Skip to main content

Thesaurus Man

 

My old thesaurus

One of the oldest books in my present collection is Roget’s Thesaurus. I bought this book in the Christmas season of 1975. One of my teachers bought it for me as well as a few other students who wanted it. The book was my faithful companion for many years because I was in love with words.

The art of writing has little to do with a thesaurus. But I realised that truth much later. Initially I laboured under the delusion that writing was a kind of verbal jugglery. My appetite for words was ravenous for quite a few years and I employed bombastic words in my writing in those days. Somebody compared me to Mrs Malaprop and somebody gave me the nickname ‘Thesaurus Man’.

Eventually I was enlightened. It dawned on me that writing wasn’t quite about words. Of course, if you can use words elegantly and appropriately that’s a great advantage in writing. But writing isn’t all about such elegance or appropriateness.

Writing is essentially a form of self-expression. It doesn’t need a florid lexicon. You can be a good writer with a vocabulary of a few thousand words, believe me. The heart has its own diction. It must have if you want to be a good writer. That diction doesn’t come from any thesaurus. That comes from your inner depth.  Any discerning reader will discover sooner than later where your words come from: hour heart or the thesaurus.

As I grew up I discarded a lot of books from my collections. When I shifted from Shillong to Delhi and later from Delhi to Kerala, on each occasion, I discarded a substantial number of books. But Roget’s Thesaurus stayed. Though I never used it anymore. It stayed because it carries a lot of memories. It has a heart of its own, for me.

The price: Rs7.05

I still remember with much fondness the teacher who bought it for me. I remember frantic searches for words while I wrote articles for a local newspaper in 1990s. My malapropisms of those days wink at me even now. The thesaurus is a bag of mixed memories.

It was the ambition of my youth to become a writer. I wrote quite much but I know they haven’t made any ripples – not even in a humble teacup, let alone the wretched Ganga. Now, less foolish and much less quixotic, I write with a shrug of resignation that aspires to hobnob with some ascetic detachment.

 

My study today

xx

Comments

  1. Enjoyed reading this insightful piece.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hari OM
    It's interesting, is it not, how some of us just know we have many words to share and keep working at it no matter how wide the ripples? From an early age I knew words to be my 'art' and was gifted a Roget's by my parents who felt that to be true also. Later, one of dad's friends gifted me his old school dictionary (Chambers). Maybe once a year I take them from the shelf to let them know I appreciate their part in my writing path! Thanks for a post that stirred similar reminiscence. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's always heartwarming to see another soul with similar experience. My first personal dictionary, a pocket Oxford, came from an uncle who was a teacher. That didn't endure with me beyond ten years or so.

      Delete
  3. Yes I remember the earliest gifts were dictionaries. I still have the Oxford dictionary along with a few others. Unfortunately or otherwise, now they are all replaced by digital versions.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I too rely on a lot of digital reference books these days. Easy to use. The flip side is the increasing distance from books altogether, especially by the young students.

      Delete
  4. Lovely lovely piece sir. This morning I was having a conversation around honesty in writing being of paramount importance. And then I read this. A huge fan of your writing.
    But what resonated most with me was the last line,
    Now, less foolish and much less quixotic, I write with a shrug of resignation that aspires to hobnob with some ascetic detachment.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It takes us time to learn certain hard lessons.

      Thanks for sharing this too.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...