Who is Agastya Zayant?
I sat cross-legged in my high wooden chair with a comfortable cushion underneath me, wood supporting my back, and lips getting chapped because of dry air on a zero degree snowy day wondering what to write for the past 30 minutes as the cursor kept blinking away at the default rate set by a Medium employee on an almost clean white minimalistic page. Then a thought popped up in my big cranium (my mom says it is big!), this is my first “Story” (yeah, Medium calls them stories instead of articles/posts because it has to stand out from other platforms like magazines and Facebook) and at most one person other than me is going to read it. So, why not blab about myself!
If you ever googled for the name Agastya Zayant before now, you wouldn’t have found a single result. So how did I come up with this name? I did my research on which medium (small m) to write my stories/articles/posts and was looking for good pen names as I didn’t want my friends or relatives to get offended by any of my posts. As I hail from Southern India currently living in the United States and was lately missing my home and focus, I was searching for odd Telugu boy first names and came across Agastya and looked up the meaning of the name and came across Agastya Muni (a south Indian saint) and it meant ‘a wise and stoic man’, as I like stoicism and I think I am wise, I stuck with it. Then the googling for last names and names matching with Agastya began. I really liked Agastya Vyas like Ved Vyas (another saint) but wasn’t convinced as some people already had that name. Two hours into my searching while binge-watching “ Gordon Ramsay’s 24 Hours to Hell and Back”, I realized that my first name began with A so why not find a last name that began with Z, as I wasn’t sure to whom in particular I was going to streamline this blog for (every successful blog is for a particular group of people) and I was going to write about anything and everything (i.e., A to Z). Oh boy! finding a decent South Indian name with Z that went along with Agastya is a difficult task. As I wanted to pay homage to my hometown as well, I had to eliminate Zahin, Zavian, etc. I finally came across ‘Zayant’, a word resembling Jayant or Jayam in Telugu which means victory and fortunately Zayant also had similar meaning and it suits my actual name as well. Then I asked my girlfriend who was sick because of cold about her opinion on the name and didn’t get any reply. Anyway, I went ahead and googled for the name and didn’t get any matching results and I was ecstatic. I didn’t sleep the previous night, slept in the afternoon for 2 hours and 12 hours later coming up with the name, I created an email account under the same name and signed up on Medium (capital M) and hence first-ever matching result for the name “Agastya Zayant” was created at 7:38 PM on 9th of January, 2020.
To what heights can I take my pen name and my real name?
Only time will tell. I will try my best to portray my real emotions when I write. A story without a soul is not a story. Many people write posts about technology or life without any soul and my aim is to put some of my feelings into the stories I publish.
I fell in love with the writing style of David Foster Wallace when I came across his article (I was looking for something challenging to read) on Roger Federer while I was preparing for my Reading Comprehension part of the Common Admission Test (CAT) back when I was in India. I immediately read almost all of his old articles (difficult to comprehend but amazing pieces) published across various esteemed news organizations. His book, String Theory is immaculate and beautiful to read. I didn’t dare to touch his book, ‘Infinite Jest’ because even Bill Gates was afraid to read it and I know that I am no-where near the halfway level as well. That’s the reason I started this story of mine describing how I was sitting and where I was sitting.
I am aware that mentioning all the big shots and giving myself a pen name (I never wrote an article till now) as if I am a big name in the writing industry comes off as arrogant, to say the least. But, does being self-aware of this arrogance and over-confidence make me a humble and wise person? — I don’t have an answer for this and I am trying to figure it out myself. Or, maybe I consider myself too smart? — again, I don’t have an answer and this journey is to learn that.
The Beginnings
To the algorithmic bot of Medium and me, thank you for reading the story and here’s to the new beginnings.
