On Writing

Disclaimer: I have a folder with old writing – others’ writing. Today, a wonderful wet soporific Sunday morning, while rummaging through old stuff I found this 17-year old ‘note’. I hear a young man’s naïve and refreshing voice. I should not have lost touch with him and maybe, it is that guilt which makes me want to share his ‘note’ with you.

One could write a million words and never say anything of substance. Or, one could utter a few meaningful words and never be understood.

If what is written ends with itself and the final full-stop, critics would find themselves bereft of a pastime. The author is after all a normal human being with his limitations on experience and understanding of life. But at the moment of writing it is his inner depth which is being searched – this excludes the paper-mongers, the multitude, among whom the true writer has been made to fight for survival. Survival of the financed.

Do people take the words without a remark? Do they think first, read between the lines, wonder why the writer is so or do they try to perceive the theme, form opinions and ‘evaluate’ the work of art. Evaluate – which mortal has the right to evaluate another, or rather, competent enough to do so? In those words, the cry of the multitude is echoed – “I have seen all this before. Who are you to lecture – you, who have not fought the odds for someone or something?” The historian does not fight battles, the romantic poet need not be in passionate love, the humorist need not be a joker – it’s not their actions which make them write but their thought, principles, honesty and earnestness in knowing more like a baby who yearns to do things for the first time, and innocence like that of a young boy who asks his mother how he came into the world.

But he is not a faultless creature. He is always searching for a nonexistent state of Utopia – his most morbid work would be like narrating the last night’s nightmare hoping its horror would fade away. He is always teaching the little he gets to know and he seems to be preaching!

He sits in a dark one-window room, crouching over his book, feeling the comfort of the sweat-stained sides of his pen and frequently he goes to stand by the window overlooking a street filled with non-writers, he blames the smoke curling from his cigarette for producing tears; he watches, curses himself and starts to wonder how it’s like down there amidst others. Back to the comfort of his seat, he pours his thoughts yielding the pen like a sword, slashing the paper, more interested to mar than beautify. And finally, when it’s done with, he often crumples it and let it go flying to the wastepaper pile. Each roll a small world in itself – a world he is not sure of, the creator, and one he keeps checking and rewriting hoping the final draft is the truth. He knows it is not so. And in that moment of pain, the external world confirms it with rejection. That ends his foray into that external world – the one which he secretly loves but never be loved and understood.