realised that getting a book deal is only a small part of the struggle. Writing the book after getting the deal is a different world. My agent even told me that many authors never finish their manuscripts after signing.

Even for me, getting a book published and seeing numbers rise is not the real form of success. The real measure is how far you have come in your craft, how well you can finally articulate the things you once struggled to express, and how much you can grow through practice and learning. I now realise that the thing about being consistent is that you can only be consistent with what you love to do. So first one must find out what they really love.

I still consider myself at a very early stage. Only now have I started feeling a small confidence that what I write has a fair chance of being published. So this is not the end of any struggle. It is the beginning of a journey where I hope to write better and put words and hopefully can struggle for better things in life.

As Rilke once said” “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”

Thank you for being here and for staying with my ideas, my messy thoughts, and everything in between. If it feels interesting to you, please consider buying a copy of my book.