More like Gramsci than Kafka

I wouldn’t have aspired to become a writer had I learnt the essential lesson from Franz Kafka at the right time.

Kafka [from Wikipedia]

Kafka didn’t want his works to be published because he wrote for his personal satisfaction, out of some sort of compulsion, and he didn’t think his writings were good enough for others to read. But the world is lucky that he didn’t dump them. He entrusted them with Max Brod, his friend and writer, with the request to burn them after his death. The world is again lucky that Brod didn’t honour that wish. Otherwise, we would have been deprived of some of the finest novels like The Trial and The Castle. Brod went out of his way to get some other works of Kafka published after the Nazis captured Prague in 1939 because of which he had to flee. But he did carry with him Kafka’s unpublished works to Palestine and got them published.

If Kafka didn’t think of himself as worthy of publication, what should I have thought of my own writings? I am not even as good as a grain of sand on the beach of the ocean that Kafka is. The very thought of a comparison is atrocious.

Kafka died at the age of 40 in 1924. As a sexagenarian, who has written quite prolifically (and rather shamelessly), I haven’t reached anywhere near the profundity required of a writer. That is why I choose to describe myself as a blogger rather than writer. 

Gramsci [from Wikipedia]

There is another writer who did take much trouble to get his writings published. He wrote profusely while he was in prison from 1926 until his death in 1937 at the age of 46. As a prisoner of the Nazis, he wrote more than 30 notebooks which contained about 3000 pages of history and analysis. His sister-in-law smuggled those notebooks from the prison by hiding them in her innerwear. He was an incisive critic of Mussolini. At his trial, the prosecutor declared that “For 20 years we must stop this brain from functioning.” He didn’t live for 20 years, though. The fascist prison sucked his blood much before that. That man is Antonio Gramsci.

I may not be a writer. I may be nothing more than a blogger. Yet I am inspired by people like Kafka and Gramsci. More like the latter. I would like to bring my thoughts to some readers.

By the way, Gramsci’s philosophy is relevant in today’s India. He saw his fascist government using cultural hegemony to control people’s will. Instead of using force, the fascists used institutions to project one culture, one language, one ideology. All other cultures and languages and so on were projected as alien. Consent was created by the government and dissent was suppressed using all sorts of subliminal strategies.

Gramsci was a dissenter. He was killed in prison. Silently. But he wrote and his writings reached the people.

Let me write too sitting in the shadow prison that my country has created surreptitiously.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 432: When did you discover that you are a writer? #Writing