Daring, Surprising, Drying
During one chai session with a fellow writer, i was discussing my problem with my dried up emotional quotient and he suggested if that is the thing closest to me right now, why not write something about it only. Sure, but then visiting the demons of our own mind is not easy.
Not impossible either. So attempting the impossible here.
It's been more than 2 years that i wrote something here and almost another 6 months since i started this blog. Seems like a lifetime ago now. A lot has happened since then. I've graduated (infact post graduated) in two more course and feel bit grown up now that am a part of the shining 'working' class brigade of India, Jai Ho!
I've finally become a writer, well so the world says (refer to my previous blog where i'm contemplating a career in writing). It's fun because am living a dual life. A life where i am the writer and another, where self doubts loom so large and leave such long shadows that sometimes running away is the only viable option left and that again puts me in a vicious vircle that is so hard to break. So you see, this dubious career choice has landed me in some sort of concentric vicious circles, a chakraviyuh of sorts and i feel like the brave but dying Abhimanyu........
Well, not literally so.....
Afterall, this is something i chose consciously though i didn't have an iota of idea of what i was getting into. But FTII happened and changed my life forever. Gloomy and beautiful places do that to us i guess.
It's been 9 months since i graduated from FTII also but the hangover still 'hangs' heavy on my head. Hangover of being so away from the real world that the only reality i know is that of within the safe boundaries of the institute. Thanks but hang on, the hangover!
Has that heavenly place made me really immune to everything around me or is it the ruthless life of Mumbai? I think both.
A beautiful institute where you are left to meander with your thoughts and pen down anything that your mind wants to, clashing with a tough competitive industry and a life away from the safe heavens of a home and good food that the uncertainties begin to play with your sensibilities.
That is the worst part.
I've begun to doubt my sensibilities now.
I miss my sensibilities, my sinstivity and feelings that felt for things that mattered to me. Now, nothing matters except for earning enough to be able to sustain myself. This is not what i was to do. I was to observe, feel and write. None of the three i do now because i've stopped feeling, i've stopped empthasing, i've stopped getting surprised. Unfeelingness coupled with weak observation power leaves the writer in me even more doubtful, even more dubious and superficial than ever.
A crying child, a disbled beggar, a hungry dog. Nothing touches me now. Nothing makes me go weak in my heart and catch my attention and hold it for a while. The sweetest of movies and books bore me mid way. To be able to write any kind of emotion, i have to constantly take refernces from secondary sources of inspiration like movies and books, if at all i can sit through them.
Where are my own feelings?
Where are those bitter-sweet memories one always falls back on while watching something similar in real time?
It's not that i don't socialise, not that i don't read books or watch movies but the problem i think is that all of these activities go into the 'me' part of my mind and not the 'writer' part of it.
Phew! That is tiring and leaves me as dried up and forlorn as ever. No amount of sleeping, watching the sunset, eating panipuris and window shopping helps.
What is 'writing' then?
How does it feel to live an experience and then reproduce it on the paper/computer screen?
I don't know.
I'm waiting, waiting that something will again touch my heart, make me feel that it is important to me, corelate to the the concentric circles of my mind and then, together, the whole of me will say,
i am alive.....
