You Made A Thing, Now What?
(Hello for the second time this year)
It’s been a while! The last time I wrote to you was the first of February. Since then, I’ve changed jobs, moved through the particular haze that a big life change drops over everything, and — silently, unevenly — kept working on the little word game WordSutra.
(To new subscribers who wandered over here for the games and got this older newsletter with my writings instead — those can be received in your inboxes here.)
This week WordSutra turns seventy-five!
Here’s where I was a few evenings ago. Arun (my school buddy and fellow WordSutra creator) and I were on a Zoom call. We live in different cities, and we’d just switched over from Google Meet because the free tier is so much better on Zoom.
Arun had built a puzzle, and it was good. Clever, layered, and proper hard. Regional writers writing under pen names. Andhra food. A ‘joker’ or 10th word that fooled you twice over.
And I sat there on the call, gently prising open the game…to make it easier.
That moment is the whole story of where I am with this game. When I started, I wanted to puzzle people — to build the kind of knot that makes you feel clever for untying it. But somewhere across seventy-five games, that changed. Now I mostly want to hand someone a few unhurried minutes of fun and let them walk away lighter.
I didn’t decide this on purpose. I noticed it happening, the way you notice you’ve started taking a new route home.
Nobody warns you about this part. There’s a lot of noise made about making a thing — the launch, the announcement, the first burst of “look what I built.” That part is genuinely thrilling, and it’s also the difficult-but-also-easy part.
What very few people talk about is the long middle that comes after. The Tuesday-night middle. The middle where the novelty has worn off and it’s just you and the work, and some weeks, honestly, it feels like a chore.
(I guess this is not exactly LinkedInSpeak!)
We lost months in that middle, too. Early on I realised WordSutra had a real flaw — if you failed, it never showed you the answers. Fixing that meant rebuilding the mechanics with Thomas, our game-coder, and it took far longer than anyone wanted. But the game that actually came out the other side is a better one.
What keeps me in it is partly Arun. He’s gone from enabling me to pushing me — asking for regular check-ins, making puzzles, publishing them himself. Bala, my other school pal in this group, built something clever on GitHub that’s waiting for Arun and me to grow into. It’s good to have these folks in the muddling middle.
And here’s the thing I’ve made my peace with: I don’t fully know what WordSutra is! Some days it’s a thing I’m proud of entirely for its own sake: an original game, three sets and a hopscotch grid, made by three school buddies and one college friend from Bangalore.
Other days, it feels like a step toward something I can’t quite see yet. I’ve stopped needing to know which. Our lives aren’t shaped like a single destination. They’re a series of journeys telescoping into each other — and each place I arrive turns out to be the start of the next leaving.
For now, the journey is a small, eccentric word game that turns seventy-five this week. I’d love it if you played — and if you’d like each new one as it lands, the easiest way is to follow along on the WhatsApp channel.
Prefer email? You can also get the games on the WordSutra Substack.
The new job
Media Buddhi started off right here under the patronage of Govindraj Ethiraj, my previous employer. Had it not been for my work at BOOM, I wouldn’t have done the 200-something posts and videos here and elsewhere.
Somewhere along the way, it stopped being about media literacy and morphed into a sandbox for thinking and experimentation.
In February, I moved to the International Center for Journalists’ IJNet via another person, Nasr ul Hadi, who’s been mentioned in this Substack. This takes me away from India-centric work, but also gives me license to focus on what’s happening in the profession of journalism.
This shouldn’t mean too much difference to you here. I will continue to send the occasional piece related to Indian politics, culture and polarisation.