write, lola, write

Doing an investigative Project all alone in a strange city where you don’t understand the language is fascinating. That sentence could be broken up because every four words in there starts a trend of thought which is interesting in its own right. Only Robin Reisig can have that effect on anyone.

 Robin Reisig is an amazing woman. For one, she has come travelling half way across the world and stayed here for 3 months to teach writing to a bunch of self-righteous prigs who have their own private notions about writing (Terrible notions at that).  She does the same exercise with an alarming regularity every year that would put the migrating cranes to shame. (I am sure she would be proud of me.)

Specifics are the heart of journalism.  One wonders how she ever manages to find ’specifics’ in the mess that is the room ACJ has assigned her. She loves to email people and for a person that old, it is a feat. Perhaps it is because she has been a journalist and then a professor for far too long but certainly in the world of weighty Indians, all set to judge people because of their inability, this is a skill that has stood her in good stead.

 Good writing must show and not tell. My ears perk up at the very mention of sound. There is beauty in sound and it is only right that it must be conveyed. Writers tend to be presumptuous if they think they can convey it. If they could, there would have been no sound.

She will send long and sometimes short emails. Her emails will be full of detail, the time, the day and the place where we should meet her.   But it is fun to read these emails again and again. There is poetry in them. The way she uses words even if it’s a mundane line:

‘Tuesday’s class will be in our usual room, but Thursday’s class
will be in computer room 1. IT IS IMPORTANT TO BE ON TIME to both
of these classes–for Tuesday, as a courtesy to Shalini (please
read her stories!) and Thursday because we will start with a
deadline-writing drill that requires everyone to be there.’

I think anyone can make beauty sound beautiful. The skill of a writer is in making ugliness sound pathetic and beauty sound real. That is what she does. She makes the mundane sound so mundane that you can’t help but appreciate the boring monotony of existence.

Sentimental cynic

it seems like life has come a full circle. It is almost the end of the term and job interviews are being held on campus. We are journalists now, our chests inflated with fake self-pride. We will go out in to the world, eager to write stories about injustices perpetrated and livelihoods destroyed. Isn’t that what we are here for? Our stories will reek of pomposity and wax eloquent on ‘how things should be’. In a few years time, some of us will migrate from journalism on to better things like education, marriage and children.

We may still write an occasional piece in a newspaper that still remembers the heydays of the early millenium. We will have preserved yellowed paper cuttings of the stories that we have done. Things may work out differently. People may actually make a difference to the world. The ones, who are illusioned, at least, will.

For people like me who expect nothing from people and from life even, there is no hope. We will sail through it all. When we die, we will regret. Secretly, we will hope the world will stop after we die though we have believed and spoken all our lives against such an occurence. Such is life.

On Waiting

On Waiting

Just a tiny bit, I coax,

Why must I wait two entire days

to see the moon in its completeness?

The moon doesn’t have to wait,

It glows brightly,

Like one who has never known waiting.