Nobody Planned This: What 26 Kerala Creators Told Me About How Things Actually Begin

He started a book channel to impress a girl.

That’s the origin story. No vision board, no content strategy, no ten-year plan carefully mapped out on a whiteboard. Just a person who wanted someone to notice him, decided to talk about books on camera, and one day looked up and found himself running one of Trivandrum’s most recognisable literary channels.

I’ve been thinking about that story a lot lately.

I recorded twenty-six conversations for Season 1 of Nightout Talkies — twenty-six people who are building something with their creativity in Kerala. I went back through all of them recently, looking for the thread I might have missed the first time. The thing that holds across nearly every conversation is this: nobody planned it.

A dancer started posting because she was bored at home and had a phone. A photographer started shooting because a mentor handed him a camera and said, go. A muralist just kept painting walls across the country until the walls started paying attention. A food blogger ate his way through Trivandrum’s restaurants and someone said, film it. A priest started vlogging his daily life because he thought people might find it interesting.

The plan — the intention, the brand, the content calendar — came after. Sometimes months after. Sometimes years.

I think we tell the story of creative careers the wrong way around. We hear the finished version and construct a beginning that matches it: someone who knew, who decided, who set out. But almost none of the people I spoke to would describe their beginning that way. What they describe is more like stumbling into a door that turned out to be open.

There’s something worth sitting with in that.

The accidental quality of these beginnings doesn’t embarrass any of them. Most of them speak about it with a kind of affection — the crush who never knew she’d changed the course of someone’s professional life, the mentor who handed over a camera without knowing what he was starting, the lockdown that took away everything else and left only the thing they actually wanted to do.

What I noticed is that the creators who seem most secure in what they’re doing are also the ones who hold their origin story lightly. They’re not trying to make it more heroic than it was. They know it started small and sideways and by accident, and they’ve stopped needing it to be anything else.

The clarity — the sense of this is mine, this is what I’m building — came from doing the thing for a while first. Not from deciding to do it.

Which makes me wonder what it would look like if we talked about creative beginnings the way they actually happen. Not as a story of intention and vision, but as a story of accidental commitment — of someone who started something for the wrong reasons and stayed for the right ones.

Sreekuttan never got the girl. But he got a bookshop in Trivandrum, a channel people watch for the honest warmth of it, and a career he never saw coming. I’m not sure he’d trade the outcome for a cleaner origin story.

The full conversations from Season 1 of Nightout Talkies are on YouTube. If you’d like to hear how any of these beginnings actually sounded, the whole playlist is below.