Write a page a day - Preface

Writing a page a day is not as tedious as watering the garden or assessing your students' assignments. There are some people who can talk and talk endlessly on any topic provided they get a microphone and an audience. Once a student told me that his father could talk endlessly without any topic. I found out that the man was a politician.

Writing is for me what speaking is to the politician, I think. Give me a laptop and leave me alone and you can get an article in a few minutes.

There's so much to write about in the world of humans. You can write about Eliot's Prufrock and the latter's women who came and went talking about Michelangelo. See, politicians can't do that. Because they don't measure out their life with coffee spoons. They do it with bulldozers and earth-movers.

You can write about why the dictionary lacks rhyme and reason though it is the most precise book in the world. Or about how such boring things as carbon, hydrogen and oxygen come together to make up the sweet sugar. You can mystify people by presenting them with such impossibilities as a3 + b3 = c3

If your readers find such absolute truths of Fermat and other mathematicians boring, give them entertaining truths like how the Bosphorus Bridge had to be shut to pedestrians when too many of them committed suicide by jumping from the bridge. Why do so many people prefer death? Interesting, aint it?

Or startle your readers with a question like if they come to know after their death that nothing in the world has changed because of their death, how would they feel? The cosmos will go on just as it is without you!

There are the male seahorses that give birth to little ones. Good topic to write about? Well, add more unnatural truths from nature and raise the question: How natural is nature? Like the male clownfish turning female halfway through his life!

See, there's so much you can write about. And infinitely more if you just look around.

So I've taken up the gauntlet from Blogchatter and you will get a page here every day in Feb. I'll be delighted to have you with me in this venture. It will be worth your while, I assure you. Let us cross the Bosphorus that connects two continents on evenings that don't lie on a surgical table like patients waiting for scalpels. Cheers.