My first published writing
It was not on Medium.
I’ll say I got lucky. At least then, I was feeling that. Every year our school magazine used to be published, and each student used to get a copy. The magazine had all the school achievements, the toppers, any special events, bright young minds, sports, extracurricular activities, everything used to be there. There was also a section of Articles, where some great essays or poems used to be published. The articles were published in two sections - English and Hindi.
I wasn’t very well versed in English at that time, Even now, I think I am still not that good, but at that time, English was a big scary demon for me. But my Hindi was pretty good. My Hindi teacher, made me further fall in love with Hindi. A teacher has a big role in modelling your likes and dislikes towards the subjects. He or she can either make it look very easy or can make it too boring and pathetic to study. I remember my chemistry teacher too, he used to just throw every concept to us and expected us to understand everything without even actually explaining the concepts.
But our Hindi teacher was good. One day, she came to the class, with some blank sheets. She asked every one of us to write whatever we had in our minds and gave us a whole period to write our imaginations on that blank sheet. I decided to write a poem about my mother. It was around 12 to 16 lines, and I tried to put every single emotion that I could and submitted it to the teacher. We had no idea that it was going for the magazine.
After a month or so, we got our school magazine. My friend saw my name and my class in the article section, and he came running to show me. I was very surprised. When I opened mine, the article section had my name with the poem I wrote. The whole class read my poem. It was my moment. I was the new Shakespeare of the class, the Hindi version of Shakespeare. My teacher also praised me and I was very happy.
I went home with the magazine and showed my parents the poem. My mum like a typical mum had tears in her eyes. My father cut that portion of the page from the magazine and kept it to himself. It was a good experience, getting selected from around 500 students for the magazine publication. A proud moment for me.
Back in 2024, when I asked my father about the poem, he remembered the poem and with that, he also told me about a joke that also got published in the magazine. Me and my friend had written it. The peculiar thing was that the joke was written in Sanskrit language. Wow! I guess me and Indian literature had something between us.
