I started solving crosswords in high school. Newspapers were a daily essential back in the nineties (the last century!) and we used to get the Times of India. It had (and still carries) a pretty decent crossword — I don’t remember where it was syndiated from, but it may have been from The Times newspaper in the UK.

I can’t remember clearly why I started, but I started. I remember getting more regular with a few years later as a way to spend time on a morning commute. I’d sit in a bus and tune out the traffic, the bumpy roads and the constant press of people with a crossword.

I dont remember when I solved a complete crossword for the first time, but I do remember the feeling.

Work (and life in general) got in the way of doing the crossword regularly, but I never really stopped. I’d pick up a newspaper (either the Times or the Hindustan Times) and find myself working through the clues.

I must have found the NY Times Crosswords app sometime in the late noughts. You didn’t need a subscription back then so it was a LONG time ago. And I started out. I quickly discovered that I could solve the Monday and Tuesday crosswords but couldn’t really solve the later days of the week. But, through many moves between different countries and continents, jobs, and relationships, the crossword remained a constant.

Over time, I got better at it. A lot of it achieved by solving multiple crosswords from the archives. And then, one day, it all just came together. It’s a like a part of my brain had got unlocked and I was “seeing” the words in a way I hadn’t before.

Now, I’m not some savant who can solve every puzzle in under 5 minutes and I certainly don’t always know every word.

But, 3650 daily puzzles later, I can confidently say I am a proud amateur solver of the New York Times crossword. Ten years worth of daily crossword puzzles is just about enough to make that claim :)

Now, to the future: and I’m going back to the past.

I’ve decided to keep solving the daily puzzle and go back in time to the very first puzzle and solve every puzzle published in the app. That should easily take me the next twenty years. Come back then for my next post on this subject. It will be called, I solved every crossword the NY Times has published in their app.