Art to Entrepreneurship

After a month of abstaining from Medium, as I stared at the cursor on the blank screen blinking dimly at me, my distracted eyes caught a glimpse of these three words in an appealing shade of grey. It read, “Tell your story”.

“My untold story”, I whisper as I faded into oblivion.

I’m the kind of girl who doesn’t struggle to be different. Being different comes naturally to me as breathing. When parents dropped kids at school who tugged at their clothes, cried and refused to step inside, 3 year old me would grab the bag from my mom and walk as fast as my tiny legs could carry me, into the classroom. I was reading fables on my own at 6 when others had the same read to them by adults. Growing up, I became the girl that never disliked any of the subjects taught at school. But there’s a whole world of difference between not disliking and loving a subject.

And there was only one subject that I loved, Anatomy.

You don’t hear a lot of 8 year olds talking about Forensic Science.

If we had met 13 years ago, you just might have.

Kids that age won’t be able to spell it let alone make it their “When I grow up I want to be a _________” goal.

But I’m not any average kid. I watched New Detectives on Discovery and made luminol for a science fair while the other projects were models made in plaster of paris. I could sketch sections of the frog that put the printed diagrams in my zoology textbook to shame.

And before I knew it, graphite, paper and a couple of hours made me the envy of everybody at school who dreaded diagrams.

The more remarks I received, the better the next diagram would be. From the pseudopodia of amoebae to structures of human nephrons, effortless sketching produced my signature diagrams. With each exam I aced, I was one step closer to making my dream come true.

But I never anticipated my dad to become the chain saw that sliced my dream in half, killing me with it.

His reason was simple and skewed, “I don’t want my daughter to hack corpses for a living.” I was unprepared and most unwilling to submit to this insanely cruel condition of his. He wanted me to join the long list of engineers that my family boasts of.

The day I joined an engineering college marked the demise of the budding Forensic Scientist in me.

I wasn’t a budding Forensic Scientist anymore. I was a savage dream chaser. It wasn’t a battle of brute force anymore but a battle of wickedness. I wanted my parents to pay for hammering my chances of getting into med school by choosing their least favourite engineering course — Biotechnology as opposed to Computer Science. It’s against my nature to dislike subjects and towards the last semester I had grown pretty fond of biotechnology too, bagging a national award for my research.

The only reason I had to abandon Anatomy (temporarily) was because, at 16, I didn’t have a whopping amount of cash to fund med school on my own.

Now at 21, I work as a content writer to the dismay of my parents who wanted me to become a computer geek. In these 6 years, my nimble fingers that only held pencils to sketch anatomical perfections, were reduced to drawing lines and margins.

But not for long.

It was my friend’s birthday and I didn’t have anything to gift him. Aware of his undying love for Gotham’s hero, I decided to sketch an illustration of Batman.

Batman wasn’t the same as sketching the skeletal system.

And all I wanted was a sketch that didn’t look shabby (something that I never had to pray for until then).

He loved it and so did a lot of people at office.

I was stoked.

Before I left, three people had asked me for sketches of their favourite superheroes.

Well like they say, if you’re good at something don’t do it for free.

And that’s how Yume was born!