Transitioning Careers: The move from Engineering to Writing made me feel DUMB

How did the transition from engineering to writing make me feel? Pretty DUMB, I must admit.

In Pune, you signed up for engineering if you were smart. You signed up for commerce or arts if you were…“Dumb”.

It was a deep-rooted bias in our city’s DNA.

One afternoon, during an annual college fest, my engineering classmates were standing outside the mechanical drawing hall, watching students from other colleges, visiting us. My classmate deflected his chin towards a few girls parking their scooters, and said in Marathi “hee arts college chi mulgi kiti dumb distay”. (These girls from art colleges look so dumb). The stereotype was hardwired — arts, creatives, and commerce meant “sparkless and stupid”.

I loved engineering — I couldn’t imagine studying anything else. Subjects like Mechanics and Statistics came intuitively to me (though I shied away from probability and thermodynamics). I was blessed to go to a college where many of us were non-IIT material (haha) — it helped me shine academically. Intelligence for us engineers meant marks, maths and numbers. Later In office, I’d be spending hours over excel spreadsheets creating models, calculations and insights from data.

It all happened within a year.

I moved cities, teams and projects, all at the same time and it was over my 29th birth year, when I found happiness in creative pursuits. I was engrossed in the…