Thursday, February 13, 2014

To write it right


I reached home late after a long day’s work and I switched on my system to check my mails. There were plethora of mails as usual and I promptly dumped into the trash folder. The boring day was about to end until I saw an envelope with my name in a hand writing I recognized was from my pen friend. I jumped with joy and I tore open the envelope and glanced through the letter. The best of all gifts you can give someone is your time and no feeling can match the joy when you know that someone had taken time to pen their emotions for you.

I was worried whether the culture of writing would go out of fashion with advent of technology. Technology is a peculiar gift to mankind that he had given himself for it has enabled him to set foot on the moon but not to care about his neighbor’s name. To write is an art. To write is a science. To be artistic is essential for art without science is beautiful but science without art is unscientific. To write is easy but to write well and to make an easy reading out of it requires damn hard writing.

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” What has inspired me to write is “ The picture of Dorian Grey” by a gentleman who would be arrested on Indian soil had he been alive in India and also happened to be the one I quoted above.

To be drunk is to be spiritual for you transcend reality and be with peace with yourself. And you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. When we are given a piece of paper to read no matter how short the paragraph is we tend to skip certain lines and read the ones which we would find would be interesting. Man has become devoid of patience and without patience there cannot be romance as being romantic with words requires something more than an acquaintance. If you can leave out the parts people would skip you would become an overnight hit.

When you try to put down your thoughts on paper you would pause not for want of words but to decide on what emotions to let go and what to hold back. This in turn would encourage profound thought process otherwise what would have been a mundane exercise of existence. It has been said that never use the same word in two sentences of the same paragraph as it would make you look amateurish but if you can use the same word twice in a same sentence you would considered genius and I have used the same word five times and it makes me something more than a genius. This reminds me of William White. “Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence.”

A piece of art would leave you wanting for more and precisely so that anything that is worth read should leave you insatiate. To be a writer you have to breathe in and out, breath in prose and breath out poetry and the difference between a prose and poetry is that of a skirt and mini skirt with mini skirt being longer by a couple of syllable.

The battle against silence is the toughest battle of all and now that I fought my way out of it I must confess that the reason for this inartistic piece of penning my thoughts is to wrap and throw it “down under” the bin and hoping it would be found by someone who is artistic to the extent I am otherwise.