In the winter of 2001, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone hit theatres worldwide. As an 11 year old in Kampala, Uganda, this new development did not pique my interest. All I had seen was a trailer of a boy in black robes sitting beneath an oversized talking hat. Such was not the stuff that filled my dreams at night; if the power rangers or the X-men were not involved, I probably was not interested. What did draw my attention to this movie’s release was my brother’s uncontrollable excitement to go watch it. As the youngest of four brothers, I always had a particularly competitive relationship with my immediate elder brother. If he liked something, I had to like it more. If he hated it, I despised it. So when my brother was beside himself with glee at the movie’s premier, it was imperative that I matched his joy. So you will understand why I was completely distraught when my mother granted my brother leave to go watch the movie, yet simultaneously denied me the permission to do so. When I asked her why, my mother calmly responded, “Have you read the book like your brother has?” The first response that came to mind was “Who reads books?” But, even at the age of 11, I had slightly more tact than that. You see, my mother was concerned I did not share the same passion for literature that my brother did. I attempted to assuage her concern by assuring her that I would start reading the book as soon as I got back from the theatre. But never one to be beguiled, my mother gave me the ultimatum that forever changed my life: “If you really want to go watch the movie, read the book.” Muttering words under my breath that my parents would be appalled to discover I knew at that age, I retreated to the bedroom my brother and I shared and picked up his copy of The Sorcerer’s Stone. I lay down on my bed and leafed to page 1. It was the first time I had ever voluntarily picked up a book not assigned to me. Well, if you could call that voluntary. And I was determined to hate every second of it. Except that I didn’t. I loved it! I could not quite put my finger on it, but something about this book was different. Where the required reading for class was boring and dry, this was almost alive in my hands. The words jumped off the page almost faster than I could read them. The scenes were playing out in my head and exercising my imagination in ways I did not think possible. The next time I looked up from the book was to begrudgingly eat a quick dinner before rushing back to my read. It was the first time I had experienced what it meant to find oneself unable to put a book down. In fact, up until that day, I had been quite skilled in the art of putting books down. But not this book: this one stuck. And then it was done. I had read and finished the book in a day flat – a definite first for me. I watched the movie the very next day. A fortnight later, I had read all four books that were out at the time. All of a sudden, almost overnight, I was an unstoppable reading machine! Unfortunately, there were no more Harry Potter adventures for me to read yet. But my engines were purring, eager for more and more. So I picked up The Hobbit. When that was done, I tried my hand at The Fellowship of the Ring and The Silmarillion, but failed. My engines were not equipped to launch me that high just yet, but I was definitely at a cool cruising altitude. This was also around the time that I started excelling at English in class. All of a sudden, the class made sense. No longer a mindless chore, the class was something I actually looked forward to every week. In 2006, at a time when the literary force was quite strong in me, I moved to the U.S. I was convinced that I was fated to become a writer. Why else would I have found such a desire and craving if not to use it to author my own works? And why else would my parents bring me to the U.S. but to mold me into the next J.K. Rowling? It turns out there were plenty of other reasons for my emigration from Uganda. Mostly, my parents wanted me to become successful and have a better life than they did growing up. Something about an “American Dream”, I think is what they said. So, not only would my parents not stomach the idea of a budding writer in their ranks, they insisted I put my love for writing, rhetoric and communication to something more feasible. “Why don’t you be a lawyer?” my mother often asked of me, “We need a lawyer in the family.” And so, against my better judgment, they somehow convinced me somewhere down the road that I wanted to be a lawyer. I say “convinced” because for a while I did not think it was what I wanted at all. But after a while, I found that there were other things that caught my fancy; the operations of the U.S. government; the penal system and the wages of violating the law; and public policy. After a while, it seemed to me that the law was the perfect intersection of all these elements, while at the same time upholding a love for reading and writing almost as a prerequisite. It was this combination of factors that led me to law school. Unfortunately, none of it tells me what type of lawyer I want to be. In a sense, really, law school is one big expensive experiment for me: one that I hope will yield results worth getting published.

-- AdrianNtwatwa - 26 Feb 2013