1.DEATH ALONE IS NOT TRAGEDY
You alone can write some things. If you wait forever for a right or ‘write’ moment to pen a lasting piece of work, you end up writing little or nothing. You will only be able to blacken the white paper occasionally. The spider silk of creativity are broken due to continuous postponement. The over tension between the world and your self is fruitless. Art cements a relationship between your self and the world. If you fail to write, you need no other tragedy such as the death of your friend or spouse or child to depress you. If you are mired in your memories, your creativity would never bloom. Life, the fountainhead of creativity also gets dried up.
2.PAINS OF DELIVERY
You don’t stake any claim to absolute truth. Truth seekers can go to science or history. Since a truth is true from your own viewpoint, let others agree or disagree with you. You find more delight in reading rather than writing. You suffer from an acute sense of loneliness in this bloody crowded world. The herd-mind-- religious or irreligious is ready to tyrannize you. Trade mongers or war mongers support firms firmly at the cost of humans Be firm and suffer from pangs of delivery and let the world be charmed by the newly born.
3.RELATIVISE YOUR SUFFERING
Myriad moments melted in the sea of time. You are caught in Miltonic anguish or Chaudhurian angst. Souls more courageous than you courted the damsel of death. You shied away from her passionate and deadly embrace. Your temperament is rather gloomy and idealistic. Think of man-inflicted and avoidable suffering of children, men and women in Afghanistan and Iraq. Think of the people buried alive in Haiti and Chile. Are you still gloomy or dreamy? Do You still want to sing “the eternal tune of sadness”?
“Sophocles long ago/ Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought/
In to his mind the turbid ebb and flow/Of human misery.”
4.DILEMMA
The cloud of ‘foreign’ language hovers over your mindscape. Michael Madhusudan Dutt, the Bengali poet also faced the same situation. Modern Indian English writers say that English is as much Indian as any other language. You are tossed between mother tongue and motherly tongue. Your words may not move canonists or cannon-lovers. But they surely drive the devil of your discontentment out. It is quite likely that there may be someone like you in this world now or in remote future who would relish the dish you cooked.
5.DELIGHT THE READER
The obsession with politics and the submission to the censor have sapped the creativity of many a writer. In the world of corrupt politics and bloody fists, literature offers an alternative means to understand the world. Shouldn’t a writer appeal to the emotional as well as logical aspects of the reader’s mind? To Margaret Atwood, writing means seizing the control of your destiny. No writing, no communication. No life.
6.YOU ARE MATERIAL
You find that literature is pushed to the secondary position in comparison with entertainment industry. But pages live longer. the meaning of your life emerges through pages alone. From cosmic viewpoint, your writing may be trivial.
You feel sad when you think of martyrs who cannot tell tales. It is the choice of the living. Neruda, the poet died in Chile for Socialism. In Siberia of suppression, Solzhenitsyn worked in a labour camp and survived the Soviet imperialism. If you are afraid of taking “a leap in the dark,” it is better not to be a writer or a fighter.
7.DON’T LOSE CURIOSITY
You are a child. Your thought starts with your origin, your parents and stops at your grand-grand parents. You don’t know about Charles Darwin or Bertrand Russel or Stephen Hawking. Then you fall in love with letters on a page. You wait for “Chandamama” or Andhra Prabha weekly to read stories illustrated. Even a potlam ( wrapper) which contains eatables draws your interest. You feel that every thing to be written has already been written by somebody else. As a young rebel you decide to turn your life into poetry. The resultant repression sends your creativity and curiosity into the nether world. No curiosity means conformity.
8.LIVE FOR ART
If You watched the ballet, “Sambhavami Yuge Yuge” performed by Sobha Naidu and her troupe, you would appreciate the secret of art. She seems to have subdued and sublimated the personal demons in the worship of art. The secret of the artistic success is that you have to live if not die for it. You should have the courage of the gambler and hope fervently amidst deep despair. Perseverance is the “open, sesame” to the treasure hidden in side the cave of one’s mind and heart. Artist Ali Baba can hoodwink the thieves of distraction if he doesn’t forget the mantra. He can find treasures of creativity when his mind is relaxed.
9.POETRY IS AN INSIDER
Poetry even today is neither elitist nor insincere. It is as difficult as writing a drama or story or a novel. It needs a lot of courage to write poetry in the era of business communication, science fiction and non-fiction. Your entire personality alone knows which form and style are apt for your artistic articulation. You must sincerely believe in the efficacy of writing. New thoughts– think, continue, write, own, change and spread them. Your memory miraculously connects the remotest fragments of thoughts and detects the usually undetectable things.
10.RUSHING ONTO PAGE
You are at six and forty. You are at sixes and sevens. You read many books and penned a few poems. You taught and sought to write in a foreign language. Your critic says that you thought in mother tongue and wrote in ‘(sm)other’ tongue. You swing between harmony and discord. You love Rushdie’s writings and but do not rush- to- die. Your life is a tale of sound, sparks of fury and a little significance.
11.THINK ORIGINALLY
White paper is a bed. The pen is the mother. Letters are sons and daughters. Their friends called ideas lead to more ideas to action. Do ideas and actions have value? Your ideas evade wastage due to thoughtless acts whereas your actions exude energy. You use and misuse words to make or mar meanings.
12. AN INCREDIBLE MIND
It’s difficult to measure the creative reservoir of Shakespeare. The name of Marlowe or Ben Johnson is invoked to dismiss the genius of Shakespeare. But Vyasa wrote the epic Mahabharata in one lakh slokas. Tikkana translated fifteen parts of the epic into Telugu. Voltaire wrote many volumes. In our times Russel, Asimov, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood and others wrote copiously. Human brain is a miracle-- a source of infinite creativity as well as immense stupidity. In stead of using it creatively, many only know how to abuse their minds and their human existence.
13.THE VALIANT NEVER TASTES DEATH….
Avoid posing as a detached thinker. Literature is not neutral like Switzerland. One has to be objective like Arundhati Roy but not like “ clinically objective” intellectuals who don’t know the despair of the deprived and write to dull, lull and kill the spirit of the struggle. You find the clash of ideas, castes, classes, nations, races and genders. The tyrants of any hue- white, brown, red must be criticized. But politics permeate our lives till we know their true value. On the other hand, one can concur with historian Collingwood’s words that all his life he had been engaged with politics unawares. At last he decided to fight consciously. Some delude themselves that the victory of one group is final and the end of history. There are no permanent victories or defeats in history. Every generation has to fight afresh, consolidate, make or suffer from history.
14. NOTHING LESS THAN COSMOS
It seems Telugu writers have embraced identity politics – feminism, minority, Dalit literature etc. in a narrow minded way. They are not able to give larger picture. How can they enthuse all the sections of the people for change?
Poetry is seen as elitist. Prose, that too short story alone is in. what is about essay, novel, monograph, prose poem, imaginary interviews etc.?
A writer has to go on doing his duty to understand and make others understand the reality. She has to understand herself as an individual and the larger society. Her task is like that of a doctor, engineer, artisan or a soldier. A writer has to entertain, enthuse and enlighten the readers cutting across age, gender, class, religion or community. All may not respond in the same manner to the same degree at the same time. She has to give new ideas- aesthetic, scientific, political or economic etc. She has to write not to sell best in numbers but influence as many as possible deeply and for good. A professional writer is not partial and his subject is nothing less than the entire cosmos.
15. A LOT IN A FEW WORDS
Reading is an individual act. It decides the destiny of an individual to some extent or other if he does it for a purpose. Readers like according to their needs and interests and expectations from life. What impresses one may depress another. Purposeful reading has to be followed by purposeful writing. Today many things are flooding the market and time is all. So, a writer has to tell a lot in a few words and impress the reader a great deal.
16.IS PRESENT ENOUGH?
What struck a chord in your heart yesterday may leave you cold now. Why Shakespeare? Why Shaw or Ibsen or Marx? Is contemporariness all? Should we praise the present at the cost of the past? You feel a hole in your heart when you have to reject your past for the present? Past, present and future cannot be pigeonholed from one another.
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