My failed quest for a legacy

This is going to be a tricky post.  There is a part of me that wants to bare its soul.  And there is the other part that tells me that I have to be mindful of the privacy concerns of those people who are the subject of the topic.

That should not stop me from writing about it though.  Write I must, even though I might end up writing something that does not say much.

For some time now I have felt this strange urge to leave a legacy or a lineage.  A someone, an intellectual heir whose thinking, if not world-view or life will in some small way at least be influenced by me, by what I impart formally or informally.

Let me hasten to add that in using terms like an intellectual heir I do not mean to imply that I believe I have something profound to leave behind.  Far from it.  I am an ordinary fellow, almost basic.  Nor do I suffer from any delusions of intellectual grandeur.

It all started at a time when it appeared that Lakshmi and I might not have children of our own.  I began to treat my various nieces and nephews as our own children.  The ulterior motive was to create this legacy.

That did not go very far.  Pressures of a somewhat high profile corporate career and geographical remoteness did not help build those bridges.  Mind you these were pre-whatsapp days.  The most advanced mobile instrument was a feature phone that was as bulky as a brick.  Mobile telephony was so expensive that it was meant only for the uber rich and the profligate.  I was neither.

So even to-date Lakshmi and I are fortunate to enjoy a close bonding with our three nephews and two nieces.  They are as fond of us as they are of their parents. Or at least nearly so.  And we reciprocate.  They admire many things that Lakshmi and I stand for.

But will anyone see me living through them when I am no longer around one day, as I inevitably will?  I am not sure.  I should have invested a lot more in their development for me to have justifiably hoped for that.

And then over time we were blessed with the twins.  That should have meant the creation of a natural legacy.  That might well be so.  But it did not quite turn out that way. 

One of our sons is a great fan of mine, although he has inherited Lakshmi's mild nature.  The other has inherited all my not so nice traits and there is a large cache of that.  But he is no fan of my world-views.

In an interestingly strange way Nature has distributed between my two sons the two ingredients that are needed for the evolution of a legacy - similarity of temperament and buying into the belief systems or philosophy of the source of the legacy.

I am not sure if it was this realisation or simply a mid life disposition that set me on the quest for a new set of targets as candidates for my legacy.  Whatever the reason, it led me to people I got to interact with in my capacity as an academic.

Two of these are more prominent than the others and worth a mention.  Out of respect for their privacy let me refer to them as Prospect 1 and Prospect 2 (P1 and P2, for short, respectively.)  They passed through my life , one after the other.

They had many things in common.  And it is possibly those qualities that drew me: Extremely bright, academically highly accomplished, hailing from decent middle class families, highly driven, individuals of solid substance, yet highly understated.  They had everything that I valued as attributes and admired.

What is more they seemed to look up to me, not just as a teacher or academic supervisor, but as someone they would be prepared to look upon as a mentor or even father figure.  Or so I seem to have imagined, I must say, going by the way events unfolded subsequently.  And that appeared plausible given that they were both just old enough to be offsprings of Lakshmi and myself, a bit older than our sons.

And thus started my endeavour to influence them, if not mould.  I invested heavily in the process, emotionally of course.  I coopted Lakshmi, although she was a bit skeptical that I was getting carried away.  I guess she played along because she was happy to see that my emotional need for a legacy might be fulfilled after all.

I was filled with excitement.  I did not miss a single opportunity to interact with them, both academically as well as outside.  I would invite them home with the hope of developing a bond that was not based on a narrow academic transaction. 

I took great interest in their overall well-being, much the same way that I was interested in that of my sons.  And I took great trouble to communicate to them that I saw them as being no different to Lakshmi and myself.

It is not as if the potential futility of this exercise was not completely lost on me all that while.  One major source of anxiety was about what I could offer that was intellectually appealing to two young people who were decidedly superior to me in terms of raw intelligence and whose brains would let them pursue anything that they wished to while mine seemed to be in terminal decline.

The other source of worry was that I had never met any of their families.  And no matter how genuine my motives how could I presume that their families would see it the way I was hoping they might.  And the fact in both the instances, they would not expose me to their families, in spite of my repeated requests, was the first sign to me that we were not on the same page on the relationship, to use a contemporary cliche.

To cut a long story short and roll forward in cinematic style, both P1 and P2 dropped out of the candidature soon after my initial efforts.  Each of them dropped out for different reasons.  What appeared to be common to both was a serious discomfort about my endeavour to turn them into an heir to the legacy that I wanted to leave.  

It does not take a lot of imagination to sense the pain and the disappointment that it caused me.  As I write this post, as I still deal with the dropping out of P2, Lakshmi and I speak of where things may have gone wrong.  Being the pragmatist that she is, analyses of this kind do not mean much to her. 

To her there are just two takeaways.  One, the experiments have failed miserably.  Two they leave a cloud of pain and misery and so the experiment does not deserve a third attempt, which she dissuades me against, even though she dreads that I might not eventually give up.

My current state of the mind is reconciled to the possibility that I will eventually not find anyone who will be heir  to the legacy that I wish to leave behind.  I should now work on my sons, who are the best things that could have happened to Lakshmi and myself, hoping to leave as much of a legacy that I can through them.

But then I know I cannot trust myself. At this point in time I can only pray that I do not end up being like the profligate in many stories and movies, who returns to his foolish ways, once the chastening effect of his punishments have worn off with the passage of time.

Painfully, with nanni and namaskaaram....


 



 

ABP shuts down

On September 15, 2017 the Au Bon Pain (ABP) outlet on the campus shut shop for good.  It happened at just a week's notice.

It took us all by surprise.  And the surprise must not have been pleasant to most of us. 

ABP started off with a controversy.  The issues involved in the controversy are not well documented. A few emails that flew around within the IIMB network suggested that there were concerns about whether the store would affect the view of the Open Air Theatre when the convocation proceedings were being webcast.

I cannot say if these concerns were warranted.  I did not study those issues.  I cannot say for sure if there were other worries or concerns either.  But I guess they do not matter any more.

Controversy aside, the administration must be given credit for addressing the various concerns and for putting up a store that served as an affordable watering hole for most people on the campus over the five years that followed.  This was in contrast to another similar cafe, the Cafe Coffee Day outlet that attracted very few footfalls.

One can think of many reasons for ABP's success.  I believe that the fact it had a wider variety of merchandise at a range of price points, some of which were affordable to nearly everyone, that it was  a combination of open and closed spaces that made it all-weather and that it was open 18x7 were perhaps the most significant factors behind its success.

In what was perhaps an unusual distinction it was one of the few places on the IIMB campus that was frequented by faculty and students alike, apart from Amruth Kalash, the other cafe.  I consider it unusual because I have often been struck by the fact that outside of the classroom there are very few venues in IIMB where faculty and students are at least seen together at the same time, even if they are not together.

One can point to many other interesting things about ABP.  I have overheard startups discussing business plans, fund raising worries and term sheets.  I have seen recruitment interviews being held at desks beside me.  I am quite positive that when the history of starting up in Bangalore gets written some day ABP at IIMB will find a mention as the place where some highly successful startup was conceived on the cafe's napkin.

Students across various programmes used to run their entire project discussions at the cafe for several hours on end.  There were times when the cafe provided chessboards and people used to be blissfully lost in their game. No matter what reason people were there for, the cafe exuded an unhurried air, typical of a campus where time would appear to stand still, to use a cliche.

Campus kids used to have their weekend get togethers as their parents felt they were perfectly safe in that place.  Older kids who had left the campus to go their separate ways in life used to have their reunions late into the night, over coffee and sandwiches.

As someone who has spent many evenings, nights and hours there and been a witness to many social events there I can go on and on.  The purpose of this blog is not present a paean on ABP as a public place or a campus cafe. 

I chose to write this more for the many memories that the place holds for me.  Its five years coincided with a phase when I held busy administrative positions, including an extremely hectic four year spell at NSRCEL, IIMB's entrepreneurship centre.

I met some of the most interesting people doing the most interesting things that I have known of at IIMB during those four years.  I met them at ABP.  Most of them were far younger to me.  The cafe's cosy informality allowed me to transcend the barrier of our age difference and helped me have more engaging conversations with these people.

I met with students from IIMB, entrepreneurs, a wide variety of journalists, visitors from other similar centres who wanted to learn from our experience, visitors from within India and outside, government officials who wanted to support the Centre, alumni, colleagues, venture capital investors, potential recruits for the Centre who I hoped be drawn to NSRCEL because of the cafe. 

By now you may have gotten a sense of how I ended up spending a good part of my waking hours there, during those five years.

With some of them I developed special relationships that went beyond my time at NSRCEL.  I continued to meet them well into my sabbatical and beyond.  I made my now unsuccessful attempts to create an intellectual legacy at its desks, within and outside.

My family and I would saunter across if we were totally bored on a wet, rainy evening.  All the special attention that we got as faculty and family felt nice, even if it made us self-conscious some times.  My sons who are essentially very shy and diffident felt confident and self assured inside the store.

To my family and myself, more so to me, ABP was more than just a watering hole.  It was and will remain a reservoir of memories that will come wafting back like the gentle breeze that frequently blows through the night flowering jasmine tree that still stand behind where the cafe was.

As with many other facets of life, many of them are pleasant and bring an involuntary smile to my face.  Some of them, leave a dull numbness, reminding one of people and conversations one misses.

Whatever the nature of those memories, I will miss you dear ABP.

Nanni....Namaskaaram...

Seeking refuge in a soliloquy

PGP teaching has never been easy for me.  I do not know if it is my desire to win those kids’ approval or the intense engagement in the class that makes it so challenging.  

For example,  we had one of the most intense discussions today on why money has time value and the micro-economic foundations (to the extent that time permitted) of how investors choose between consumption and savings given the time value of money and their preferences as revealed by their utility functions.  Draining to say the least, in a way, while fulfilling from another perspective.

Add that to various other recent woes of my own making and I have all the conditions necessary and sufficient for a bout of clinical depression.

I turned to one of all my time fav poems, Alexander Selkirk's soliloquy, as I usually do to fight back such blues.  Good prose, most of the time, and good poetry occasionally have saved me many a time from the ravages of an oppressive mind.  

I have quoted lines from this poem in some of my posts before.  I now reproduce the whole poem below.  Read it at least once.  I would go so far as to say that a life that has not read it is a life incomplete.

I was first taught this poem by the late Sankaran Nair Sir, fondly nicknamed Himalayan Karadi (karadi is malayalam for bear) when I was in Class X.  Sankaran Nair was the ideal teacher that I hope to be at least in some future birth.  He was full of love for his students.  He loved them as much as he loved English literature.  And he could never be far away for too long from either!

Although a biologist by training he would pick up some piece of prose or poetry at the drop of a hat and get the class excited about it.  It was one such session when he was standing in for a teacher who was absent that he taught us this poem.

It was pure delight for the next fortyfive minutes as he brought alive to us Selkirk's pain.  Although his favourite student then, I knew that I had not grasped the finer aspects of the sentiment in the poem.  But the words and Sankaran Nair Sir's exposition have stayed etched in my mind for the past forty three years.

And on days such as this, as I fight back depression without the help of a shrink's couch or chemicals like SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) that mess around with the neurochemistry of this grey jelly that is called the human brain Selkirk's pain looks so real and feasible to me.

It is strange.  We humans seek the privacy of our own space even when we are in the midst of those we love and those who matter.  Yet, when we are away from them we wish to have a glimpse of them at least, as the pining of Selkirk screams out.  

I guess what we are really looking for are choices.  Modern man seems to be forever seeking options.  In essence I think we have lost the ability to commit.  I need to learn to commit.  Unconditionally.  Commitment must be the secret of happiness.  Commitment is selflessness.  True happiness lies in selflessness.

Nanni....Namaskaaram...

I AM monarch of all I survey;
My right there is none to dispute;
From the centre all round to the sea
I am lord of the fowl and the brute.
O Solitude! where are the charms	5
That sages have seen in thy face?
Better dwell in the midst of alarms,
Than reign in this horrible place.
I am out of humanity’s reach,
I must finish my journey alone,	10
Never hear the sweet music of speech;
I start at the sound of my own.
The beasts that roam over the plain
My form with indifference see;
They are so unacquainted with man,	15
Their tameness is shocking to me.
Society, Friendship, and Love
Divinely bestow’d upon man,
O, had I the wings of a dove
How soon would I taste you again!	20
My sorrows I then might assuage
In the ways of religion and truth;
Might learn from the wisdom of age,
And be cheer’d by the sallies of youth.
Ye winds that have made me your sport,	25
Convey to this desolate shore
Some cordial endearing report
Of a land I shall visit no more:
My friends, do they now and then send
A wish or a thought after me?	30
O tell me I yet have a friend,
Though a friend I am never to see.
How fleet is a glance of the mind!
Compared with the speed of its flight,
The tempest itself lags behind,	35
And the swift-wingèd arrows of light.
When I think of my own native land
In a moment I seem to be there;
But alas! recollection at hand
Soon hurries me back to despair.	40
But the sea-fowl is gone to her nest,
The beast is laid down in his lair;
Even here is a season of rest,
And I to my cabin repair.
There’s mercy in every place,	45
And mercy, encouraging thought!
Gives even affliction a grace
And reconciles man to his lot.

Emojis, emotions and other new tricks

This is perhaps the busiest season of the year for me.  I am not just teaching two sections of the core course, which is tough enough for an aged, low productivity fellow like me.  I am also coordinator for the course across all six sections.

Without boring you with further details about my academic life I should just say this:  It is that time for the year when apart from eat, pray and work, I should be doing nothing else.  May be a wee bit of sleep would be alright.

Yet I am here, writing this post about an absolutely inane matter.  Or something should appear inane on the face of it.  But I write about it because it is more than just inane.

My lessons in understanding the different kinds of emojis and the emotions that they convey is about my desperate attempt to keep up with recently acquired young friends - may be just acquaintances  as they see the relationship - who are about the age of my sons or a bit older.

That does not give you the full picture unless I tell you that Lakshmi and I were blessed with twins such a long time after we were married that our sons are nearly as old as our grandchildren would have been if we had had managed to bring forth children at the average age that educated, Indian, middle class couples are supposed to bear children.

My need for a 101 on emojis was made imperative by my attempt to stay in touch  on whatsapp with these kids that I referred to.  I shall refrain from revealing more about these kids out of respect for their privacy.

My acharya on the subject was my seventeen year old nephew (my sister in law's son) who is a bit of an odd genius.  Odd because he does not have any of the off-putting irritating qualities of a genius.  He has many of the other hallmarks though, apart from a razor sharp acumen and a broad range of talents across, sports, arts, letters and the sciences.  He is absent minded, leaves stuff around, can stay without food for extended periods of time and then when he gets going, he resembles a ravenous wolf.  And so on.

Over a twenty minute session he explained to me that there are two sets of emojis each conveying the same sets of emotions.  One of them is typically used by people who are well over the hill, to use a telling idiom, while the others are used by the more happening age group that my nephew belongs to.  If I wanted to be cool he advised that I should use the latter.

His true genius was in full flow when he demoed me the visual effects of why each of those emojis stood for they what they are supposed to.  By the time he was done I did not have to make any leap of faith to accept what he said.  That, to my mind, is the hallmark of a great teacher - transcending the teacher-student distance to make the student see sense and reason in what the teacher is saying.

So these cool emojis which were mere odd, minimalist combinations of straight lines, dots and and small arcs and semi circles, conveyed an imaginable range of emotions that only the highest of nature's creatures - homo sapiens - is capable of harbouring, not to speak of displaying them:  Various shades of anger, frustration, sadness, happiness, smugness, romantic moods, even vulgarity of various kinds.

The one that took the cake of course is one that is meant to express a human emotion that I was not aware of, which brought out the young man's pedagogic talent in full measure.  He said that it conveyed a mood of indifference that could be expressed by a sound that resembled that of the half hearted bleat of a goat that did not want to be left alone.  To make sure I got the essence he said it might be spelt as "mehh"!

And then he went on to say that the more brightly coloured golden yellow, although meant for the less cool older fellows like me, can present an even wider range of thoughts and ideas.  There is one that shows lips that are sealed by zips, there are images of lips so red and so full that could be used to convey romance so full blooded romance that you would wonder if it was February 14th already and so on.

At that point that this was as much as a 101 could cover and promised to deliver in a more advanced lesson in his next visit if he was satisfied with the progress made by his new, near-hexagenarian disciple.

As I reflected on my young mentor's lessons, I realised that since I went to college the world of communications seemed to have progressed a great deal, well beyond the semaphores that we learned about.  It seems to have borrowed heavily from the world of hieroglyphics that one only read about in the context of the Sumerian and Indus Valley civilisations.

Nanni....Namaskaarams...

Taking back territory

If you sense a victorious ring to that title you are right.  In the past two months I may have managed to get my mind, thoughts, emotions and whatever else I am unable to think of, out of the clutches of those thoughts that had been holding my weak nature hostage for some years now.

During those years I struggled.  Some of that turmoil resulted in the most difficult posts that I had been writing, dripping with self-pity.  After a while I gave up, having lost hope of ever wriggling out of the emotional mess I had landed myself into.

In the most unanticipated manner in these past two months I got release from that state of the mind, by God's Grace. 

The victory has some Pyrrhic air to it.  As I thought about it I was reminded of the various military victories that I have been reading about in the newspapers:  The Taliban being replaced by the allied troops again being replaced by the local government in Afghanistan.  The IS being repulsed by an inchoate coalition of Kurds, Shia Iraqis and Sunnis, none of whom would talk to each other on a normal day.

The point in simple terms is this:  I have managed to replace one misery with another.  Why do I feel victorious then?  I do so because I have established the important principle that the original malaise could be eradicated from my system.  Somewhat like the principle of vaccination.

How do I know I have prevailed?  The most telling indicator is that for the first time in many years I am feeding my craze for mush with Mitwaa and Tu Jaane Na from youtube, in place of various soulful Mallu songs that I would play ad nauseum much to the unhappiness of Lakshmi and my sons. 

Again, what is there in a tune after all, you might ask. 

Tunes are reflective of the world that I see in my mind, although I am no musician, nor am I knowledgeable about music.  But music is all about social and personal contexts.  They are closely connected to events in one's life. 

The Mallu songs reflected the complete capture of my mind in all these years, to the exclusion of everything else.  That I listened to a whole long list of songs today with not a single Mallu song to me indicates the fall of my mind to the forces of liberation by God's Grace.

That still leaves the task of asking the forces of liberation to leave before they become the new oppressors.  But with a little bit of tenacity that should not be impossible.  After all, the idea that territory can be recaptured has been demonstrated.

True the new obsession would linger for a while.  And may even leave a trail of misery as it is evicted.  But that the new occupant can be pushed out is now within the realms of demonstrated feasibility by God's Grace.  And that this territory called my mind belongs entirely to my wife and sons and my Dad.

Nanni....Namaskaaram...  

The Joy of Publishing

This post is motivated by news of a young friend, well actually she is a college kid, publishing what I guess may be her first article in a mainstream daily.

I do not know yet how she reacted when she saw her name in print.  Most kids in her place would be elated. Not her though.  She probably treated as matter-of-factly as eating her afternoon thimbleful of spinach.  I only hope that she is not worrying about what happens now that her name is in print!

As I reflected on the episode I was reminded of the first time I got an article published.  I was all of eight when it appeared in The Children's World, a children's magazine that was being published by Shankar who was already making his name in the world of publishing.

The idea of writing that piece was my father's.  Much of the article was also written by him.  When it finally appeared I had no idea of how to receive the news.  The old man was elated and he went around showing it to all his friends, relatives and colleagues.  As he did the next couple of pieces that he mostly ghost wrote for me.  I am sure many of them must have been bored stiff too!

I could sense though that getting published meant being famous.  I imagined a few, if not many, others reading what I had written and then wondering what the author Sabarinathan must look like.  Just the way I used to wonder about all those people whose pieces I used to read.

I had been bitten by the bug of wanting to see my name in print!

In the decades that followed to date - five to be exact - I drifted mostly.  I look upon them as the lost decades of my life. 

But the desire to see my name in print would get the better of me from time to sporadic time.  I would write up some shoddy stuff and get them printed in odd and obscure places that were hungry for matter.  Like the school day magazine that could never get enough kids to write in English. 

Soon I learned to combine my desire to see my name in print with other ulterior collateral motives. I was perfecting the art of purpose driven publishing although I did not realise it at that time.

Such as gaining access to a young and extremely pretty and accomplished dancer who hailed from one of the wealthiest and most powerful business families of the South.  I was completely smitten by her and was willing to risk a limb or two to just get to talk to her. 

I end up publishing  an interview with her on her career as a danseuse, in a magazine that an entrepreneurial college mate was bringing out.  That he published my stuff seemed to be an ominous augury for the publication.  Before long it was consigned to the graveyard of Indian journals.

I masqueraded as a music critic to see my name yet again in print in the art magazine, Aside, although I knew next to nothing about that art form called Carnatic music, that was as endless as the oceans in its richness and complexity. 

The motivation for publishing in Aside?  Someone whose name started with R.  I did not know how to tell her that I was completely bowled over by her.  And I saw those pieces in Aside as the winding, convoluted path to R's heart, which I never reached till we parted ways, without ever having spoken a word to each other over two years of waiting at the bus stop every day and innumerable other encounters carefully engineered by me.

I wrote about the sugar industry because I had been advised that it would improve my chances of making it to one of the IIMs if I had published an article close to the interview. Why sugar industry? Because an elderly and indulgent relative edited the house journal of the sugar industry association in Chennai.

At IIMB I went on to edit the students' in-house journal, which I named IIMBIBE - very aptly according to some classmates who knew me well.  I appointed myself editor at the end of a mid night drunken brawl with a senior who was editing it until then. 

The few issues of IIMBIBE that came out thereafter mostly carried stuff that I wrote under the names of various classmates, after  securing their consent of course!

Thanks to a few drags at a herb and / or a few ounces of some forbidden beverage those inane words kept tumbling out of my pen.  Remember those were the antediluvian days of writing in longhand, much before the keyboard was as ubiquitous as it is today!

What drove me to this extreme step of writing a whole house journal by myself? In a class where the gender ratio was extremely badly stacked against inconspicuous twits like me this was my last ditch attempt at fighting hopeless destiny and an even more unkind nature at the same time, hoping against hope that someone from across the gender divide would take note of what I wrote. 

The results were no different from the past though.

My desire to see my name in print remained, well after I was no longer eligible to be motivated by the forces that drove me to write in my college days.  I was married and was, at least in principle, not allowed to aspire for those joys that made me write in my college days, and yet cruelly eluded me.

I wrote for the business press.  Now that is what I call selling one's literary soul to the vultures of commerce!

Finally I now have a calling that expects me to write.  I masquerade yet again, this time as an academic. 

The trouble is that I am expected to write extraordinarily boring stuff that would be consumed only by people who have a dim outlook in life.  And they would then chew on it till they can decry everything that I say, for its countless factual inaccuracies, myriad analytical and logical fallacies, not to forget the hanging participles and various other grammatical sins that I sprinkle my prose with. And spit it out in disgust and distaste!

Then there are these posts that I started writing to pour out my secret angst and assorted emotions that I inflict on my forgiving friends from time to time.

As I reflect on this long and checkered track record in writing, over an even more checkered professional and academic life, I wonder  why people write.  And what should or could they reasonably look for from a career in writing, full time or part time?

First and foremost, writing could be a means of livelihood.  Even wealth.  But then it is not a viable means of living - unless you are Chetan Bhagat, Ravi Subramaniam, Durjoy Dutta, Amish Tripathi or at least Devdutt Patnaik. 

No, I am earnest.  Most other full time writers cannot disclose how they make both ends meet, without feeling embarrassed.  As with many other fields in our resurgent India today the world of writing is also a winner take all world, quite like ecommerce and commercial films like Chennai Express or Julie2.

The second motivation is fame.  Well that is possible if you end up as a successful writer.  Or as a good, readable writer who delivers the joy of good prose and a story well told.   The two are often not the same.

The possibility of fame does leave a thin ray of hope.  You may not make the cash registers ring for anyone.  Or in more contemporary terms make the payment system electrons flow in a massive deluge.  But you might still have a small band of admirers for your writing, although a very modest band in terms of numbers, compared to the tens of thousands of thronging fans that the commercially successful writers command.

A third motivation could be that you just want to say something that is important for you.  But like me you do not fancy talking to people - unless you and they cannot help the conversation.  So you write.  It lets you pour out all the gripe that is waiting to rush out of every pore on your skin in one unending torrent.  Like the waters of a river that are waiting to rush out of the sluice gates of a dam.

There could be many many more reasons or motivations.  But I guess you get the point.  It is simply that name, fame and riches are not going to be easy to come by.  Look at the Friday edition of one of our more modest newspapers, The Hindu, that is trying to punch beyond its bantam class weight. 

Every week the supplement is filled with dozens of names and faces of new, aspiring writers.  That somehow makes me think of those race horses as they are led out of their stables and through the gates on to the race tracks. 

And like most of those horses, many of these writers I suspect are put to grass before long.  Because in all these years I have rarely seen a name appear a second time, even after a few years, as an example of a writer who stayed on to write more.

Bottom line, my young friend and freshly minted writer, as my Americanised friends are wont to sum up:  Write because you enjoy it, for whatever reason.  May be it helps you speak your mind about someone you love.  It probably lets you mope about unfair life and the world.  It gives you a chance to bicker without waiting for a patient pair of years.

Name, fame and pelf?  Well, if that happens take it as an icing on the cake! After all a Chetan Bhagat or Ravi Subramaniam is not born every time the sun rises in the east, right?  But who knows?  With luck you might at least end up as a Gurcharan Das!

Nanni....Namaskaaram...