A lot of what I do is a lot meaningless than a lot of what I want to do.
Truth makes for poor writing. Truth is banal. Truth, nothing but naked truth, is unglamorous. Truth is, even, plain boring. Dress it with half lies. Embellish it with turns of imagination. Garnish it with inventions. Then you have compelling writing and reading material.
A twist or a turn, a judicious omission of a word, person or a place, a creative addition of a romance, relation or ritual all go a long way in engaging a reader’s attention.
What I have written so far is plain boring because that is the truth. Your attention wanes from this page like that of a lover long into the murky world of love. What would appeal to you then? A discreet show of skin perhaps. A leg or two on the side eh? Let us see.
Let us see in our mind’s eye a setting of a café. Let us call it a Leopold Café, complete with bullet holes through cracked glass and in corrupted cement. The café is replete with foreigners, jaggery for terrorists, with a smattering of well heeled Indians- more citizens of Bombay than of India, really- through out. The foreigners are poor but have fairly over tanned fair skins and fair skins are a brown man’s weakness. They are given preference over the natives when it comes to finding a table by the maitre de, who is not even remotely matronly. But that is Bombay, with its in your face brutal honesty.
Never mind. We await our turn outside, ogling the frequent stream of well dressed, well heeled women, making, no, snaking their way through the cramped pavement most of which his encroached by sellers of curios, antiques of dubious antiquity and cheap, silly, pseudo ethnic wear.
We are given a table at an undesirable location where the breeze wont reach and the waiters bus every ten seconds past the table at peak time. We waited for long and are thirsty. We order a flask, which is not a pitcher and is definitely not a burette by any stretch of imagination or even a glass cylinder with a glass cylinder within which is usually used to store dead snakes but is without the dead snakes, of beer and are given piss-warm draught beer. The cylinder within the cylinder surprisingly has ice cubes in it to cool the beer. And there are no dead snakes, if you notice closely.
Conversation veers around office, colleagues, inane topics, we zone out until an overly drunk yellow chap who by the day turns into a monstrous marketing god, starts asking obviously drunk questions. What would you feel if you wake up one day and do not see the tall, fair and handsome girl sitting next to you? Truth compels me to say I would be disappointed I would have to pay the full cab fare. Bor-ing. What does that say about me? Am I too money minded not to appreciate the beauty around me? Am I too lost in the lust for lucre not to if not lust at least look at the lookers around me? Such being the doubts that would arise, what would a writer have done in such a situation? Remember, I already mentioned that romance is in the ambiguity of truth.
Romance of reading and writing and their root, imagining, is ever an escape from reality. What if, if only, things would have been so different, almost as if, just then etc fill the lexicon of that romantic unreality. Conversations around water coolers and coffee makers center around cute interns. A respite from the reality of work. And only that.
When did it ever happen that a dream really turned into reality?
When did ever a flight of fantasy land safely in the land of practicality?
Truth makes for poor writing. Truth is banal. Truth, nothing but naked truth, is unglamorous. Truth is, even, plain boring. Dress it with half lies. Embellish it with turns of imagination. Garnish it with inventions. Then you have compelling writing and reading material.
A twist or a turn, a judicious omission of a word, person or a place, a creative addition of a romance, relation or ritual all go a long way in engaging a reader’s attention.
What I have written so far is plain boring because that is the truth. Your attention wanes from this page like that of a lover long into the murky world of love. What would appeal to you then? A discreet show of skin perhaps. A leg or two on the side eh? Let us see.
Let us see in our mind’s eye a setting of a café. Let us call it a Leopold Café, complete with bullet holes through cracked glass and in corrupted cement. The café is replete with foreigners, jaggery for terrorists, with a smattering of well heeled Indians- more citizens of Bombay than of India, really- through out. The foreigners are poor but have fairly over tanned fair skins and fair skins are a brown man’s weakness. They are given preference over the natives when it comes to finding a table by the maitre de, who is not even remotely matronly. But that is Bombay, with its in your face brutal honesty.
Never mind. We await our turn outside, ogling the frequent stream of well dressed, well heeled women, making, no, snaking their way through the cramped pavement most of which his encroached by sellers of curios, antiques of dubious antiquity and cheap, silly, pseudo ethnic wear.
We are given a table at an undesirable location where the breeze wont reach and the waiters bus every ten seconds past the table at peak time. We waited for long and are thirsty. We order a flask, which is not a pitcher and is definitely not a burette by any stretch of imagination or even a glass cylinder with a glass cylinder within which is usually used to store dead snakes but is without the dead snakes, of beer and are given piss-warm draught beer. The cylinder within the cylinder surprisingly has ice cubes in it to cool the beer. And there are no dead snakes, if you notice closely.
Conversation veers around office, colleagues, inane topics, we zone out until an overly drunk yellow chap who by the day turns into a monstrous marketing god, starts asking obviously drunk questions. What would you feel if you wake up one day and do not see the tall, fair and handsome girl sitting next to you? Truth compels me to say I would be disappointed I would have to pay the full cab fare. Bor-ing. What does that say about me? Am I too money minded not to appreciate the beauty around me? Am I too lost in the lust for lucre not to if not lust at least look at the lookers around me? Such being the doubts that would arise, what would a writer have done in such a situation? Remember, I already mentioned that romance is in the ambiguity of truth.
Romance of reading and writing and their root, imagining, is ever an escape from reality. What if, if only, things would have been so different, almost as if, just then etc fill the lexicon of that romantic unreality. Conversations around water coolers and coffee makers center around cute interns. A respite from the reality of work. And only that.
When did it ever happen that a dream really turned into reality?
When did ever a flight of fantasy land safely in the land of practicality?
1 They say:
bull's eye.
that's the thing i don't like about marketing - it shows me masks. and skin. i wait for the day marketing has a chapter on "practical marketing without lying" (wait... that means exactly opposite on second reading!)
imagination is good, and is here to stay. but it cannot replace reality. truth is banal most of the time, but it outlasts imagination, and everything else. funny i wrote pretty much similar post couple of days back
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