Mena Trott, the mother of blogging

The 3 kinds of writer's block

“I think writer’s block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible.”

– Roy Blunt, Jr.

I’ve been writing actively in journals, newspapers, magazines and blogs for the last 5 years, and the writer’s block has been relentlessly pursuing me all the time. If I don’t write for 3 or 4 days in a row, I can’t think of anything at all the 5th day. Or, alternatively, if I’ve been writing vigorously for a week, then taking even a small break after seems adverse – it feels as if all my ideas have been exhausted although I know I have thought of something worthwhile to be put down. So, the following is about the 3 kinds of writer’s block I think there are, and what I write is based on my experiences only.

1. Surplus of choices: By calling it the ‘surplus of choices’, I mean that the writer has too many ideas and doesn’t know which one to pick and elaborate on. In this case, the core cause could be conflicting priorities. Not knowing what to write about, in general, could be a statement of one’s ignorance or inadequate knowledge. However, there is also the other possibility where a writer can’t choose between two topics because he finds them both equally important but is not availed the opportunity to indulge in both of them. I’ve had the misfortune to be in such a situation quite a few times, especially when I’m faced with an audience with high expectations.
2. Fear of approach: This reason I think explains itself. Like the quote says at the beginning of this post, most people are daunted by the fear of failure or of not meeting expectations (which may not amount to the same thing). If they start working with such a mindset, what happens is that they question each and every one of their next moves to the point where they lose confidence in what they’re doing. If there’s no confidence, then there’s not going to be any conviction. This morale will eventually avalanche into the writer discarding his or her attempts at continuing to write. There’s also a subsequent chance of this mood upsetting all other projects at hand.
3. Exhaustion of thought: When I’m exhausted of all thoughts, I mean that I’m in a state of mind that’s like a combination of the first 2 types. I might just have completed a writing task and somehow find that, as a result, I’ve used up all my literary devices and techniques in one post instead of saving some techniques for the upcoming ones. So, now, 2 things face me: I have to come up with something suitable to write on as well as judge for myself as to whether it would satiate my literary goals. What I don’t like in this case that whenever I think of something new, I also seem to find an excuse to discard it in favor of another topic. This goes on and on until I’m back on square: nothing in hand, nothing in head.

The interesting thing about any form of the writer’s block is that there’s always only one cure: by doing what it prevents you from doing. Keep writing no matter what. Refering to the quote again, don’t be afraid to write badly, absolute nonsense even. You’ll find that it will come your aid in the long run. When I write gibberish, two things happen to me. First is that I’m inspired by my own (often drab) creativity. When I write a meaningless paragraph and read it again, I’m able to see that I’m headed somewhere but am not able to guide myself properly. In that process, I’m able to identify a topic I seem interested in. Second, I slowly begin to construct longer sentences with broader meanings – in other words, I begin to construct ideas on the go. In the first case, I drew the big picture.In the second, I stuff it with the kind of information that also gives me the foundation.

But over and above everything else, writer’s block is there only if you want it to be. And like all unfortunate experiences, it’s easier said than done. However, I do know of some people who continue to write even thought it’s visible that they’ve hit an ideological wall. If you want to get there too, you must understand what’s happening within you. I’ve written here what happens within me. Is it the same for you? Or not?

10 Lessons I've Learnt While Blogging

While you might have concentrated on optimizing your blog for search engines all this while, there are somethings you master on your own while you write and trim and maintian the whole thing – the little things that matter, the little things that lead to the bigger ones.

1. Don’t let them get stuck in there – Link your blog to other (possibly more) authoritative sites. If a user lands up on your blog, make sure he has many ways out of it, even if that means linking to Wikipedia all the time.
2. Build an arcade – Link your posts together through some keywords. When I read a post on your blog, make sure I can either make my way out of your blog or jump to another post within the same blog.
3. Move around yourself – Don’t stay put. If you’re a WordPress user, go around and make some friends in the blogging circles. Suggest, comment and criticise actively. Make sure people reading comments on other sites are able to make note that someone like you EXISTS.
4. Keep the place clean – Keep it clean, keep it cool. People coming to your blog shouldn’t have to look long for important links.
5. Let everyone know whose blog they’re reading – Don’t be anonymous, you’re not there yet. Put up a prominent ‘About Me’ page with the relevant details.
6. Take it places – Your blog’s like a kid. Everyday, take it some place where it can have fun. Don’t be shy of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. At least, if you don’t like Twitter like some of my friends, use Facebook.
7. Stick to your goals – My goal is to keep writing no matter what – a selfish endeavour if you will. And I’ve put up 362 posts including this one. It keeps me active, but a greater merit is one keeps showing up in WP circles and Google also keeps an eye out for one’s updates.
8. Keep it specific – If you’ve been catering to a target audience, keep them in mind all the time. A sudden change in theme, if sustained, can have you lose a lot of addicts.
9. Categorise – Like #4, make it easy to look for specific things in your blog. Just a search form won’t do. Having categories (and a tag cloud if you want) can be very helpful in this regard.
10. Proofread your entries – Yeah, it’s somewhat like writing your novel. Even if you’re not so keen on keeping everything spic and span, broken sentences and incomplete phrases can put people off.

What people need to know

I just realised the people of this world – at least those who spend a considerable time of their days online – always want to know of, hear and see only specific things. During a specific time of the day, it has to be good news, during another part of the day, it has to be bad news so they can sit down and plan out how to tackle it, and during the rest of the day, they believe they should be allowed to just ramble on – while some hope in their heart of hearts that someone is listening or perhaps, better, waiting to pay them. This is a big world we’re in. Up to yesterday, history existed. Today, history is dead. Our lives are saturated with the present, the now, to an extent that lingering on to the ease of yesterday will only serve to slowly drag us into the plunges of mediocrity and, worse yet, the subconscious desire we begin to harbour for it just so it becomes easier for us to survive. We have to begin to learn, and instill in ourselves, that a fight is all it takes, and only a fight will give us what we need. Survival is out of the question; if there is anything that we have learnt in 4,000 years, it is the art of survival. Anybody with a beating heart and two or more limbs can survivce. It is the living that should concern us. How are we going to going to see the light of a happy day, a day when we will no longer be waiting for a pay check to register at the bank, or a day when we will no longer be anxious about the rise and fall of economies? How we are going to be independent of that is what will make the ultimate difference, and this difference in itself will not stand to be our success or our failure. It will only be the door to another opportunity which does not have us looking back.

 

Stuck in yesterday?

Can you give another person what he or she needs to know to make such a thing happen for himself or herself? Do you think you have the information necessary to enable you to have deserved the money you are hoping you will be paid? People need to know all kinds of things. They need to know everything from how to live their own lives to how to get a rat family out of their garage. All of us are born with an equal number of opportunities lingering in the air, but the situations which we are brought up through will only enable us to reach for a few of them. All the other chances will be made available to someone else, and there is nothing you can about that. What you will have, others won’t, and what others will have, you won’t. If you are ready to understand these differences, you will survive. If you can make use of these differences, you will live. People no longer need to wait to be heard. There is the internet, there is the radio, there is the television, there is the telephone. There are newspapers, and there are people. What you tell your friends will eventually jump from ear to ear and reach a thousand people, in the form of an opinion, a judgment or in action. Eventually, ideas will spread. You will never be alone even if you want to be, and if you are, you will be noticed. The world can no longer tolerate silence. Someone or the other will always rue the day he or she let an opportunity slip by unnoticed. Even if you deliberately tried to restore the opportunity to the person due it, you can not. It is not that people are bad, or it is not that civilisation has only served to deteriorate human minds. It’s just who we are. Accept it.

 

Sometimes, we wish we could just flip the buttons on an imaginary remote, have everything problematic disappear into thin air, just so we could spend an evening in the comfort of our homes with a cold beer for our throats and some Sylvester Stallone-ian action for our eyes. We feel the weight of our years hang down on our shoulders, and the work of the spent day cloud our thoughts and desires. We wish to be in a free world, a world that didn’t worry about money or cars, that didn’t worry about how much noise the neighbours were making or the price of the new car they had just purchased, that didn’t worry about how much weight the people around them had lost or the predictable crash of the stock markets. We wish to be in a world that only worried about boob jobs and the Oscars, about the bottomless bottles of beer and the toothbrush flavours we dreamt of. You should know that such a world does exist, and it is not beyond our grasp. In fact, I can tell you where it does, too: in your head. You can come to live that life when you are ready to pay the price the people around you have set for it, and only when you can pay it without regrets. We are part of a larger world that will continue to exist even though we may choose to deny it, staying encumbered within the four walls that comfort us oh so much. I say why not build those four walls around the world itself? As much as all of this is so materialistic, one will have to accept it because it is the truth which ever way you think of it. It is inescapable, undeniable, even incorrigible at times. But for that matter, don’t give up. You will belong somewhere. 

مرحبا!

وقد تم منذ وقت طويل منذ أن كتبت في مرحلة ما بعد بلوق العربية. في الواقع ، فإن لها أول مرة! وأعتقد أنني أردت فقط أن وجود العربية على بلوق لسببين : 1. أنا أعيش في دبي ، الإمارات العربية المتحدة ، و 2. أحب الطبيعة المتدفقة من السيناريو. العرب في هذه القراءة ، من فضلك لا اعتقد انني استخدمت لغة غير لائقة. أنا فقط مترجم لاستخدام ما هو عليه إلى أن أكتب. أنا لم توجه الكثير من كل ذلك في منطقة الخليج. لقد كنت في سلطنة عمان ، وعمان ، مسقط فقط. فضلا عن ذلك ، هو في الأساس إلا دبي والشارقة. دبي هي المكان الجميل قليلا — انه يتجلى الطابع هو ما يجعل الاختلاف. مع تهيمن على المشهد في المنطقة كونها العرض المبهر للإبداع للسكان المحليين ، والناس من بلدان أخرى يجعلك تشعر كأنك في العالم من الألف الاحتمالات. على أية حال ، قائلا إن ذلك ، أود أن يوقع الآن. لقد يوم جيد!

Writer's Block, Be Damned Thou!

For someone aspiring to work in a newspaper, writer’s block is an evil sickness. It is physical as well as mental. It cripples your fingers and blights your mind. It throws you overboard from a speeding ship, leaving you to wonder where the hell you are in an ocean of words. Your tongue grows numb and sentences no longer flow as easily as they used to. However, one important thing I have observed about it is this: the writer’s block only overcomes you in such awesome proportions when you have spent weeks together writing incessantly about all kinds of this. Your words, then, literally are spent, exhausted, and there’s no way to bring them back if you can’t tear down the wall. Tear down the wall? Tear down the wall! Preposterous! My tools have been stolen from me, and they’re stowed away behind a wall I’m supposed to tear down with those tools. It’s Biggleman’s safe all over again. Of all the things I imagined could spell doom to a writer, I never thought it would be a mental block. I imagined paralysis, gangrene, amputations, leprosy, and what else not, but not the writer’s block. At least, with the other illnesses, you could feed off public sympathy and have them do something for you. But with writer’s block, it’s a dead end. You can’t go up to a person and ask him to write articles for you! You have nothing to give when all you want to do is take. You feel like screaming, but all that comes out is a muted rage. It’s like you’re watching ‘LoTR’ for the first time, and just when the Witch King of Angmar is about to kill Gandalf on Minas Tirith, the power gets cut. It’s heart breaking.

I was on a roll, I tell you. I had uncovered this wonderful new article on time as a physical quantity, and somehow managed to worm my way to the idea of God as a teleological consequence – it turns me on, I tell you! – when the words snap. Yesterday, I had such a hard time trying to differentiate between form-following-function and function-following-form, I lost my appetite. My god, it is demeaning. Demeaning? Where did that come from? Oh yes, demeaning! It’s like some god gave you eyes and then blindfolded them. It’s degrading to be subjected to such torture. You not only question your very presence, but also that of your purpose. It’s like being gifted the Thrust 2 and then having your limbs cut off. It’s like being handed a million cartons of cigarettes but not a lighter. It’s like, in short, being handed a paradox. How do you use a paradox? Its effect negates the cause, which in turn negates the effect itself; the effect is a contradiction of itself! Oh, this is killing me. That’s another thing the writer’s block is: a labyrinth. If you’ve got in, then there’s only one way and you have no idea where that is unless you are prepared to look. And I am looking! There are no markings, no sign posts, I don’t even have a wand like Hari Puttar, no Mad Eyes to guide me, and the worst part is, some of the walls are disjointed. If you place your palm on the face of a wall and begin to walk without ever detaching from the surface, you have a good chance of ending up going round and round in circles.

Science has to catch up soon, I tell you. Just concoct some pill for it. Taken with a glass of hot water, it should induce a severe case of verbosity. Watching ‘Big Bang Theory’ and reading about the LHC, I’m surprised scientists can do so much more but not this. They can tear apart the smallest of the small things, they can put together the biggest of machines to do that, but not a pill to cure sick me. Cocktails for cancer, DNA combinatorics for AIDS, nothing for the writer’s block. Yes, I am being unreasonable! I am allowed to be unreasonable! Where are my words?! Do I lodge a complaint with the police? Because that’s all I can think of!

Stupid muted rage.   

"I wished he would hit me"

“I wished he would hit me. He never did. If he had, then it would have been a matter of fists, and I could have forgiven him later on. I wouldn’t refuse to take a shot at him. I mean, I had seen him in different light for some twenty years, and to see him changed liked this was very new and surprising. It is not something I had ever expected from him, and he had proved me wrong. But he never hit me. Just gave me cold looks which I couldn’t forget for days. They rent my mind in two. I couldn’t sleep well in the nights, knowing there was a monster in human form roaming around outside my bedroom. To be someone whom you have looked upon as an idol all your life and then to consciously shatter those impressions as if they were something so trivial. The mind is but sand floating on the surface of water. It will look beautiful if you want it to, but a small disturbance will change its appearance for ever: there is no bringing it back, and even if you do, there will always be a difference.“

This is something I wrote  long time back in a letter or a post card (or perhaps an e-mail) to someone I can’r remember now. I just like the way it’s written.

The Confused Politician: A Story

There once lived a confused politician in a small city in south India. His name is immaterial here in this story, but he had a name that spoke of an ancient hero and his more ancient heroics. He was born, as most confused politicians are, in a small village a few hundred miles south of the state capital. His father was a poor farmer, and his mother worked in the now decrepit mill, both for meagre wages. He had five sisters and one brother, all younger. One gloomy evening, his father passed away due to a fever brought on by dyspepsia. The confused politician was only five. His mother took care of them all by herself. She worked day and night, and toiled and poured her sweat into everything she did, just so she could send her children to school. However, there came another gloomy evening when she also passed away, and the confused politician was left all alone in supporting his brother and sisters. He had harboured dreams of his brother becoming a doctor and his sisters being married off to respectable husbands who held white collar jobs. As for himself, he’d like to think of himself as the man behind everything, the invisible puppet master who pulled the strings of their budding worlds.

Days passed. And so did months and years. The confused politician was older now, although not too old. His brother was a bus conductor – well on his way to becoming a doctor. His sisters were back in the village. He was proud of the youngest of them all: she had come closest to completing her high school education. But all this didn’t matter. The confused politician’s mind had begun to focus on a bigger dream, a larger dream, a more wholesome dream. He had satisfactorily overcome the challenges that life had posed to him as yet, and now, it was his turn to take the reins and ride his own chariot. The confused politician had decided to become a politician.

Some nights, before he went to bed in his little pyol at ten in the night, he could hear speeding jeeps on the streets with microphones held aloft by little boys. They would shout into the empty streets and sleeping houses about their Great Leader, a man of will and purpose, who would solve all their problems. They would plant flags in all nooks and corners, and they would brighten up the whole street with hundreds of tubelights strung out on wires that seemed to have appeared magically. And then, the confused politician would run out into the street to find himself one amongst thousands, all gathered to hear the Great Leader speak. And when the Great Leader said something about his nativity, his culture, or the foreign rulers, the crowd would erupt in cheers, and the confused politician could feel his blood rush in his veins and arteries. This was where he belonged, the confused politician thought, this was his calling in life. Opportunity had deserted his door in his little village, but now, in the Great Capital, it had come crashing through the roof. And so, the confused politician joined the party that appealed most to him, the Great Party.

The Great Party had its office on the Great Street. When the confused politician arrived there, nobody would let him in. There was a big bustle there throughout the day. Stupid looking men would stand near the door, carrying great black boxes pointed at a lady holding a black cyilnder, and they would talk to each other all day long about God-knows-what. Finally, one day, they let him through. The confused politician walked in, bewildered by all the people inside – most of them important going by the white shirt-white veshti combo. After a few minutes, he was before the Great Leader himself.

And he fell at his feet. The Great Leader laughed a grizzly laugh, and hoisted him up by his shoulders, and gave him whatever-it-is-that-they-give, and sent him back into the dark streets. You would think the confused politician would be sensible enough to understand how the system worked now, but the confused politician was in his early stages of confusion.

Years passed. The confused politician was the right-hand man to the Great Leader. Persistent hard work and relentless confusion had brought him this far. When the he finally felt that he had truly grasped the reins of the chariot of his life, the Great Leader died of a stroke. The party people were all sad, and the mood in the office plunged from exuberant to melancholic within a matter of a few minutes. But soon, it climbed back to mania when they all realised the confused politician would now take up the stead of the Great Leader, and would be a Great Leader himself. And so, they repainted the HQ a bright white, they wore their finest silken shirts, sported their brightest smiles as the confused politican stepped out of his new and white Toyota Qualis and into the room of the Great Leader. His room from today onwards for the rest of his life, and the thought made him smile. His right-hand man asked him why he was smiling, and the Great Politician said, “Finally, my turn to do something good for the people”.

Everyday, hundreds of the rich and the poor would walk in and out of the building, either giving large sums of money or taking small ones. The confused politician was now an important man. And he felt important, too. Whenever he walked outside his building, groups of men and women holding black boxes and black cylinders would swarm around him, and magically, he would see his face in the television that night. He always loved it when that happened. The knowledge of technology had failed to amaze him and he had abandoned it as a child. But that ignorance had deprived him of nothing, or so he believed. Over and above everything, the confused politician was a happy and confused man, and that’s a very happy man.

One morning, he woke up to find the sun shining bright and beautiful outside his window. The sky looked awesome, he thought. While he was smiling into the world outside and above his head, he heard a commotion below. He looked down onto the street to see some poor people fighting to get into the HQ. He opened the window, disgusted, and shouted at them to get away. He called his right-hand man in and barked at him to ask the watchman to let no one in. Today had started beautiful, and it would end beautiful. After getting back his calm, the confused politician switched on his television and saw his face smiling on the screen. He smiled even more. And then, he thought, why not do something today instead of lazing around? And so, he thought once more of those poor people on the streets, and wondered what they were doing here bothering him. He wondered why they weren’t at home, toiling away like his diseased mother and dyspepsic father, eager to send their children to school. And then, the confused politician and Great Leader realised these people had to pass exams. That’s preposterous, he thought! And so, he declared a reservation for the backward classes in the IITs and the IIMs for upto 27% of the total seats. There, problem solved! Now, they would be busy in the morning to send their children to school, and the confused politician could spend a more beautiful morning without having to shoo people through his windows.

The next day morning, he woke up to find a more brilliant sun shining in the skies, and little wisps of clouds here and there. He smiled to himself and cautiously looked down into the street. No poor people shouting at his gates. The confused politician smiled more. And then, a phone rang outside his office, startling him out of his Utopic visions. He gave a start and began to furiously walk toward the door. Just then, it banged open and his left-hand man walked in. He was holding what looked like a phone without wires in his right hand, and said, “Your supporters want to erect a statue in your honour on the Great Busisest Street”. The confused politician smiled. Today was turning out to be more and more brilliant! He immediately nodded his approval, and the plans were made, and the documents were signed, and the money was poured. The next thing he knew was that he was sitting in the front row of a gala ceremony organised by every conceivable organ of the state where important businessmen (with white collars, mind you) came to talk about the Great Leader. And the Great Leader smiled at his statue.

He woke up the next day and looked at the skies. He did not like the look of it, as was evident from the absence of a smile on his face: it was overcast, and the sun was nowhere to be seen. The air smelled damp and muddy, as though it had rained through the night. Indeed, it had. Glum, the confused politician looked down into the street. No poor people. He turned his head towards the door. No phone ringing. Something was odd about today. He walked out of his room. There was the usual bustle, and this restored the Great Leader’s faith in the normality he thought he had established around himself. Suddenly, his PA jumped up from behind him. The Great Leader was startled.

“What?!”

“Haven’t you heard, sir?”

“Heard what?! Tell me quickly!”

“There was a big accident last night, sir, on the Great Busiest Street. Your statue’s pedestal having taken up most of the space in the left lane, a lorry had hit it by mistake, skidded over to the opposite lane and crashed into a bunch of oncoming cars and vans.”

“What are you trying to tell me?!”

“22 people have died, sir.”

Today was a bad day. Today was a very bad day. Today was a very, very bad day. Today was a… I think you get the point. The confused poltician in the Great Leader pondered. Something had to be done. If the statue was not removed, then protest groups would rise up. The Great Opposition Leader would stage dharnas against him! He would lose the majority! But that must never happen. But what if the statue was removed? Then the Great Busiest Street would not be greeted by the stony smile of the Great Leader! But there was a deeper intention there as well: when the time came for the Great Leader to step down and for the Great Opposition Leader to take over, the GOL would have to have the statue removed for obvious reasons. That time, it would be too convinient for the Great Leader to stage dharnas against him! Ha!

But that opportunity was being robbed right from under his nose now! He would have to do something. And so, the confused politician announced a compensation of a lakh rupees for the family of the bereaved and fifty thousand rupees for those injured. But he refused to remove the statue.

Election day arrived. It was judgment day. Naturally, the confused politician lost. The GOL came into power, and he removed the statue, that’s the first thing he did. When the Great Leader called for a rally to oppose this blasphemous act, nobody gathered. Who would? The statue had killed 22 people! And the Great Leader’s office was taken over, and he had nowhere left to go. Luckily, his left-hand man had saved up some of the confused politician’s money, and had purchased a house with it. It was directly on the Great Busiest Street, and the confused politician took up residence there.

He awoke the next morning, and looked at the skies. The sun was there, bright and shining. No clouds whatsoever, and the confused politician blanched. It would be a good day for the GOL, he thought, which meant it would be a bad day for him. Things couldn’t get much worse: he was no longer smiling at himself through the television screens, and important people didn’t pass through his doors, and men and women with black boxes and black cylinders didn’t swarm around him if he took a walk outside. He was almost a nobody. Suddenly, he jerked out of his stupor when he heard a commotion outside.

Large earthmovers had assembled, and engineers and contractors were busy discussing something. He learned from one of the coolies at work that the GOL was having his own statue installed. The confused politican was enraged. He caught a taxi to the GOL’s house, his old house, and alighted to discover a large number of people shouting at the watchman on duty. He barged into the throng and began to shout at the watchman to let him in. The watchman didn’t respond. The confused politician got ticked off more and began to shout louder: something had to be done! Then, someone at the front door pointed up, and they all looked up.

A hand was outstretched out the top window, and it was shooing them away like they were mongrel.

(And it happens only in India!)

My most regretted mistake

is to have had a dream. It started a few years back, and I clung on to it as though it was the life of me. I know no other reason why I didn’t let go other than the fact that it seemed easy, natural and promising. It changed nothing about me; it did not, like JKJ says, “instruct, elevate and enlighten” my days in the sun. It was something that struck, and back then, I was glad that it did. The dream was of me writing a book. The dreams that ensued were all of the plots, and those that swept my mind in the nights were all of me winning coveted awards and deep throated announcers yelling into the crowds about how I was the youngest winner of those awards. You might know, such dreams are strong ego pills. You go to bed at the end of a pallid day, not happy at all about the state of affairs, be it the world or your home. When you wake up in the morning after such dreams, you care not which side of the bed you walk out of. There is an uncanny spring to your step which you yourself can’t explain, and ladies on the streets turn around and whisper between themselves as you pass by, and you can hear giggles and feel their sight stuck on your back, only hoping that you turn around and give them a wink. In short, you feel you’re the King of the world!

But when the only laptop you have ever had crashes four times in a single night, dragging all the contents of the external hard drive with it – along with some 203 pages of the book – to some unforeseen and unfathomable doom, you can’t help but regret dreaming about writing the book. I know I could have recovered the data after the first crash, but that seems futile thought when a puff of smoke erupts out of the ventilator. You can only stand back and let the chaotic orchestra continue. If I had been in possession of a video camera just then, along with the customary lighting equipments, I could have been witness to a symphony of sorts – with all sorts of weird and unearthly noises spilling forth in chunks. Believe me, I was hoping for a moment that the roof of my room would fly off and green lights would flash down along with a white beam that would bear forth the great Spielberg’s ET himself. But, ahh, that in no way whatsoever compensates for one’s loss of his life’s works, at least that which he prizes above all else which he ever prized or will. The loss of a dream stings and bites, it claws on your back when you’re in be, it sends ants crawling behind your neck. The blanket doesn’t seem long enough to cover your feet, and when you pull it up hoping it will magically elongate, it pulls down the hair down onto your face on its way down. It seems unnaturally warm while you can hear the A/C belching away above your head, and when you turn it up, the heat turns more oppressive. Pshaw! 

As much as you lament your losses and blame Lenovo and Seagate for their sorry attempts at recruiting a brand loyalist – which I would have become if not for this mishap – you ultimately end up mourning yourself. Could you not have done more, you stupid fat-head (fingers pointing at me, please)?! You beat yourself up even though they ask you not to, only hoping all the while that it hurts. But it doesn’t: all the pain decides to linger for ever in your head. That dream will be the death of me, I know. It is my most regretted mistake, yes, but I regret it a contented man. 

The Magic Of Knowing Everything And Still Liking It

Not everyone takes to writing the same way. To some, writing is just an inconsequential gay inconsequential past time that should be done only if it is absolutely necessary that you do. At the other extreme where I stand, writing is everything – ‘everything’ to the point that I sometimes wonder if humans would one day evolve into beings capable of communicating only through written messages. In today’s world, in today’s commercialised scenario wherein it is mandatory that you belong to some network or the other in order to set your sights on success, connectivity is everything. A simple idea like Twitter is now being touted as the next big thing for small businesses. In such a world, how can anyone not consider journalism as an important business? I say that in the context of most of us taking it for granted. We all expect the newspaper to be splayed on our doormats at 6 in the morning, but there’s a group of people toiling all day to make that happen. And that’s always the feeling that gets to me when I read the paper: you can only truly appreciate something when you know how hard it is effect it. I always thought playing a guitar would be cakewalk – but that was before I cut my fingers on the strings trying to strum a stupid little tune.

Anyway, that’s my take on writing. And whenever I write, it feels like something so magical, you know. I guess I’m one of those people on this planet who think writing is magical; since everything is some form of an art or the other, there must be at the least a few people who think it is magical! But let me tell you, writing is more magical than you can think it will ever be. We can either speak or write, and for an inorganic form of communication to take up half of everything being communicated is a conquest of sorts. Ever since little scratches were made on stones, man has come a long way in refining language and the scripts that go with it.

Taking a little detour, I’d like to tell you how hard it is to create something. For example, suppose that you’re using a car. Any car that runs on petrol or diesel has a minimum of 40,000 nuclear parts in it. And all parts are part of a network of pipes, tubes, cooling systems, and so on and so forth. Nothing is attached freely to anything. In building such a car, what would you build first? The engine? What about the power supply? The battery? What about the power supply again? The dynamo? What about the wheels that power it? The power transfer mechanism? What about the engine? And that is where a bit of research was initially involved: in trying to figure out what went where. Once that was finalised, a manufacturing plant was set up and an assembly line was modeled after the designs that stemmed from the research. However, if you noticed, all this happened because everyone who worked with mechanical engineering knew where they were headed. They all wanted to build a machine that would work like the latched-D-gate: with a constant input, there would be a specific output.

But in languages, that is not the case. All though we might have inadvertently triggered the factors that led to evolution taking shape, we never were and never will be in a position to control and guide the pathway of evolution itself. It’s something like a Mobius strip: make on and then try drawing a line which is completely blocked from eyesight in a two dimensional frame of reference. Some part of the line will still be visible, although it is drawn only on one side of the paper. We can make a Mobius strip, but we can’t hide the line. If we made a normal strip and made the line disappear, it would become development – or making the car in other words. When we started off, we never knew where languages would end up. But we kept improvising it because that is what we thought was favourable. If we are to progress this way, we’ll never be able to get to the ideal language – but ideal languages don’t exist (the very thought of it is absurd!). And so, here we are. We didn’t know what our goal was, other than the fact that we knew we waned to simplify things; we only did what we thought was right. Therefore, there is nothing to say that languages would have ended up like this whether we wanted it or not. It only leads us to the fact that there could have been any other language in the stead of English. And that is what makes the languages we have today more beautiful! There could very many more, but it was these that took form and shape and materialised in the form of images in our heads.

And that is also what makes writing more valued, rather more worthy to be valued. Now, writing is a tool used to convey information through the simultaneous structuralisation of perspective, grammar and logic – the end result of which constitutes a sentence. With these elements, we know for a fact that we have conveyed something or the other; what I’m saying is that such realisation is also very miraculous. Just by improvising on something, we believe that we are making it simpler. However, since we know no other alternative that might exist in its absence, we don’t have any options. And dangling at the end of this feeble thread lies the future of every language.

And what lies at the other end? What lies at the end which is pulling it higher and higher? The need to communicate as well as to picturise. Speech was the first mode of communication – it was created in order to generalise some ideas and actuate conformity in order to fortify any efforts made towards a single goal. Writing had to take form in order to preserve any such communication. It delivered repeatability and timelessness. What was before dust in the wind or sand on water is now an engraving on stone. And how something as inanimate is capable of projecting so much imagery is something else altogether. And with these many uncertainties involved, don’t you think writing is a magical wand that can perform magnificent feats?

The answer to that question is what divides the readers from the writers!