Skip to main content

Nothing and Something


There are days when you don’t want to write anything.  Today is one such day for me.  I would normally have followed the instinct blindly and written nothing.  But I realise I have to write something today because I promised that to a friend: that I would participate in the WriteTribe’s weeklong Festival of Words challenge.  My last two posts were submitted at the site with due compliance and loyalty.  The fact is neither of them was written for WriteTribe or any other specific purpose.  The naked truth is that I don’t write these days with any purpose.  Writing just comes.  Whatever I write is born of the thoughts that spring in my mind irrepressibly. 

Nothing was coming today. Nothing irrepressible, I mean.  But I wish to keep the promise.  Some friends are valuable.

That’s how I realised that I still value some friends.

That’s also how I realised that I don’t have any motive for writing.  I breathe.  I eat.  I write.

I’m not trying to influence anyone in any way, let alone convert.  But if someone tells me that he/she finds my writing good for certain reasons, it makes me feel that I’m doing something worthwhile.  That sense of worth makes me realise that I’m still human.  

Perhaps, that’s the only reason why I write.  Just to reassure myself that I haven’t lost myself.


PS. This post is written specifically for 

Comments

  1. Hehe...Well, sir, To do things consciously without purpose is in itself a valuable thing. It's not easy to just breathe, eat, and write. It's the essence of peace & bliss. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's a reassuring comment, Ravish. Bliss may be a bit far yet ☺

      Delete
  2. I have not even begun my journey and yet I face the same situation. And now I have this constant fear that after some days, I will not have anything to write. I will just become blank and simply stare at a wall, is what I fear.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, you are a seeker and since there are no final answers in life the wall will keep shifting. 😯😉

      Delete
  3. You wrote today because you have a passion to Writting. Today it came out of your mind and not of some facts and knowledge. This innocence is a value that many of has lost. It's good to know that all hasn't lost that value till now.Writting for a purpose can often make it dull.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are wiser than your age, Jo! ☺😇

      Delete
    2. It truly reflect your love to express, how it has so much become a part of you and also how much you value relationship..

      Delete
    3. It has indeed become a part of me.

      Delete
  4. Nothing irrepressible to write, but then you kept the promise to a friend. I think I pretty much follow the same I breath, I write..

    ReplyDelete
  5. I really liked your words - "...Just to reassure myself that I haven’t lost myself'.
    It do happens when nothing striking comes mind as an inspiration to write but still we carry on our passion for writing and improving ourselves.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nice to see you becoming a frequent visitor here, Swati.

      Delete
  6. It happens...but these are the days when Drafts save me and motivate me to write and complete them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't keep drafts, Upasna. I prefer writing to be spontaneous. Though some thinking backs up that spontaneity :)

      Delete
  7. Writing just comes.....and perhaps that is the reason your friend invited you....because of your passion to write....And these words that seem to say nothing say a lot.....The best thing that they tell about you is that 'You care'....:)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm lucky to be still left with some people who make me "care". :)

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

A Man Called Ove

Book Review   Title: A Man Called Ove Author: Fredrik Backman Translation from Swedish: Henning Koch Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, London, 2015 Pages: 295   Ove is a grumpy old man. Right in the initial pages of the novel, we are informed that “People said he was bitter. Maybe they were right. He’d never reflected much on it. People also called him ‘anti-social’. Ove assumed this meant he wasn’t overly keen on people. And in this instance he could totally agree with them. More often than not people were out of their minds.” The novel is Ove’s story It is Ove’s grumpiness that makes him a fascinating character for the reader. Grumpiness notwithstanding, Ove has a lot of goodness within. His world is governed by rules, order and routines. He is superhumanly hardworking and honest. He won’t speak about other people even if such silence means the loss of his job and even personal honour. When his colleague Tom steals money and puts the blame squarely...

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Writers and Morality

  Dostoevsky Dostoevsky was a compulsive gambler. He also consumed alcohol rather liberally. But he remains one of my favourite novelists of all time. Very few writers have produced novels that surpass the greatness of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment . This raises a fundamental question: Should we keep a writer’s personal life totally aside while assessing the literary merit of their works? Going a little further with Dostoevsky, his personal vices gave him firsthand experience of despair, guilt, and redemption, which shaped the deep psychological and moral explorations in his novels. Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov were all parts of Dostoevksy’s complex personality. In other words, if Dostoevsky was an ideal human being, he wasn’t likely to have produced such great novels. It may also be recalled that most of his greatest works were written under extreme pressure from creditors who kept knocking at his door. If he were not the compulsive gambler that he was, t...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...