Skip to main content

At the threshold of beauty


 
With my Remington Rand in 1996 or so
A Remington Rand portable typewriter was my beloved companion for over a decade of my youth which was mostly wasted in the flighty hills of Shillong. Since I have already told the story of the waste in my memoir, Autumn Shadows, I shall not repeat it here. I sold the typewriter a day before I left Shillong without dreams. I sold it with the same self-loathing that Salinger’s Holden Caulfield had when he sold his typewriter just before running away from his school.
Delhi gave me dreams again, however. One of the first things I did in Delhi, as soon as I had enough money, was to buy a desktop computer. That was in 2001. One of the first poems I typed on it was about the WTC meltdown. The Gujarat riots would rattle my nerves a few months later.
My desktop which had a storage space of just 20 GB, much less than a common smartphone today, was meant to motivate me to continue writing which I used to do with my Remington Rand. The computer gave me a new life. I started blogging as soon as it arrived. I used to write for two local newspapers in Shillong and the typewriter was primarily meant for that. Writing kept me alive and kicking.
The Remington looked far cuter than my desktop which occupied an elephantine space. But typing on that cute little thing was a rather hard job. You needed to bang on the keys with all the strength you had. If an error occurred, you would spend minutes applying the Kores whitener and typing over it after waiting for the liquid to dry. One good thing is that the typewriter perfected my acquaintance with the keypad so much so that today my fingers fly on the gentle keypad of my laptop which occupies much less space than the Remington.
The desktop brought out the writer in me once again.  I started blogging. My first blog was The Way at Times blogs. It has now disappeared from the infinite spaces of virtual reality. When Times failed to give me readers, I migrated to Sulekha. Right wing fanatics didn’t let me write much there and I switched over to Wordpress which was eventually hacked and I found my place at Blogspot.
Thanks to my readers for this rank


I cannot live without reading and writing. Literature is the essence of life for me. Literature takes one to the threshold of the beauty of existence. I read great writers. I try my best to write good stuff like them. But I’m aware of my limitations. Nevertheless, I’m happy I have reached the threshold of beauty. I live there, at the threshold of beauty. I will enter it one day, I know. I will disappear into that seductive world of ethereal beauty one day. I’m waiting. Waiting in the autumn of a time that began with the Remington typewriter and has arrived at the current HP laptop.


Comments

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
37 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
15 comments
Read more

Sanjay and other loyalists

AI-generated illustration Some people, especially those in politics, behave as if they are too great to have any contact with the ordinary folk. And they can get on with whoever comes to power on top irrespective of their ideologies and principles. Sanjay was one such person. He occupied some high places in Sawan school [see previous posts, especially P and Q ] merely because he knew how to play his cards more dexterously than ordinary politicians. Whoever came as principal, Sanjay would be there in the elite circle. He seemed to hold most people in contempt. His respect was reserved for the gentry. I belonged to the margins of Sawan society, in Sanjay’s assessment. So we hardly talked to each other. Looking back, I find it quite ludicrous to realise that Sanjay and I lived on the same campus 24x7 for a decade and a half without ever talking to each other except for official purposes.      Towards the end of our coexistence, Sawan had become a veritable hell. Power supply to the
12 comments
Read more

Thomas the Saint

AI-generated image His full name was Thomas Augustine. He was a Catholic priest. I knew him for a rather short period of my life. When I lived one whole year in the same institution with him, I was just 15 years old. I was a trainee for priesthood and he was many years my senior. We both lived in Don Bosco school and seminary at a place called Tirupattur in Tamil Nadu. He was in charge of a group of boys like me. Thomas had little to do with me directly as I was under the care of another in-charge. But his self-effacing ways and angelic smile drew me to him. He was a living saint all the years I knew him later. When he became a priest and was in charge of a section of a Don Bosco institution in Kochi, I met him again and his ways hadn’t changed an iota. You’d think he was a reincarnation of Jesus if you met him personally. You won’t be able to meet him anymore. He passed away a few years ago. One of the persons whom I won’t ever forget, can’t forget as long as the neurons continu
16 comments
Read more

William and the autumn of life

William and I were together only for one year, but our friendship has grown stronger year after year. The duration of that friendship is going to hit half a century. In the meanwhile both he and I changed many places. William was in Kerala when I was in Shillong. He was in Ireland when I was in Delhi. Now I am in Kerala where William is planning to migrate back. We were both novices of a religious congregation for one year at Kotagiri in Tamil Nadu. He was older than me by a few years and far more mature too. But we shared a cordial rapport which kept us in touch though we went in unexpected directions later. William’s conversations had the same pattern back then and now too. I’d call it Socratic. He questions a lot of things that you say with the intention of getting to the depth of the matter. The last conversation I had with him was when I decided to stop teaching. I mention this as an example of my conversations with William. “You are a good teacher. Why do you want to stop
15 comments
Read more