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.
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...
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...
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