The email arrived a couple of days back with a subject line that made me laugh out loud:
“Professor, you are my homework.”
Apparently a graduate seminar in comparative life writing had assigned an essay comparing Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence with MyAmpleLife, and the student thought it only fair that the object of study be informed. (Did she also contact Pamuk, I wondered.)
The Museum of Innocence (Turkish: Masumiyet Müzesi) is a novel by the Turkish Nobel-laureate novelist Orhan Pamuk, published on August 29, 2008. (My birthday!) The book, set in Istanbul between 1975 and 1984, is an account of the love story between a wealthy businessman, Kemal, and a poorer distant relative of his, Füsun. Pamuk said he used YouTube to research Turkish music and film while preparing the novel. It is now streaming on Netflix.
Being someone’s homework is not a new experience for me.
Déjà Vu is a 2006 American science fiction action thriller film directed by Tony Scott, and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. The film stars Denzel Washington, Paula Patton, Jim Caviezel, Val Kilmer, Adam Goldberg and Bruce Greenwood. It involves an ATF agent who travels back in time in an attempt to prevent a domestic terrorist attack that takes place in New Orleans and to save a woman with whom he falls in love. It grossed $180.6 million worldwide against its $75 million production budget.
The first time it happened was around 2014 or 2015, when we were living on Skating Pond in Weston. On Thanksgiving evening my VC neighbor hosted a party, the kind where conversations drift pleasantly between football scores and venture capital. Among the guests were several MBA students who gradually realized that the person they were chatting with was the same professor whose OrganJet case had appeared in their coursework. One of them grinned and said, with a mixture of embarrassment and delight, “Professor Tayur, you’re our homework.”
That moment had a certain charm: life and classroom briefly occupying the same room.
But this new email introduced a deeper curiosity. The essay that had turned me into homework again did not analyze supply chains (SmartOps) or organ transplantation or anything that is operations management. It analyzed something I had never quite thought about in formal terms before:
The narrative self that emerges from writing.
Literary theory, I found out after receiving the email, calls this the implied author.
The term comes from Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction. The idea is elegant. Every sustained piece of writing produces a version of the author that readers gradually infer from the text. Not the biographical individual who lives outside the pages. Not even the narrator who appears within them. Rather, a second self that emerges slowly from tone, references, habits of thought.
Writing does not merely describe a life.
It constructs a self.
The essay places Pamuk and me side by side as two examples of this process:
The Examined Self and the Constructed Self.
I wondered what Pamuk himself thought about it, and found that he has, after winning his Nobel, written (what many literary folks consider his most personal essay) on this very topic!
Pamuk’s implied author emerges from the long shadow of European modernism—Proust, Mann, Dostoevsky—filtered through the historical experience of Istanbul. In The Museum of Innocence, the protagonist collects thousands of objects connected to a lost love. Each object becomes a fragment of memory, carefully preserved. Pamuk famously inserts a character named “Orhan Pamuk” into the novel itself, crossing the boundary between author and fiction.
The result is an implied author who appears simultaneously inside and outside the narrative: curator and observer, archivist and ironist. The past in Pamuk’s world arrives as haunting. Memory preserves what history threatens to erase.
MyAmpleLife, the student essay argues, constructs something quite different.
Where Pamuk assembles an archive of loss, the blog assembles a genealogy of inheritance.
The essay observes that MyAmpleLife openly names its literary ancestors. Montaigne appears explicitly as the blog’s intellectual inspiration—discovered through Virginia Woolf’s essay in The Common Reader (see my meting of Voltaire with Woolf in The Garden of One’s Own). The lineage then extends outward: Wilde’s wit, Joyce’s everyday epic, Russell’s clarity, Kalidasa’s lyrical compression, and even Vashishta of the Rig Veda, whose hymns stand at the origin of a spiritual genealogy that the blog occasionally acknowledges with both reverence and curiosity.
This is not a casual reading list.
It is, as the essay perceptively notes, an act of canon-making.
The implied author of MyAmpleLife constructs a family tree of the mind spanning three millennia and two hemispheres. Vashishta and Montaigne sit in the same conversation. Kalidasa shares space with Wilde. A Bond film may wander into the same paragraph as a Sanskrit verse without apology.
The refusal to maintain rigid cultural hierarchies is not an accident. It is the blog’s organizing principle.
Both/And, never Either/Or.
That phrase appears often in MyAmpleLife, but the essay reveals something interesting: it functions not merely as a philosophical statement but as a narrative architecture. Each post performs the idea rather than explaining it. Quantum computing appears beside Vedic cosmology; entrepreneurship beside poetry; cinema beside classical literature.
The sentence itself becomes a bridge.
The essay illustrates this with passages from two posts that readers of the blog know well: The Sound of Creation and The Tayur Poetry Fund.
In the first, waves striking the shore become an entry point to physics, poetry, and cosmology simultaneously. The observation that “stars hang with an almost unreasonable clarity” imports the vocabulary of argument into the language of sensation—a move that Woolf or Wilde might appreciate.
In the second, a line from Keats is repurposed three times—sensation becoming monetization, then philanthropy—compressing aesthetic pleasure, entrepreneurship, and ethical reflection into a single playful progression.
The essay also praises Sridhara-samhita, a post that began as a playful thought experiment: what if modern operations research papers on organ transplantation were rendered as Sanskrit shlokas, in the spirit of the ancient Sushruta-samhita? What emerged was less parody than continuity. In two quiet lines—“As one fruit from a tree nourishes two lives, / So too the liver is divided to grant life to two”—the compression of Kalidasa meets the logic of modern decision science. The centuries briefly fold into each other. Literary theory might call this temporal metalepsis; I simply experienced it as a reminder that the human project of saving lives has always been written in many languages at once.
What fascinated me most about the essay was its central claim: that MyAmpleLife is not merely a memoir or blog but an essayistic experiment in self-construction, very much in the Montaignian tradition.
Montaigne asked a deceptively simple question: Que sais-je?—What do I know?
But beneath that question lay another: Who am I becoming through the act of writing?
That question, it turns out, lies quietly beneath every post on MyAmpleLife as well.
The blog did not begin with a theory. It began with curiosity. But over time, patterns emerge. The same connections reappear. Certain authors and ideas recur with almost gravitational inevitability.
Picasso once said:
“I start with an idea and it becomes something else.”
That sentence could easily describe the evolution of the blog itself.
A reflection on operations management becomes a meditation on Montaigne. A discussion of organ transplantation algorithms turns into Sanskrit verse. A lecture on waves becomes a conversation with cosmology.
The idea begins somewhere.
It rarely ends there.
Perhaps that is why English has become the natural language for these reflections. Sanskrit speaks magnificently to the gods. Mathematics speaks elegantly to nature. But the reflections connecting them seem most comfortable in English.
It is, in my world, the language of men in a world of gods—a playful inversion of Sheldon Pollock’s title (see The Language of the Gods in the World of Men), and perhaps an honest description of the intellectual territory the blog inhabits.
As I write this, I am somewhere between continents (after a short but sweet visit to WVU, thanks Bernie Quirogo and John Saldanha for being such gracious hosts). By the time this post appears, I will have landed in Bengaluru after a long flight that traces its arc across the night sky near Iran. Somewhere along that journey I finished watching the remarkably satisfying third season of Tehran on Apple.
Stories within stories.
And now here is another curious one: a blog post reflecting on an essay analyzing the posts of this very blog!
What would literary theory say about that?
Perhaps it would say the narrative has folded back on itself. The author reads about the implied author and then writes about the reading. The observer becomes the observed.
A Möbius strip of authorship.
Inside becomes outside. Outside becomes inside.
Perhaps that is inevitable once writing accumulates over years. Patterns appear that the writer did not consciously design. References gather like constellations across the posts. The implied author begins to emerge—not as a deliberate construction, but as an inevitable byproduct.
The implied author is not the person who begins the writing. It is the figure that slowly appears through the writing.
And MyAmpleLife is still in progress.
