Meet Naran Shettigar, our newest staff writer!
“Hi! My name is Naran Shettigar and I’m an incoming junior at Westlake High School. My journey to becoming a staff writer for Austin Street Humans has been like looking into a muddy pond trying to find the fish. Half a year ago, I never would’ve thought of or even considered documenting the lives of the homeless. So what changed?
I really don’t know. But I suppose I’ve always been interested in writing, and therefore observing. Up until a couple months ago, I’d write short stories and essays, most of them about wars, real or imaginary. Then my muse got up and left, and a new one walked in. Now, I don’t think my shift in interest was the result of an epiphany. Rather, through a gradual mixing of what I knew before and what I learned from looking around me, I felt a new, and yet old motivation to explore the unknown. Soon, the duality of everyday existence—black and white, life and death, truth and untruth—crept into my thoughts and writing. Moral ambiguity? I’m not sure. But whatever it was, I got interested in the two sides to every story. The heads to every tails.
For me, joining Austin Street Humans was about encountering another side. In this confusing and messy society, searching for commonality within differences makes the uncomfortable comfortable and the unknown known. To accept the muddinness of the pond and the elusiveness of the fish is to realize that an objective meaning is hard to find. Everybody cries. Everybody laughs. Everybody is different. Everybody is the same. Contradiction is rife, but by swimming in it, I hope to share the little moments of human empathy with my fellow human beings.”
Stay tuned for Naran’s first story!