Words and Ideas

Every time I open Wordpad, I find an empty page and a blinking cursor inviting me to a whole new world of words and ideas. I have never found a pen and a sheet of paper as compelling as a keyboard and an empty screen. The speed at which my wrist can scribble is nowhere close to the speed at which I can think. Of course, this is true for everybody – but some find a pen and paper more ‘acceptable’ because of the fact that they can establish a relationship with it. They can strike up a dance with the ink that is flowing onto the sheet, they can know what they are writing through their very handwriting, which is a very personal signature of the human mind and its thoughts. Writing has been around for ages and ages, since even the Vedas when they were first scripted, followed by the immortal Upanishads. In the Hindu household, when a child turns two (or three, I’m not sure), a ceremony is conducted wherein the child is placed on the father’s lap and his/her fingers are guided through grains of rice to script his/her name for the first time. It marks the beginning of the inception of knowledge into the child, and is a significant occasion also because the Gods’ blessings are incurred for the child’s academia. But for me, although such and such a ceremony was conducted, I have lost touch with the joy of writing something. I want to know that this world, wherein I belong, can catch up with me as I jump from idea to idea. And it has revealed to me a brilliant realm of expression. I am not a good actor, and I am very reserved when it comes to talking directly to one’s face, but when I write, I am a whole new person. There is not one troublesome soul who can disturb me when I have struck up a flame that consumes my mind and my body together in the burning of the paranormal onto the planes of eternity. When the words begin to flow, there is no stopping them – the only person who can is myself, but since I find them to be my very excellent companions in times of joy as well as distress, why should I hinder them from coming alive? I can only ask for more.

And the beauty of it all is, they never are extinguished. How much ever I ask for them, whenever I ask for them, and in whatever forms I ask for them, they are delivered. Hey, hey, this is bad, isn’t it? How can I part myself from what I am doing? I am the thinking, I am the writing, I am the path of salvation! It is me which is my thought, its is me which is my word. All that I have written is a part of me which I would like to call a feeling. How would writing be a feeling, you may ask of me. Well, I can not lie to you: I don’t know the answer. But when I do write, I feel. When I describe a lion’s roar, I can feel the strom building up in the lion’s guts as it prepares to declare its lordship. As I write about a morning mist at a hill station, I can feel the mist hugging me and drowning me in its cold. When I write that the colour of an object is red, I can feel the boldness shooting forth from the very colour and not the object which it contains. I can feel its courage as it dares to attract my attention from the myriad of colours it has been placed amongst. When I write, every syllable defines a moment of time within which it has been born, lived and consumed, within which every other word that came before it is forgotten, within which it has lived a glorious life to the fullest. When I complete a paragraph of a story, I have defined moments in the story to be found forever in your hands as your eyes flirt over the page looking for what it wants. The spaces between two words and the spaces between two thoughts are the same. Even though they come to be defined in the different dimensions of space and time, a continuum exists where their measurement is impossible, where they can not grasped as they cascade through your visualization, realization and digestion of them. As each word follows the other, a tale is spun where the events take life from their cocoons of text, and take flight from their wings of meaning. When I write, I am telling you of long forgotten and almost lost people as they live thorugh their comedies and tragedies. When I write, I speak.