Doesn’t it happen to us often? We want to do something and on the way to that, we kind of forget or lose focus and end up doing something else completely?
I think that is what has happened with me. Although, thanks to Kite Strings getting published and everything, I have achieved my goals, but I realised of late, that I am not doing the kind of writing I want to do. It’s because I don’t have the time or the inclination to sit and write what I want, after I finish writing what everyone else wants.
I was just going through my email and came across something from Elance and almost shuddered. Elance is good. Believe me, it’s good. It’s great for people who want to work from home, who want to freelance and make extra money doing what they’re good at. I too joined in thinking the same thing.
But all too soon, you realise that once you devote your life to something like this, where you are using your god given talent, to do something else, to do something that someone else wants…it’s very suffocating. See, if I didn’t have the urge in me to write something from within me every time I open MS Word, I think I could have managed Elance perfectly well. But it soon turned into something like a monster, sitting at the back of my mind, telling me that I haven’t completed it yet. And once you start dreading what you loved doing, you know that there’s something wrong. To take a very cliched example, you’re an accomplished artist and you draw fantastic water colors or whatever. But to make quick money, you’ve decided to paint a few houses and you’re no longer happy with what you do. You get my point?
I am not condemning Elance. As I said before, it’s a fantastic platform for people to earn money and I have earned some myself, so I know that it’s not a sham. But, I realised today that Elance is not for me. If I get drawn into that vortex again, thinking about the easy money to be had for something like writing 400 word articles on some mundane topic, I won’t forgive myself.
I was just thinking, that if your talent has to flourish, then you must do something completely different as your day job to sustain you. 
If your day job is over stimulating(as mine is),then where will there be time to actually do what you want to do?
So, today, I finally opened up my folder, looked at the list of pending writing projects and picked the one that looked the easiest.
I’ve started working on More Than Just Biryani again, which is a cookbook and a little bit like a food memoir. I’m compiling the recipes that are well known across my family, well loved by friends and everyone else who has tasted them. And the idea is to show that Muslim food is more than just biryani.
And I have never felt so free and happy in my life!
