I am canceling my successful college fundraiser

I have had a change of heart.

I have had a change of heart. Strike that. I have had a moment of clarity, a revelation. Even as the money has come in very generously, hitting a mind-blowing 11 percent (4.9lac INR) in the first 48 hours of its launch - a figure I thought impossible, and even as more and more money is being pledged in my name, I can’t help but feel a sense of hollowness, and dissonance with my own self the closer I reach to the target. Last night, I had a call with a generous donor from the US, with whose help, I would certainly be able to raise all the money I need for pursuing my degree in the UK. I nodded numbly through the call, as money was being promised to me, and told him that I would get back to him.

An hour after the call, something became clear to me. I was not going to go to the UK for this degree. I wish I could tell you there was just one grand reason for this decision, one moral monopoly which dictated it all, but there are more than a few.

First of all, I never wanted to raise money this way, not the very least by adding money to an education system which seems to never have its fill. Why I ended up doing it; you will read later on. Many of you contributed 50, 100, INR to me, many students of school and college who read my work and follow my journey, and touched as I was, brought to tears even, yet I could not help but see how I was taking this hard earned money, staked on my reputation, promises, and relationships with you, and handing it over to a system which seems to quite honestly not give a shit about education - so colonial, oppressive, capitalist, and complicit in its making that any money handed over from here to there, might as well be burned at the pyre. More so, from my positionality as a Kashmiri, the most affected by the excesses of an increasingly militarized, consumerist, capitalist world, this decision is political and hence personal.

Even then, I do not think I am a paragon of morality. I have other reasons as well. One another reason. One deeply personal reason.

For more than ten years, I have built my writing practice all on my own. When I arrived back home in Kashmir in the winter of 2016 after having finished my civil engineering degree, I was very sick. I surrendered myself to a cold newsroom which balmed my nerves and inflammation, and here I plunged into the depths of my dreams of writing. Day and night.

Earlier in school, I had begged my father for a computer. Three years of begging passed, and then one day a computer arrived from Bombay, which my guardian at the time immediately put under lock and key. For three days without a pause, I cried, begged, starved, but he did not budge. He would not let me have the computer for reasons purely sadistic. I know better now. So, on day four, I begged him to let me have the keyboard; just the keyboard. He agreed. I was 15, maybe 16, not even. For almost two years, I mock-typed on the keyboard for the joy of typing, and learned without a desktop screen (that mythical thing) the skills of fast typing. I would time myself as imaginary words appeared in front of my eyes, and would marvel at how good I had gotten at these words only I could see. Madness.

It was during this time that I once got hold of an old phone, the one with the keypad, and realised that when writing, I preferred the sound of keys a lot more than the gliding rustle of a pen. I have always rejoiced at being able to type. Even as I write this, words flow from the tendons of my heart, murmuring through the tendons of my hands, clicking against the tactile disposition of my keyboard, onto the desktop I now have. And then to your eyes.

So, when I chose to abandon the path of engineering which was set out for me by those who wished me well, those who did not have the gall to follow their dreams, it tore everything away from me. The world wanted nothing to have to do with me. My family wanted nothing to have to do with me. I was essentially thrown to the dogs. Yet something mad - a congenital arrogance - drove me to write, to write, to write. To hitch rides to the press colony in the morning, and then walk back home 5-6 kilometres in the dead of night, in a pre-covid Srinagar haunted by military rifles and rabid dogs. I did not yield. My sickness clouded my eyes, my walks stunted by sudden and temporary loss of vision, but yield I did not. I would not have my spirit crushed.

When one writes, hidden worlds are revealed to him. To write, hence, was not to hold on merely and madly to the act of writing, but all else that came with it. It was to plunge into the depths of my soul, and salvage my heart, and my childhood. For me, it meant to have another chance at a childhood I never had, to follow my dreams that were suffocated long before they arose from my larynx. At this point, many wanted me to drown, many pushed me to the depths. I raged and snarled like a mad hyena at times, whimpering like a wet dog at others, but I never gave up. I allow myself this moment of pride only in retrospect. All those years, a bleak whisper of light lit up my path, and with squinted fatigue-ridden eyes, I held on.

It is that light that made my life and it is my dreams that made me who I am today. The cells in my body, the breath in my lungs, the blood in my veins - I owe them all to my madness, to my raging desire to hear the click-click-click of the keyboard as I sometimes salivated at the marvel of what flowed through me.

Forfeit your dreams, my readers, and I promise you, you forfeit yourself. Hold steadfast to that which feels right, and your body and soul with be reborn infinitely. You will be granted many lives; you will be gifted immortality itself. The fumbling blind arrow of your intuition: it may not land at the right mark from the get go, but it will catch flight and will take you with it - the only mark which will take you to the heavens. And heaven, is here for the taking, if you listen to your heart.

In following my journey, I have had immeasurable sadness, immeasurable grief, desolation, hunger, loneliness, lovelessness, but I promise you, whoever is reading this right now, a young boy, a young girl, I have also known joy like no other. I have plunged into the depths of my soul and brought to surface all my dreams - the strength to dream, the strength to see, and the strength to serve. And I have seen magic. And I have seen that it is real.

This is my most honest truth, bare bones and heart on a platter.

It is to save that happiness, that peace, that path, that I am letting go of this opportunity I spent more than four years chasing. I don’t know what drove me to pursue this so steadfastly, but if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known that this is not meant for me. I wouldn’t have known that this is not a measure of my worth, that this is nothing to deserve. That is how I learn things. I taste them, and then I know.

There may however be one worldly reason. Over the years, there has been unprecedented clampdown on journalists, writers, artists, and that has made lives so very difficult for us, forcing us to take counterintuitive, corrosive decisions for our souls - such as pursing a structured, regimented system of instruction, education. We are starved and we grasp at the vapid promises of institution. I know such education may have its merits, but it also is becoming an increasingly fascist undertaking one must be very careful while pursuing. My Tiny can and does teach me more about life than any degree ever can.

I might go for studies/mentorship at some point, but only and only when it feels right.

So what is a government in the face of destiny?

What is a fascist state in the face of time?

What is an institution in the face of a beating heart?

I will be alright. The future will be alright. I want to write a book, or I want to become someone who writes a book. I have many in mind. I don’t want to get published, not for the sake of getting published. I want to sell and gift postcards, and I want to distribute free pamphlets, and talk to people about the food they eat, what ails and aches them, and ask them what I can do to help. I am Wes Anderson’s Lobby Boy from the Grand Budapest Hotel - and of that I am certain.

A final note (for those who helped)

All of you have come forward like siblings and helped me, and I know that while many of you might not have been comfortable with the path I was taking, you still showed up with faith in me, and it is with that faith that I return to you.

For all those who have contributed, you will receive a message from Milaap by midday tomorrow, and the process of refund will be initiated. Within a week’s time, all of you will have your money back. I thank you, every single one of you who contributed, shared, spread word for me. I am, as of this moment, forever indebted.

If I ever publish a book of my own, please help me send it out into the world. That is all I ask.

• Yours, Rumpelstiltskin