I was trying to read the paper today, but I found myself skipping article after article because everything I read seemed to be everything I knew already. Not perhaps in terms of fact, but in terms of expression. For instance, an article on the Mangalore attacks will more or less follow the same pattern of an article on dalit women being raped. An article on Vajpayee on the ventilator will more or less dance along the same tune of Manmohan Singh's operation. So familiar is the pattern that my eyes automatically skip whole passages- the only thing that still retains my interest is the Calvin and Hobbes strip. This doesn't happen because we are so used to such news. Because we still feel a little angry, a little sad, a little hurt, a little horrified, when we see atrocity on camera (not in films anymore because the screenplays follow patterns just as the articles do), but we've stopped reacting to the description of atrocity in the Print medium. Everything is starting to sound like the same old story over and over again. Trite.The secret of good writing is to speak a strange language that only you can speak and yet be understood by whoever is listening. Those describing atrocities, however, despite their impeccable grammar and punctuation skills, commit the fatal error of speaking in a tongue that is so common, it passes into the air unheeded. It's like yelling 'Wolf!' in a place where the wolf is part of the landscape and not an intruder. So when you tell me that a woman was beaten, or raped, or murdered, or tickled to death, mummifying your narration with bandages of phrases so old, I sit like a fat crab inside my carapace of insularity. We become- you and I- writer and reader- two beings in two boxes, happily apart, content in our inability to connect. I already know what you want to tell me- and you become the classic definition of a bore.
In our BA class, we had this great essay by George Orwell on our syllabus. I can't help but notice how increasingly relevant his words are becoming as the days pass. We have created such hideous phrases in our idiom that all we need to do to escape the brutality of seeing things in flesh and blood is to put out a hand and pick up a dead phrase from the freezer, like a cold fish, and lay it out on the table. The cold fish will not struggle, its eyes remain calm, the scales betray no secret, and its tail will never swish. You are in control of this cold fish and you make your offering to your readers who are more than willing to accept it because it's easier to handle than a leaping, angry, writhing fish alive with the surf of its being. The cold fish only inspires a faint sense of nausea. It goes away soon if you muffle it beneath layers of the everyday. Its gills will not haunt your mind because you never heard its last dying gasp. So much of news reporting resorts to picking cold fish off the freezer. And as a reader, all that I feel is a vague sense of guilt for being so bored at someone's funeral.
What then, should a writer do to unsettle his/her readers? How does one write the everyday without camping in the graveyard of phrases? It isn't easy, certainly. Most people find it difficult to write a text message that makes sense. Most people cannot write emails that are neatly divided into paragraphs. Most people are so inarticulate, it is astonishing that they are not dead already. But we're not talking about most people here. Most people are not writers and they are happy not being so. There are only a few who are so narcissistic that they believe the world is at the edge of its seat to hear what they have to say. And they still treat the world with condescension. Here I lay my pearls before thee, swine. So if you've chosen to be a writer, you bloody well make sure you work at your art. All good writers are good readers. Not only does reading stimulate your imagination, it also teaches you languages. And by that, I don't mean languages of countries. I mean the languages of people. The languages of love, anger, hate, bitchiness, devotion- whatever it is that you wish to write about. The more you read, the more words fall into your brain like snow, blanking out the mundane, creating an expanse, a canvas, where you as the artist, suddenly discover that you can now speak the language you had been forlornly searching for, for so long. Because this is your land, this is the kingdom you've dreamed of when you had read what you had written and been disappointed by its jadedness.
The more you read, the more you know about your own skills to write. The more you know, the more afraid you could become about what to write. Because we have our invisible demons that whisper in soft strains about how far we can go. How frank your writing can be. How much you will let your words reveal about you. It is this fear that once again drives us back to the comfort of platitudes. It is always difficult to be the only voice of dissent in a birthday party. If you draw a line that keeps your reader away from you, this much and no further, if you decide to be the stowaway in your own ship, then your reader will walk away from you because all there is to see is the steel and skeleton of a machine.
This is true of not just writers writing about atrocities but writers in general.A lot of Indian writers for children, especially, are so painfully imitative of their western counterparts because of their fear to take the plunge and be original. They'd rather be derivatives of Enid Blyton or Rowling because they are safe zones. Happy to be the Indian Blyton, the Indian Rowling. It is this dead-end that must be clawed open to reveal new worlds. Or all you can do is to hopelessly throw yourself against the wall and wish for Platform 9 3/4 to open up.
I'd love to open the newspaper one day and feel scared. The way it's going now, I think I'll read my own obituary and stifle a yawn. I want the writers who are penning their reports to wake me up with their rage. I don't want to read what I already know. Please tell me something new or am going to break up with you.