At 11 years old, after an unremarkable argument with his mother, Nikhil Kalita did something increasingly rare for someone his age: he picked up a pen instead of a phone. By morning, he had written his first story about a boy - nothing grand and something about the experience of putting words on paper that night convinced him he had found his way of making sense of the world. Reading it back the next morning, he says, "proved that writing came naturally," and it sent him down