Every time I read Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Prize citation lecture, ‘My Father’s Suitcase’, I am transported to a day I can’t now fully recall. Every growing child has that day, when, shielded from the vicissitudes of reality, it wants to become a painter, a musician, a writer, something it knows bridges the gap between what it wants to do and what it thinks will sate its parents’ hopes for itself. Even though I can’t remember all about that day, I’m sure I thought I wanted to be a writer. I would have wanted to write all that I read, but in a way that it preserved me. I would have wanted to write to partake of the only tradition I knew – literature – so I would not be forgotten. At every turn, I would despair that I was going farther from my dream growing older, but I would still attempt to reach out to that tradition. What has kept me going till now is that every time I would reach out, it would reach into me, and remind me that I would only have to divert my gaze inward, to bring forth an imagined reality that would help me survive this one. All this Orhan speaks of. His insight is inescapable, I must admit; yet, I do not regret that I borrow from him without striving – with that stubbornness Orhan finds is central to being a writer – to find my own words. I am not yet a writer, but I still hope to be one. And ashamedly I admit: When that day comes, I hope I find the tradition is still alive in me.
Tag: writing
Who talks like that?
Four-and-half years of engineering, one year of blogging and one year of J-school later, I’m a sub-editor with an Indian national daily and not doing bad at all, if you asked me. I’m not particularly important to the organization as such, but among my friends, given my background, I’m the one with a newspaper. I’m the one they call if they need an ad printed, if they need a product reviewed, if they need a chance to be published.
So, when a 20-year old from BITS, Dubai (where I studied) mailed me this, I had no f**king idea what to say.
NIce to hear bck frm u……. actually s i said m a growing writer…. i jzzt completed my frst novel n [name removed] is editing it…. i wanted to write articles n get dem published in reputed newspapers like urs….so i wanted help wid dat…. cn u jzzt give me a few guidelines so dat i cud creat sm f my best works n send dem to u…..
- I’m given to understand the QWERTY keyboard was designed to make typing easier for words spelled like they were originally spelled using fingers designed by evolution for a human hand. So, doesn’t typing ‘just’ have to be easier than ‘jzzt’, ‘.’ easier than ‘…………’? It’s one thing to make language work for you; it’s another to use symbols like you have no idea how they should be.
- Why are you so lazy that you can’t finish a word before going on to the next one? Do you think a journalist – who has lots to lose by spelling words wrong – would appreciate ‘creat’, ‘cn’, ‘sm’, ‘frst’? Don’t you think the vowel is an important part of language? It’s the letter that permits the sounding, genius.
- If you’re looking for a chance to get published, don’t assume I will give you the chance to be published if the best I’ve seen from you is “i jzzt completed my frst novel n so-so”, “cn u jzzt-” I cannot even.
And then to think anyone with a smartphone and a Twitter account can be stereotyped to be this way. Ugh.
The pain is gone.
Reading some pages of fiction touched off old memories that I’d forgotten existed, bringing back to life words and, with them, sensations. Words were between words, ideas between ideas, color underneath hue.
Earlier, I wrote not to remember or document, I wrote because I knew of no other way to digest the world; when I wrote, I grew up. Every phrase I pushed back into the inspiration whence it had come, like a bullet pressed back into the wound, I’d bleed, but the blood would be blood, just there, undigested like a colored liquid I could see, feel it crawling, but not speak about. So I wrote relentlessly, good or bad, profound or – as often was the case – meaningless.
And then I’d read myself, I’d grow up just a little, and there’d be a little more to think about life. I’m not much of a traveller, a mover even, so over time, what I wrote about would have become mundane, featureless, like a barren tract of land that lay rasping, unable to breathe air and already alien to water because it had eaten and suckled on itself, if not for books. I grew up on the minutes of lives very different from my own – or whatever lay beneath all the pages of my ink – and soon couldn’t think for myself without even the gentlest consideration of another character’s opinion.
As the years passed, I began to frighten me, I was not comfortable with the decisions I made for myself. It wasn’t that I feared that I’d be the only one to blame; in fact, that thought had never struck. No, it was simply the lack of awareness of the self, a full man beneath the patina of literature, of scientific intellect and philosophical leanings, built upon all the uncertainties and failures that the litterateur above had thwarted. A part of me had gambled me away for knowledge of the desires of other men and women, while another waited, rather cowered, in its weakening shadow.
Finally, one day, the world arrived, and robbed me away: from books, from stories, from oh-so-important The Others. What was left of me emerged, looking upon the world as a continuous litany of disappointment, the pain and the shock of humiliation – much of it in my own eyes – still evident, and took its first few steps. It tottered. It fell. It stood up, and it fell again. When it learned to stand up and straight, it refused to fall ever again.
The child was man, the writer was gone, the learner was robbed, and the world was upon me, smothering me, it smothers me still… and then I found books once more. I long to return to my shell but the emergence seems irreversible. Now, when I look upon the words, I see words: I see that they are red, viscous, flowing only with steep gradient, still and even tending to crenellate. I know that it is blood, but the nerves are deadened. The pain is gone. It is difficult to grow up when the pain is gone.