(All Rights Reserved by the Author)
Date: 28th April 2025
There are moments in life when you feel the world has decided your destiny — and not in your favor.
For me, that moment came early.
In school, literature was my biggest enemy. I tried, I failed, I got scolded — again and again. No matter how many times I picked up the pen, it slipped through my fingers like water. Words — beautiful for others — seemed stubborn and foreign to me.
I buried that hurt deep inside and moved on.
Engineering became my escape, and later, my career.
But life wasn’t easy there either. I found myself posted in harsh terrains, juggling impossible projects, racing against impossible deadlines.
There was no time to think, no space to dream.
The little flame of creativity inside me flickered, almost extinguished, surviving only through the few random lines scribbled on dusty notepads.
Then came 2019 — the year everything changed.
A massive heart attack brought me to my knees, and a heart valve replacement surgery anchored me to a hospital bed, beneath a glaring ICU light that never dimmed.
Lying there, staring endlessly at the white ceiling, unable to move, unable to eat as I wished, unable even to turn sideways, the reality hit me hard.
I realized — the life I had known was gone.
Freedom would no longer be mine so easily.
I would have to rebuild everything — body, mind, spirit.
And somewhere in that emptiness, a soft voice inside me rose.
“You still have something left to do,” it said.
“You were not born to be forgotten.”
“You can still write. You can still dream.”
Every sleepless night, that voice grew louder. It reminded me of all the thrashings I took in school, all the moments I felt small and insignificant. It asked me — Are you going to let those memories define you forever?
And somewhere between the pain and the silence, I answered back — No.
When I returned home, fragile but determined, I started writing — truly writing — for the first time in my life.
The words that once betrayed me now became my companions.
Slowly, line by line, I wrote my first book: “A Sanguine Tale: Unfolding the Life of a Project Engineer.”
That little book, born out of an ICU bed’s loneliness and a tired heart’s hope, went on to win the Best Emerging Writer Award at KLC 24 and the Golden Book Award.
Today, writing is not just what I do — it is who I am.
It is the language of my survival, the music of my second life.
To everyone reading this — if you ever feel you are too late, too broken, too lost to start again —
I am here to tell you: you are not.
Dreams don’t have deadlines.
Sometimes, they are just waiting for you to find them again.
– Rajat Chandra Sarmah
Instagram: @rajatchandrasarmah5
Website: musingsofrajat.wordpress.com
YouTube: @conversewithasmile
