The near extinct writer’s tool.

Not thoughts. Though it's very close in line to the frontrunner today, the pen.

I suffer the creative’s privileged disease of sulkiness. Humbly, I call myself neither a designer, nor an artist; neither a thinker, nor a writer. I indulge in little of all whenever the alternative moods set in. And these days, on the rare occasions that I conquer my laziness.

Yesterday, adorning my writer’s garb, I sat down with the smartest invention by mankind after the wheel and most constructively destructive by far after the guns and the bombs - Man’s smartest machine, and the most powerful today with every man with an average IQ being its slave - the computer.

I had been reminiscing about my childhood. A certain friend in particular. And the lovely times we shared. Then came the unstoppable urge to string these fragmented thoughts with words. I started typing. Leaping through the waves of my emotions I got farther with words than I had expected to go when I started. Trouble began when the power failed. I did save a copy of the draft before the battery gave out. The cause for the frustration was the inability to proceed with my writing towards its completion. Exhaustion, forgotten in the midst of an enthusiastic stunt with words, set in; heightened by the afternoon heat and the sumptuous meal savoured earlier. A quick nap put this restlessness to temporary rest. I had a strange dream. Nightmare, while I was still in it. My computer crashed. With it, my intellect. And communication. I woke up to a comic reality. Honest thoughts do not need a brush of fancy words generated by the thesaurus. To write all I need is a pen and paper. And my thoughts. Not MS Word. Not a web dictionary.

I concluded the ‘Autobiography of a Pen’ eleven years back, with its broken nib earning it a place in the corner dustbin. It wasn’t penned as an obituary to this marvelous writing tool. In today’s scenario, however, it’s metaphoric to this impending death.

(A page from 2009. Was compelled to pack it in with the rest of the stuff here!)

On Coffee, Roy & lucid writing

One can't expect a day that starts with Roy and a cup of strong smooth German coffee to be anything but inspired and spirited!

'To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.' - Arundhati Roy

Great respect for the lucidity in her writing, deeply researched subjects and honestly rendered thoughts.

'As a writer, one spends a lifetime journeying into the heart of language, trying to minimize, if not eliminate, the distance between the thought and language', writes Roy.

It has been an ongoing struggle with me, as a creative - and it evidently holds true with all other media of expression as much as with writing. Ergo, I find greater relevance to her usage of  the term 'language', not limiting to words, letters or symbols.