ink bridge

For the last few years, the only question that has visited me day and night with an intensity no candela can measure is how to be a writer. The answer eludes me even now. I know it is not in the books. I know it is not in the writing programs; neither in workshops, discussions, interviews, or biographies. You see, it is a personal thing. When you decide to be a writer, it is not a choice at all. As they say, choice is a luxury. We don’t have that luxury when it comes to two things – writing and love. They both are absolute. Do not mistake this for the love for writing, though. The love for writing is another luxury. I don’t think I, or anyone who has to be a writer, can own this, either. Writing cannot be an emotion for someone who seeks to be a writer. It has to be their whole existence. And how? A writer is that crack in the old floorboard. For someone else it is just a slight wreck, but to him it is an abyss and the abyss is him. It hides a story, a fragment of...

Sometimes, late awake, staring out of the window, sitting at the study table, in a relatively quiet universe I think about the different times. Curls of wisps of smoke slowly float ahead and then up and finally vanish into some other form. The cigarette runs out. I light another. I wish to write, but my muse is silent. I know there are a million stories out there. I know a hundred stay with me. The difficulty is to tell those exactly as they deserve to be told. Most often we all fail to. Stories exist because hope exists. We look back in time to bring to our present a perspective. Without it, it is impossible to see why we would want to laugh amid the all-pervasive banality or go crazy with passion about quite simple things and deem them beautiful. Stories deconstruct the absurd and demystify the conscience. Some stories are like a flickering flame, about to die any moment, waiting to be acknowledged, wanting to be received by those who know what it is like to be born a story. ...