I have never considered myself a writer - just as a person who could write. So, as any eager and audacious teenager would , i ventured to do something about my supposed "writing skills" , as my teachers put it. If i had had the wisdom gained from the fifteen or so years of experience from my life then, from which i now brand them (teachers) exceptionally optimistic ( though , i consider it a job requirement for those who have chosen to take up teaching as a profession in normal ,boring and supposedly "best schools in the city"* , for whom i personally sympathize with(I don't condemn the teachers, just the methodology!), and coming back to my comedy of errors, I excitedly enrolled myself into a writing class to hone the above mentioned "gift" that i supposedly possessed.
So , after the first class , I purchased an expensive writing pad that was beautifully crafted in handmade paper, ordered a few hot bajjis , settled in a comfy corner of a cozy cafe with a steaming mug of hot coffee, took out my pen and started... well... of course- nothing less than my masterpiece-to-be! The assignment was to describe something that inspired me to write. The villainous rain that seemed unrelenting must have occurred to me as an ill omen, but unfortunately, being the hopeless romantic that I am , the mental image of J.K.Rowling working her magic on her writing pad and the vicarious thrill of imagining myself in her shoes completely washed aside the perils of underestimating the kind of crap(please excuse my French!) I am capable of churning .
As anybody who has ever written exams in their life would know, writing about nothing tends to bore. It bores, creates a crater, drills a hole and finally collapses your skull inwards , leading to a sloppy, mushy and not to mention -a trashy mess of an article or what ever it is that you are writing.Not only was it a tedious activity, it also had the effect of ripping the creative streak out of me.After about an hour and a half of spinning a yarn out of my " writing skill" complement, i took a break to review the damage i had done. It was after all my first real writing assignment that i had taken "seriously",so i decided to go with the flow of my thoughts and vowed not to throw out the first draft as i usually did ,simultaneously hoping hard that i shouldn't be asked to read my work aloud to the class.
But fate never works your way just because you hope really hard and that applies especially to students like me who hope for an "accidental" fire in the examination wing that cause my exam papers to "tragically" burn to dust . So just like you are probably expecting and i must have been too, my name was called - and worse- called first . Normally reading out my work wouldn't have bothered me. But this was different.Thanks to my parents who had named me in R and the completely un-imaginative system of alphabetical order, I had never been the first to stand before a class.By the time i got my chance , everybody would usually be either too taken by their performance to actually care what other people were doing on stage , half asleep or completely so. And now , here i was , standing before 20 people,clutching an article that i knew would make them vow to stop me from writing anything at all ever again in my life. 20 pairs of curious eyes were looking at me with sweet expectation.And did i tell you? - i was the youngest in the class, so naturally,everybody applauded which had the effect of successfully turning me red-pink-blue-and back to red as i walked to the podium...
Everything that happened then on inside those four walls of the class that day is completely confidential- yes, Confidential with a capital "C".Ha! You thought i was going to tell you my story on the internet, over a public blog when I cant even get the courtesy of seeing your face when you laugh at me!!?? It would be a sin to reveal it that way! (wink! :P)
Good. Now you are angry ,frustrated ,irritated- thinking why I went on and on and on for three long highly verbose and vividly descriptive paragraphs on something I never meant to tell anyone in the first place .....well, i did it for precisely the reason anyone ever does anything- Just for fun! :D:D :P
Have a nice day ! :P
*This is DEFINITELY NOT meant to disgrace or defame any teacher/school or person in the teaching profession-a profession which I have the highest regard for. It is purely based on a few of my personal experiences in the traditional Indian school system .Don't get me wrong..I love some of the schools I was fortunate enough to study in and some teachers have been the most influential people in my life . Anyone taking offence at these comments is ... well,welcome to do so- mostly because, I can't really do anything about what other people think.
So , after the first class , I purchased an expensive writing pad that was beautifully crafted in handmade paper, ordered a few hot bajjis , settled in a comfy corner of a cozy cafe with a steaming mug of hot coffee, took out my pen and started... well... of course- nothing less than my masterpiece-to-be! The assignment was to describe something that inspired me to write. The villainous rain that seemed unrelenting must have occurred to me as an ill omen, but unfortunately, being the hopeless romantic that I am , the mental image of J.K.Rowling working her magic on her writing pad and the vicarious thrill of imagining myself in her shoes completely washed aside the perils of underestimating the kind of crap(please excuse my French!) I am capable of churning .
As anybody who has ever written exams in their life would know, writing about nothing tends to bore. It bores, creates a crater, drills a hole and finally collapses your skull inwards , leading to a sloppy, mushy and not to mention -a trashy mess of an article or what ever it is that you are writing.Not only was it a tedious activity, it also had the effect of ripping the creative streak out of me.After about an hour and a half of spinning a yarn out of my " writing skill" complement, i took a break to review the damage i had done. It was after all my first real writing assignment that i had taken "seriously",so i decided to go with the flow of my thoughts and vowed not to throw out the first draft as i usually did ,simultaneously hoping hard that i shouldn't be asked to read my work aloud to the class.
But fate never works your way just because you hope really hard and that applies especially to students like me who hope for an "accidental" fire in the examination wing that cause my exam papers to "tragically" burn to dust . So just like you are probably expecting and i must have been too, my name was called - and worse- called first . Normally reading out my work wouldn't have bothered me. But this was different.Thanks to my parents who had named me in R and the completely un-imaginative system of alphabetical order, I had never been the first to stand before a class.By the time i got my chance , everybody would usually be either too taken by their performance to actually care what other people were doing on stage , half asleep or completely so. And now , here i was , standing before 20 people,clutching an article that i knew would make them vow to stop me from writing anything at all ever again in my life. 20 pairs of curious eyes were looking at me with sweet expectation.And did i tell you? - i was the youngest in the class, so naturally,everybody applauded which had the effect of successfully turning me red-pink-blue-and back to red as i walked to the podium...
Everything that happened then on inside those four walls of the class that day is completely confidential- yes, Confidential with a capital "C".Ha! You thought i was going to tell you my story on the internet, over a public blog when I cant even get the courtesy of seeing your face when you laugh at me!!?? It would be a sin to reveal it that way! (wink! :P)
Good. Now you are angry ,frustrated ,irritated- thinking why I went on and on and on for three long highly verbose and vividly descriptive paragraphs on something I never meant to tell anyone in the first place .....well, i did it for precisely the reason anyone ever does anything- Just for fun! :D:D :P
Have a nice day ! :P
*This is DEFINITELY NOT meant to disgrace or defame any teacher/school or person in the teaching profession-a profession which I have the highest regard for. It is purely based on a few of my personal experiences in the traditional Indian school system .Don't get me wrong..I love some of the schools I was fortunate enough to study in and some teachers have been the most influential people in my life . Anyone taking offence at these comments is ... well,welcome to do so- mostly because, I can't really do anything about what other people think.
