Age 10: How Losing Everything Created a Writer

Phulenagar to Nigdi

I was born in Phulenagar, PCMC, Pune. A small flat, a modest neighbourhood. All my friends were 6 to 8 years older — they wouldn't let me play cricket until my mom forced the society kids to include me. I was an extrovert. I loved going out. I loved being surrounded by people.

In 2007, when I was 10, my family moved 5 kilometres away — near Nigdi.

Five kilometres. That's nothing on a map. But for a 10-year-old, it was the end of the world.

The Turning Point

I lost all my friends. In the new area, I had nobody. I became reserved. A lone wolf. I'd ride my bike 4-5 km back to play with the old friends, but it wasn't the same.

I had nobody to talk to.

And there was another problem: my mom, my first best friend, would share my secrets with my dad. The trust breach made something click — I need to keep things to myself.

So I started writing in a diary.

The Diary Becomes Poetry

My dad — or maybe I read it somewhere — said: "Write what you feel today. Read it 5-10 years later. You'll be amazed."

The diary became my confidant. Then my English teacher, Gita Miss, pushed me toward poetry. She never gave high marks — maximum 5.5 out of 10 even for good work — which made me crave excellence. I started writing poems to learn vocabulary, using extremely heavy, complex words that a 28-year-old wouldn't understand.

Poetry became my superpower. The vocabulary. The rhythm. The ability to compress emotion into a few lines.

From Diary to Draft

By 7th or 8th standard, I'd written my first full book draft — inspired by The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, about my best friend Tanmay. It was rough. It was unpolished. But it was a book.

The writer was born in 2007, in a small flat near Nigdi, because a 10-year-old boy had nobody to talk to.

Nineteen years later, that lonely boy has written 1,537 books containing over 44 million words. 68 of them are published and readable here.

— From the desk of Atharva Inamdar, March 2026