MAHESH RATNAM RAJAN tells Misha Arora what made him write a book on human behaviour and his learnings from the lockdown
This last one year has been testing times for everyone. Each person out there has reacted to the lockdown that followed due to the present pandemic in different ways. While it brought out the worst in some people, in others, it was the best. They turned to their kitchen to hone their cooking skills, while others chose to pick up a paper and pen to pour their thoughts. People as young as seven-year-old took to writing and this includes Mahesh Ratnam Rajan, director of the strategy for a technology company, who launched his first book Illusions of Control on February 7, 2021. The book is a fiction based on human behaviour.
It was the isolation coupled with his experience of travelling around the world and seeing it from a different perspective that inspired Rajan to write this book — how people reacted while confined to their homes. The book highlights his thoughts on how an invisible enemy can turn one’s plans upside down.
“While writing this book, I was apprehensive about my writing skills and the topic that I had chosen to write on. To get a feel about how people would react to what I had written I decided to send it to my friends and asked for their opinion. They liked it and encouraged me to go ahead. I poured out all my experiences and the lessons that I have learnt even if it was for business,” Rajan tells you. Writing a book, he says, makes one learn patience, an extremely valuable lesson.
“This book gave me the most important lesson - that of patience. There were times when I thought what I am writing didn't make sense and I needed to redo. I did just that. I began from scratch. This is the moment when most people give up. But, the love for the book and the motivation to pen my thoughts kept me going. I learnt to be patient and went step by step and did things as required,” he says.
He tells you that one should never fear roadblocks that come in life; instead, one should continue to work towards their goal.
“When one writes a story or a book for that matter, there are high chances that it might not go as one had planned. One may feel that it is not relevant. The mantra is to keep writing even if you feel it is not good. Give it to your friends or family to read who will give an unbiased feedback. If you want to be a writer, be open to criticism. Learn from your mistakes, try to not repeat them and go back to writing again,”he opines.
His timing of course, to debut as a writer came at the wrong time. “I picked out a really bad time to launch a book. I reached out to a couple of publishers and they were reluctant to take a new book especially from a new author. Every writer out there should try to get in touch with different publishers through networking. Everything today happens because of networking. Self-publishing is a good option as the writer is in-charge on how the book comes out,” Ranjan says.