When I Was Gone A While
I got a mail a while back. I eighteen year old from India asked me why I had stopped blogging. She - and her mom - quite enjoyed what I wrote. That was flattering, for I did not think what I wrote was any more than idle parsing of words. And, she wrote, your earlier Avatar seemed to have have disappeared completely. I liked your posts on Dizzy.
That got me thinking. What was she then, ten? Twelve? And she remembered?
She loved Dizzy. So did I, love, so did I.
But have been busy the past two years. Was down on the luck, despairingly so, as far as proper writing was concerned. Creative writing seemed to have abandoned me. Like sleep, it was not a mistress that came at my bidding.
So did what any writer worth his salt does. At least one addicted to writing. I wrote for others. I wrote two pieces of fiction - autobiographies really, but are not all autobiographies really fiction? Ghost writing is fun, because it pays.
I had a technical book done, something I could not comprehend, but wrote it anyway.
Then I went back to my book, my very own, and still despaired. Dialled Sharon Bakar's number a couple of time. Could I join her writing class? Maybe I need a kick in the ass to get started back again. When times are bad, they just are, the number I had was outdated too.
Anyway, life went on. Joined Rotary in the midst. Then Zafar tweeted something about Mistry's book being banned by a university. It riled. I went back to read the Journey, bathed in its beauty, loved the work. The best way to get a dormant writer to write, I found, is not to call him an ass, he knows that. Say something bad about a writer he admires.
Martin Niemoller's words ring in the mind. "First they came for the trade unionists, I was not a trade unionist ans I didn't speak out. Then they came for the Jews, I was not a Jew I was silent..."
Some one has to. Even if it is just a ripple in the a pail, as it is for them. The goons that want him silenced don't care much for the ripples nor voices of dissent. They after all cheered the deaths in deaths in Gujarat, the falling of mosques.
I will write more on that.
