Table of Contents
About This Book
Chapter 1: The Boy Who Didn’t Fit the Template What’s Next…
About This Book
This book is not just a story about love. It is a story about becoming.
When It Begins starts with struggle, illness, failure, and the quiet fight to stand up again when life pushes you down. It is about finding your way when you don’t fit the template, and learning to move forward when everything feels uncertain.
This is also a story of one-sided love the kind that is felt deeply, but lived silently. Not every love story is about being together. Some are about waiting. Some are about growing. Some are about learning to let go.
The first part of this book is about healing, self-discovery, and choosing a different path. Love comes into the story slowly, and in its own time quietly, honestly, and without guarantees.
This is not a perfect story. It is a real one.
If you have ever felt lost, broken, or unsure about where life is taking you, I hope you find a small part of yourself in these pages.
This is how my story begins.
— Sanskar Bhartiya
Chapter 1: The Boy Who Didn’t Fit the Template
“Sometimes when life doesn’t give you what you want, it gives you a story worth telling.”
Hi. My name is Sanskar.
This is not a success story. At least, not yet. This is the story of a boy who began his journey carrying depression, negative thoughts, and a quiet fear of being left behind. Even today, I don’t know whether I should call myself unlucky or just someone chosen for a harder road. Sometimes I feel God saved me during Covid. Sometimes I wonder if He saved me only to see how much I could endure.
Covid wasn’t just a virus. It was a pause button on the world. Streets went silent. Homes became offices, schools, and hospitals at the same time. People lost families, jobs, dreams. Some lost their lives. I stayed alive. And in India, surviving is never enough you are expected to prove that your survival has a purpose.
After my 10th, the same question started visiting my house every day like an uninvited guest:
“Aage kya karega? Doctor banega? Engineer banega? Kuch banna bhi hai ya bas timepass?”
I was the elder one. And elders don’t get the luxury of being confused for long. Responsibility is placed on your shoulders before you even understand its weight.
Dreams are discussed, but decisions are made by fear, fear of society, fear of relatives, fear of those invisible judges we call them - 4 log.
The truth? I never wanted to be a doctor. I never wanted to be an engineer either. But saying “I don’t know” in an Indian family feels like admitting a crime. For a few days, I thought about engineering until reality reminded me that maths and I were strangers, and physics was a language I never learned to speak.
I was a biology student. I loved anatomy. The human body felt like a miracle to me-so perfectly designed, so intelligently connected. Sometimes I would think, If God is real, He must be the best engineer of all.
But admiration doesn’t make you a topper.
I wasn’t a good student. I wasn’t good at sports. I wasn’t good at anything, actually.
I didn’t even know where I belonged. I just knew that wherever I was, I felt out of place, like a wrong puzzle piece forced into the right box.
And then came the most powerful decision-maker in every middle-class Indian home: “4 log kya kahenge?”
So, my life entered a phase that deserves a story of its owncoaching classes, pressure, expectations, long days, silent nights, and battles that don’t look dramatic from outside but change you completely from inside. Aphase where you wake up with targets and sleep with guilt. That phase shaped me, broke me, and taught me things I’m not ready to tell here yet.
Maybe one day, it will become another chapter… or another book.
But something unexpected happened in that phase. I studied.
For once, I tried seriously. I stopped running from books and started sitting with them. My marks started improving.
Teachers started noticing.
People started saying, “Ho jayega.”
For a moment… even I believed it.
For the first time, I allowed myself to imagine a future that didn’t look like failure.
“Just when you start trusting life, it reminds you who’s in control.”
Just when hope started feeling real, my body betrayed me.
The diagnosis sounded like a foreign word: Avascular Necrosis (AVN).Asimple meaning with a cruel reality-my hip bone was slowly dying.
Not my dreams. Not my hopes. My bone.
The doctors were calm, like they always are when they deliver life-changing news. Surgery was necessary. There was no shortcut. No medicine. No escape. The dates were decided as if my life was just another entry in a hospital register:
NEET on 7th May.
Surgery on 9th May.
Two days between an exam and a knife….!!
I gave NEET with pain in my body and noise in my head. I don’t even remember many questions only the weight in my chest and the fear in my mind.And then came the surgery the kind that doesn’t just cut your body, but also cuts your confidence into pieces.
After that, life became a room.
One bed. One ceiling. One window. And too many thoughts.
Bed rest for 7 to 8 months.
No walking. No normal life. No independence.
“There is a special kind of pain in watching life move while you are forced to stay still.”
I watched everyone else continue. Colleges reopened. Friends moved on. Careers began. Life didn’t wait.
And I stayed there… learning how to depend on others for even the smallest things.
I lost my NEET attempt. I lost my routine. I lost my confidence. I lost a version of myself I had just started to believe in. Some nights, I lost my will to continue and almost lost willingness to live...!!!
I won’t lie there were moments I wanted to end everything. It felt easier than waking up every day feeling useless, broken, and left behind. But then my mother said something that didn’t sound heroic, but saved me anyway:
“Hum tere saath hain.” We are with you.
That sentence didn’t fix my bone. It didn’t fix my career. But it fixed something inside me.
Slowly, I started recovering. Learning to walk again felt like learning to live again. Every step was pain. Every step was effort. But every step also said, You’re still here.
And because I was still here, I tried again.
I gave NEET again.
But I wasn’t the same Sanskar anymore. The hunger was weaker. The belief was shaky. The long break, the fear, the self-doubt they all sat with me in the exam hall. I tried, but not with the same fire. And the result showed it. It wasn’t what I had once dreamed of. It wasn’t what people had once expected.And slowly, I had to accept a hard truth:
Maybe this path was not my path.
That realization hurt. Because in India, changing your path feels like accepting defeat. It feels like telling the world you weren’t strong enough. But somewhere between pain and recovery, I discovered something about myself - I liked business. Ideas. Building things. Thinking about how something could grow from nothing. I liked the idea of creating, not competing in the same rat race as everyone else.
But again, reality asked its favourite question: “Degree kaunsi karega?”
And then, from the most unexpected place, came the suggestion. My doctor brother-who usually never interfered much in my choices looked at me and said:
“Why don’t you do BBA?”
It wasn’t a dramatic movie moment.
No background music.
No instant clarity.
Just a small sentence… that quietly changed the direction of my life.
I didn’t know then that this decision would take me to a new city. I didn’t know it would give me new people, new struggles, and a story I never planned. And I definitely didn’t know that somewhere in that new life, love was waiting for me in the most unexpected way.
But every story needs a beginning.
And mine didn’t begin with success. It didn’t begin with confidence. It began with a boy who tried, failed, broke, healed, tried again and finally, chose a different road.
“Some journeys don’t start with courage. They start with exhaustion… and a small decision to not give up.”
What’s Next
This is only the beginning.
The next part of this story takes me to a new city, a new life, and a version of myself I had never met before. It is where Pune enters my journey, where everything starts to feel unfamiliar and possible at the same time.
It is also where a quiet, one-sided love slowly begins not loudly, not perfectly, but honestly.
This chapter was about falling, breaking, and learning to stand again.
The next ones are about becoming.
Thank you for reading.
— Sanskar Bhartiya