On Writing

Writing is something, which signifies different things to different people. Some use their pens as paint brushes, some as pocketknives, some as voyeuristic binoculars while some as a big, white, tickling feathers. My fear and my most common criticism is that often I use it like my eyebrows or nose, to put across arrogantly to my reader, get me completely if you can. The words, which come to my mind most regularly when I put myself in their shoes and read myself, are pretentious, convoluted and unnecessarily flowery. But then there is a history to all this. My language was devoid of this shock value till a certain age, after which I came in contact with a few books, and a certain professor of English. All of them were equally obscure, with the human being more than his inanimate counterparts, but the indelible effect they left on me still bears the scar. Like the true actor’s mask that penetrates the epidermis and blurs the line between make-believe and reality, the words, the tone, the convolution and the arrogance crept into my pen. And more so, as my twisted cerebellum found the perfect conduit to feel important.Simplicity is often cited to be the stuff real genius is made up of; somehow I felt relieved when I heard that. For I didn’t want to be the genius who eventually gets institutionalised or drawn into the mainstream like Bob Dylan or Sunil Ganguly or Amartya Sen….on the demands of the english teacher or the publishers guild or Cambridge or Bilboard. I always aspired to be Laxman’s Common man with inconsistent streaks of brilliance. Who wants to be Sachin, when one can be VVS? Articulation is something that is again considered to one of my Achilles Heels. I sometimes wonder what is more fulfilling- being articulate enough to make it easy, or being honest enough to make it difficult? Both can lead to happiness, variant on the individual utility functions. If it is a man in a fast lane with a premium for time, it is the former; if a mountaineer, then the latter. And I feel when it comes to reading and writing I would like to be amongst mountaineers. It is not that I don’t enjoy the spurious, the trivial or the simple…it is just that a mountaineer gets to see all that… and much more. He can encounter the simplicity of edelweiss, complexity of a thin ice and the fatality of a crevasse one after the other, and draw on all three for fulfillment. I would like to reach out such poly-modal engines…for who knows which is the right fuel for the moment to ignite? Proof-reading thoughts, have according to me, the bane of most plebian writers like me… proof-reading in order to keep in tune with what They say. I love to dispense with that angle. And sure enough, at the back of the mind there is this conformist, who desires strongly let more and more people be in unison with my convolutions. The result is the conflicting swiss-knife which might be can-opener now, only to be a blunt paper-knife in the next second. Whether the swiss-knife is saleable or digestible or even acceptable, is upto you, monami…..for your whims have fashioned the future of poets. I greatly revere the ilk of Chidananda Dasgupta, despite the light-year distance between Amodini and Charulata.