Author Profiles: Sachin Dharwadker
Sachin’s weblog, The Technology Charge, was featured on Seedling several weeks ago. We spent some time talking to Sachin, getting to know him and exploring his motivations behind his website. Below is the interview conducted with him over the course of several weeks.
Who are you, where are you from, and what do you do?
My name is Sachin Dharwadker, and I’m a sophomore at James Madison Memorial High School in Madison, Wisconsin in the U.S. Being in the middle of high school, my life during the week is somewhat hectic: I’m constantly juggling between schoolwork, basketball, and my life on the internet. When I’m not doing one, I’m usually doing the other two.
My parents are originally from India; I was born in Oklahoma City, and my family moved to Madison just before I started first grade. We travel a lot—I spent the better part of seventh grade in India, going to an Indian school, and it was during this time that I developed my unhealthy obsession with the technology industry. Before that, it was cars. Before that, it was Transformers, Batman, and anything that wore a cape.
As of today, my primary interests aside from tech lie in film, acting, sports, and good writing. However, it’s all subject to change.
What was your inspiration behind TC? Why did you start the site, and what’s been your motivation behind it so far?
I just wanted to write about consumer technology. Before The Technology Charge, I had played around on platforms like Blogger, Vox and WordPress.com, but it was only when I discovered Squarespace that I really took an interest in doing what I do now. I started out in eighth grade with SachinStyle.com (no longer live), but after a while, I felt I needed some “rebranding,” as they say. So in late 2009, The Technology Charge was born.
I started out writing long, infrequent posts. But over time, I developed a taste for the type of content you see on Daring Fireball, Shawn Blanc, and more recently, The Brooks Review: relatively frequent long-form articles punctuated by posts linking to relevant material elsewhere on the web, with heavy use of blockquotes and opinion. It’s a format I’ve come to love, and I use it not to emulate those who do so better than me, but because it just feels right.
You can obviously see Daring Fireball‘s influence in The Technology Charge‘s design, and I’ll say that John Gruber is definitely an inspiration when it comes to the idea of writing on the web; the writing itself, however, is inspired by no one except me.
Besides switching to more linked list posts, would you say your writing abilities/style has changed at all since beginning TC? What have you learned along the way?
Things have definitely changed for the better. I remember deleting every article save for a few in early 2010, because I was so unsatisfied with some of the early stuff I wrote. A few of them were tumbls masquerading as articles, and others were beyond repair. I decided at that point to follow that age-old idea: “quality, not quantity.”
Along the way, I’ve learned to not force-feed dry humor (a habit which Shawn Blanc was quick to point out), to trust my readers’ intelligence, and to stay focused on the topic at hand; much of my early writing on The Technology Charge rambled like Mark Zuckerberg at the D8 Conference. I now realize that failure is a necessary obstacle on the road to success.
I end up writing whatever’s on my mind and hope that someone out there will enjoy it. Have you had the desire to do the same on your site? What do you do when you want to write about something other than technology?
All writers struggle with that problem, including me. Because I’m adamant about keeping The Technology Charge on topic, there are other places on the web I where I muse about “everything else”: SachinStyle (which is not the same as the site I mentioned earlier) and Three Paragraphs. Both are powered by Tumblr, which I adore. The latter is where I posted tech-related links before I started doing this on TC, along with miscellaneous fragments of information. Since I now do links on TC, I’ve effectively abandoned Three Paragraphs in favor of the more “personal” SachinStyle. I inaugurated that site with a review of Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
What’s your general method of writing an article? Do you just sit down and write something all at once, or do you require more time for thought and revision?
I usually start writing immediately after I think of something to write about, but I almost never finish an entire article in one sitting. I tend to work on a paragraph or two at a time, with long stretches of time in between writing sessions. These “breaks” (I say it like that because during this time, I’m usually taking care of something more important, like homework or…my social life) are when my opinions are fully formulated, and maybe even altered. Rarely do I have everything mapped out or fully realized when I begin writing.
I consider myself somewhat of an English buff, so the process of editing my work is of great importance to me. Even when I’m convinced that I didn’t make a mistake, I always find something to fix or improve. Polished, concise, and error-free prose is something I take pride in.
Any future aspirations as a writer? Do you hope to actually make something out of TC, and perhaps do writing as part of a career path down the road?
I would like to write as long as I am able to. As for my career path, I’m pretty focused on going into acting. However, I also have a strong interest in screenwriting, so any writing skills I have now will pay off if I end up doing a lot of that.
If the career in showbiz doesn’t work out, I can see myself writing professionally about the topics I cover on TC. I don’t have plans to end the site any time soon, so even if I’m writing somewhere else for a living, TC will probably live on.
And, that’s it. Thank you very much for taking the time to do this interview, Sachin.
In the future, we hope to do more author profiles from sites we’ve featured on Seedling.
