The Steering Wheel
I have been thinking for rather a long time about what to write. In the end, I simply began , because the ideas, in my experience, tend to arrive not before you start, but because you do.
If anyone has wondered why I have been silent these past few months, the honest answer is embarrassingly simple: I did not make it a priority. I have always told myself to prioritise writing and journaling, because those two habits, more than almost anything else, help you take hold of the steering wheel of your own life. Writing helps you see, with startling clarity, which things you are doing because you choose to, and which things you are doing because someone else, somewhere, quietly chose for you. It helps you filter the genuine from the borrowed. It catches you, mid-drift, and asks the rather important question: whose life, precisely, are you living?
Difficult to explain if you have never tried it. But I shall give it my best.
Have you ever genuinely wanted to know what you actually think? What you actually like, separate from the noise of everyone else's opinions pressing warmly against you? The honest truth is that we rarely get to find out, because distraction is relentless and the world is rather loud. You mean to write something. Something pulls you away. And afterwards, you cannot even quite recall what the thought was. You cannot simply hard-code your own values into your brain and declare them non-negotiable.
But writing things down is the closest one gets to doing exactly that. The mind becomes, if you will forgive a slightly technical metaphor, an organised file , easy to search, easy to retrieve. Clean API. Fast response. One does what one can.
And yet, I have not been writing. So why?
I have my excuses, naturally. I would rather not have them. But there they are, a small, slightly shameful collection.
Let me catch you up on what happened while I was quiet.
The Roommate Question
A few weeks ago, my roommate asked me something rather simple. He is a fellow who finds himself deep in the thicket of academic anxiety , worried about his English, worried about his grades, worried about obstacles that, to him, feel mountainous. He looked at me one evening and asked: "If you were in my shoes, what would you do?"
My answer arrived without a moment's hesitation: "Watch tutorials non-stop and practise them."
And then, quite without warning, a light bulb switched on somewhere behind my eyes.
I had not learned anything genuinely new in months.
There I was, dispensing advice with the cheerful confidence of someone who had absolutely no business doing so. I had been drifting , slowly, quietly, without any dramatic announcement , away from the very thing I loved most. Not through surrender. Not through defeat. Simply through neglect. I had stopped writing. I had stopped keeping track of myself. I had climbed out of the steering wheel and let the car go where it pleased.
That is the particular cruelty of not writing. It does not crash you. It does not sound an alarm. It simply lets you drift, pleasantly and imperceptibly, until one day a roommate asks you an innocent question and you realise, with a start, that you have been giving directions to a place you have not visited in quite some time.
How I Ended Up Here
(The full story of what I call The Great Pivot lives here, for those who prefer their narrative with proper context.)
The short version , and I shall keep it deliberately short, because some stories earn their mystery , is that I left things behind. Work. University in Malabe. A particular version of myself that had, frankly, run its course. And that leaving eventually brought me here, to SLIIT KandyUni, at Pallekele.
Which is, I must say, genuinely beautiful. Walking in for the first time, I felt something rather close to pride. Not on my own behalf , I had done nothing to deserve the scenery , but for the place itself. It has that effect.
I received a small preview of Kandy's character before I even arrived. I rang the support services and greeted them in English. They hung up immediately.
Right. Splendid. Message received.
Colombo vs. Kandy: A Completely Unfair Comparison (Which I Shall Make Anyway)
Before I say a word about Kandy, let me be clear about something: what follows is my perspective, at this particular moment, from where I happen to be standing. It is not a verdict. It is not a documentary. It is, at best, one man's honest impression, offered in good faith and with the full acknowledgment that I could be entirely wrong about half of it.
Colombo, I should tell you, very nearly broke me. Not any single thing , it was rather the whole ensemble. Relationships. Work. Money and the absence of money. Twelve-hour days. Four hours on the road. The pressure of a city that never stops moving, never lowers its voice, and takes a rather dim view of stillness. And the phrase , delivered with such weary authority by so many different people , "Kesaru, you have to understand." I heard that sentence so many times that I began to feel it was the city's unofficial motto.
And yet , and this is the rather inconvenient part , Colombo does something to you. The chaos and the sheer relentlessness of the place generate a certain electric energy in the people who survive it. They are plugged in. They know what is happening in the world. They move with it. They have something , even if it is buried, even if it is their own quiet secret , a sense of forward momentum. A book with a cover and a first page, even if the remaining chapters are yet to be written.
I came to Kandy. And everything, quite wonderfully, levelled down.
The temperature changed first. Indoors, it is almost always pleasantly cool. The pace dropped. People are more relaxed, which is genuinely better for one's nerves and, I suspect, one's general longevity. The beauty of the city did something to my chest , the hills, the fog, the particular way evenings settle here, as though they have nowhere urgent to be. All that accumulated weight from Colombo simply... swayed away.
It was rather marvellous. I had needed it more than I knew.
What I Found Here (And What I Did Not)
I began, as I always do, with the library.
I found some genuinely meaningful connections there , some brilliant, rather handsome people, as it happens. But I noticed something that I kept turning over in my mind, the way you worry at a loose thread without quite meaning to. Many of them seemed lost inside the academic machine. They treated English as an insurmountable wall rather than a door with a slightly stiff handle. They attended lectures not out of curiosity, but out of a grim sense of obligation, as though education were a sentence to be served rather than a gift to be unwrapped.
Now , I should be fair. People in Colombo do not all love studying either. But in Colombo, people tend to enjoy something. There is some particular interest, some private passion, tucked away behind the busyness. Even if it is hidden, you find it eventually. A book with a forward, even if the pages remain unwritten.
I found that sense of forward , that quiet readiness for one's own story , to be missing in many of the people I met here. Some had possessed passions once, it seemed, but had let them go, or forgotten them so thoroughly they no longer felt the absence.
What does that to a person? What quietly extinguishes a dream while its owner is still young enough to dream? I find I still do not have a satisfactory answer.
The academic staff, I should note, are a different matter entirely , genuinely impressive teachers, more invested in the actual business of teaching than many I have encountered elsewhere. And slowly, toward the end of last semester, I found the ones I had been quietly hoping existed: the geeks. The curious ones. The people whose eyes light up at the right kind of question.
Two of them deserve a proper mention.
Thathsilu , one of the most creative eyes I have ever had the pleasure of encountering. The way he looks at design is something I genuinely admire. Most people look at a screen and see a screen. He looks at it and sees a feeling.
Javeen , in many respects, another version of myself when it comes to work. The sort of person who requires no external motivation whatsoever, because the work itself is the motivation. Rare and rather wonderful.
Javeen on LinkedIn · Thathsilu on LinkedIn
The three of us, in due course, started something together: Sobersided (sobersided.com). More on that at a later date.
Do I Miss Colombo?
No.
Every time I return, it arrives in exactly the same rush , frustration, disappointment, nostalgia, sadness, hunger. Trains, buses, sweat, pressure. The "Kesaru, you have to understand" dialogue, delivered fresh by a new cast of characters. Dogs, bureaucracy, traffic, tuk-tuks, coffee, the absence of coffee, money, the absence of money, anger, loss, brutality, unexpected kindness, melancholic music played at an unreasonable volume.
All of it, every last bit, levelled down in Kandy.
I like that. I do not complain about it. I enjoy every aspect of it , the quiet, the cool air, the unhurried pace of a city that has not yet decided to be in a hurry.
But at the back of my mind, there is a small and persistent worry. I may be drifting out of touch. Out of the competitive world. Out of the current that keeps moving whether or not one is swimming in it.
That worry is real, and I think it is worth naming. I push myself every day , books, the internet, whatever I can find , to keep the momentum alive, to ensure that the stillness does not quietly become stagnation while I am busy enjoying the scenery.
Because here is what I know now, after the roommate question, after the light bulb moment, after several months of entirely unannounced drifting:
Stillness is not the enemy. Unawareness is.
And writing , this thing I keep neglecting, keep returning to, keep offering slightly sheepish apologies to , writing is the only reliable way I know to stay aware. To sit back down in the driver's seat. To ask the question that matters more than most:
Whose life, exactly, am I living right now?
I love Kandy.
And I am still, very much, learning how to love it without losing myself somewhere beautifully inside it.
~Kesaru