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Welcome back, to myself!

7 years is a long time to have abstained from writing a blog. I maintained a blog (this one!) back in the day when I was doing my PhD, and I had named it 'Playing with Electrons' because my PhD research was to engineer devices & fabricate them wherein I'd trick the electrons to my advantage by tailoring their energy landscape. And then I stopped blogging, since Nov 2013. That's nearly 7 years. I often thought of creating a new blog but gave up on that idea for reasons I don't remember now. Finally, I thought I'd revive my old blog & continue where I had left.

Yesterday, I tried to read a few blogs I had written back in 2012/13, and I realized how much one's thoughts, expectations and understanding of things change over time. Growing old makes one wiser though not necessarily smarter - I recently read somewhere. So here I am, welcoming myself back to my old blog, growing wiser (perhaps), coached by life and shaped by experiences. 

I will try to write as often as possible, though, I must admit that 'my own time' is now a lot more limited compared to that in 2012-13. I have become slightly more effficient in managing time but still I'm a novice at this art. Lack of time is not a good excuse for not doing something. One who efficiently manages time ends up accomplishing a lot more than poor time managers like me. But then, there are so many books to read and things to dream of that reality soon catches up and pulls one down to the ground. 

It's not like that I didn't write in the last 7 years. I did write but never put anything up on my blog. I wrote short sci-fi stories, I even wrote a whole novel in 2014-15 (or 2016?) when my academic/research & family work loads were fairly light. It was my first attempt at writing a full length novel, and it ended up being an incoherent story, I realized that. Even today, I dream of writing a sci-fi novel (or novels) one day which I can publish, because it's one of those wishes buried deep in my heart. I do have quite a few plots in my mind already!

However, there's a price one has to pay for anything. Writing a novel back in 2014/15 did cost me a lot of time which I could have otherwise used for planning my research activities better, or reading up on technical books/journals, or doing some theoretical work to publish research papers. Or writing proposals to get more funds to set up lab facilities etc. Those could have helped me move up on the ladder of my research & academic career a bit more than where I am today. So, do I regret it? I don't know, frankly. I have never asked it myself. Today, if I spend even 1 hour per day to write a novel, I will spend 365 hours in a year which are precious hours for me, very much precious. I can't afford to spend that on writing novel. I spent the last 15-20 mins to write this blog. I could have spent that time to read up something technical (I've too many books to read, in technical areas, that are lying on my table, right in front of my eyes!).

So, why do I write? I write for myself, to satisfy my intellect. I write for the same reason a music lover plays a guitar at her home or a soccer enthusiast runs to the field whenever he gets a chance. I write for the same reason one watches Netflix or one does gardening. I love it. That's all. 


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