The Burping Bullfrog

If someone had told 25-year-old me that one day I’d be juggling research proposals, science explainers, video scripts, slide decks, blogs, and people… I would’ve thought they were patronising me.

After grad school, life greeted me with the soft, warm (actually, hot) hug of a recession. Within the pharma industry, I managed an impressive hat-trick: hired, laid off, hired again, laid off again, hired once more, only to be laid off again. Even my OPT gave up on me. So I packed my bags, swallowed my pride, and returned home, utterly confused about what to do next.

I joined a small publishing house. Let’s just say the experience wasn’t my personal triumph. I didn’t work hard enough, the boss and I did quite get along, I was an immature prick, and the whole thing sank like the Titanic. Meanwhile, my debt was climbing Mount Everest.

Then came a breather. A tiny assignment: design a database for a materials science project. Database? Me? I didn’t say no, defying logic. I learned MS Access from scratch, built the thing, and waited for the modest cheque I imagined would arrive. When it did… it was not modest. It was dollar-denominated magic. It wiped out my entire INR debt in one swoop. That was the day I started believing in miracles.

Then came my cousin and his R&D company and his badly written research proposals. He asked me to clean them up. I did. He gave me more. Then he asked me to write new ones altogether. Not mere writing, mind you. Reading requirements, identifying gaps, crafting solutions, and turning them into proposals. A niche job if there ever was one. And a job that somehow fit me like a bespoke glove.

And here we are—25 years later. Still writing proposals. Still loving it. Except… this year’s been choppy. Mega research funding cuts in a certain unnamed country (you know who you are). Work slowed down. I panicked a little. (Fine, a lot.)

But the cousin-boss pivoted. Suddenly he was chief of some scientific society and needed talks, speeches, and presentations. So this year, I became Chief Presentation Wizard. And let me shamelessly declare: I make a mean presentation. Turns out creativity doesn’t care whether it’s writing or slide design; it comes from the same slightly frazzled corner of the brain.

Meanwhile, for the past decade or so, I’d been writing blog posts for a tech company. Nothing fancy, just one blog post now and then. When proposal work elsewhere slowed, they stepped in with more responsibility. Today, I manage their entire content universe: management, blog content creation (“writing”, in archaic English), delegating to writers, developing blog strategy, SEO analysis (yep, still learning new things), making video posts, web stories.

And someone who briefly met someone else I had known only through blogging, got my contact and I write press releases for them, now and then.

It’s been a long, unpredictable, chaotic journey. I’ve reinvented myself more times than I can count. But today, standing in this whirl of words, ideas, science, scripts, and slides, I feel one thing most strongly: gratitude.

I am humbled by every opportunity that found me—especially the ones I didn’t even know how to ask for.

And I hope I never retire. I hope I keep creating, writing, designing, and dreaming right up until my last breath.