Inverse Karma

When I was in high school there was an essay competition to choose a student representative for carrying the Olympic torch as it passed through India.  The moment my dad told me about it, I started writing. I wrote 6 sides and still was a good 4 pages away from completion! That’s when my dad mentioned the basic condition – it had to be 300 words! And I had half a novel ready! My torch was extinguished as I realized I had a huge problem – I can’t write short and concise articles! My material for that essay was good. Definitely different from what the winner had written (short of course!) but had exceeded the limit by just a million words. I have close to 30 articles and poems that I’ve written. None of them in a dearth for words!

I wonder if it’s some kind of electrostatic attraction between my pen and my brain because when am in the groove it goes at top speed like a seismograph sensing a powerful earthquake! I don’t write articles everyday in spite of having a lot of things to write about (that explains why my diary is swollen to 10 times its size with just hints I jot down daily!!) but when I do feel a work coming on it’s a few minutes of rapid and serious writing and bingo – I’ve exhausted a bunch of papers! I’ve always felt my mind and heart working as one when I write. Like they seem to know what exactly wants to be put into words. That’s hard to control. I’m a person who gives heart and soul to anything I do and writing definitely tops my list.

People who have read my works tell me they are good but my mom always points out with a sigh that they are obviously too lengthy to be read by anyone without forcing them into it! Pras would agree vehemently.. Every time I mail him an article he has a lot of tweaking to do with the font size and the layout to make sure it doesn’t run off the page! My own blog suffers the same plight.

I love expressing myself and thanks to that they always turn out to be magnanimous. That’s my style of writing – replete with sarcasm, humour, confusion, anger and what not. I reasoned with myself that all those things needed pages to explain (couldn’t convince  myself to write short) but then I found one guy who did exactly that and still kept his articles to half a page! Sudhish Kamat and his movie reviews in The Hindu! Each one is a treat for anyone with good humour! That’s when I started thinking if someone else could do it, I could do it too! And I started reading blogs belonging to my friends. It turned out that ‘someone’ was ‘everyone’ apart from me! It was around that time our own Pras woke up from his intellectual slumber and started filling IK with his creative write-ups (sick of running behind us – the others who promised to contribute!). They were brilliant! Short and sweet, they were a perfect expression of emotions spot on. I realized that was the secret. To write, write and write.. Whenever you feel like it. That way what you want to say comes out at the right time and you don’t have to wait for it to accumulate sufficiently and end up writing XL-sized articles! One tiny reflection at a time brings about the same reaction and increases your article database too. Pras, now I know your secret har har! So that’s it. I’ve decided to try and write concise stuff. This should be a start!

This doesn’t mean the lengthy ones won’t happen but I’ll reserve them for once-in-a-while. Wish me luck guys!

P.S: This one didn’t go over a page! Yay me!

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