The Polymath is a blog where every thought is a blog post. At least, I try to keep it that way.
That is precisely why The Polymath doesn’t have a niche. It’s not a personal blog though that is the closest a category comes to defining it. In a way, this blog is the perfect embodiment of me as a person; volatile and eccentric.
The New Direction
Before I tell you about how this blog came to be, let me lay some detail on how the content that is on it today is structured.
There are three kinds of posts: The Journals, The Words and the Nudge.
- The Journals are blog posts. These are life-updates, things I’ve learned and so on. These don’t have titles. They have numbers.
- The Words are more than just blog posts. These are creative pieces, short stories, narratives and so on. These have titles.
- The Nudge has self-help articles which try to be less proud and righteous. These end with shareable takeaways which summarise the entire ideas.
The Journals happen word-for-word, The Words don’t, and the Nudge just tries to nudge you in a better direction. This is explained in detail in The Journal #0 and The Journal #11.
The Origin Story
People usually ask me about the origins of The Polymath. There’s a rather interesting story here. It was ninth grade and a social sciences faculty wasn’t so keen on teaching that day. So, to avoid his duties for the day and to kill time he came up with an exercise. Maybe he read about it somewhere and emulated it. Maybe it was a figment of his own imagination, implemented erroneously.
The exercise was simple. Pick two slips, each with the name of a popular character and write a short story with those two characters. I picked two slips out of the box and my selection was rather disjointed. Robin Hood, the first slip read. Barney Stinson, read the other. I came up with a quirky and funny story, as far as I remember.
That was the first part of the exercise. The second part was showing him our stories and him finding our personality traits from said narratives. I don’t know how qualified or learned he was in doing this but he gave me the following insight after reading my story.
“You’ll never succeed in life. You are the jack of all, you will do everything that everyone else is doing and will not stop giving up and taking up new interests and just because you’ll not stay constant onto a single thing, you won’t succeed. You play the drums if a friend of yours plays the drums. If another friend starts to learn the guitar, you’ll start learning the guitar. You are the master of none.”
Those were his exact words. His words infuriated me. They made me so desperate that I practically wanted denial at the time. Tell a 14-year-old something like that and he is bound to panic. I came home and started putting in random search queries like “person who does a lot of things” or “someone who does everything”.
I didn’t have to look for very long to find a word that would eventually become a part of how people remember me. It is incorporated so deeply into my life that my social media handles are usually @thatpolymathguy if they’re not @deepanshkhurana.
I started a blog on Blogger.com called Sigh of the Polymath. It doesn’t exist anymore. This post was how The Polymath began back on the ancestor of what today is this website you lay your eyes on.
Was He Right?
In hindsight, maybe he was not too far from the truth. Maybe, his conclusion crafted me into picking up any hobby I could pick up. Its a classic case of “what came first” and “time travel nuances”. I’ll never know if my plethora of hobbies and things to do come because of that day or vice versa.
All I know is that when I want to trace back to why I am who I am, I usually look for that one event in my memory. In fact, since ninth grade, I’ve done quite a lot of things and I have kept an open mind. In fact, I have shortened my learning curve to the point that I can grasp basics for anything rather easily.
The downside is, I do switch activities a lot as the insight had read. You can see a gist of whatever I do on my personal portfolio.
What Happened To The Blog Then?
If you read the blog or even give a quick scroll to it, you can obviously see that the content isn’t really about things I do or about anything the first post promised. The thing is, this blog evolved as I evolved. It went downhill as I went downhill. It peaked as I peaked. The blog has been a perfect and almost parallel representation of who I am as a person and what I am going through.
If you pay enough attention, you can see things change quite easily; from my writing style to how I think and what I say.
Thank You
Thank you for visiting this obscure-corner-of-the-internet as I like I call it. I know how difficult life can be because I spend way too much thinking about mine so when someone spends time reading some thousand words written by me, I know I have found a friend.
If you ever want to talk, you can always hit me up and send me a quick message.
I appreciate your presence and again, thank you for coming to this page and learning more about me and the blog.
