‘STRUGGLE’ IS A BEAUTIFUL WORD

‘Struggle’ is a beautiful word, as I am beginning to learn. Like love – all pervasive, touching all creations, leaving indelible marks and transforming into life lessons.

Somewhere in the history of mankind, the word gained a wretched reputation. Struggle became a close relation of failure. It became a modifier of sorts, denoting what was not achieved in tangible terms.

A struggling actress. A struggling artist. A struggling sportsman. A struggling entrepreneur. The word hung over their resume silently, constantly reminding them of the goals unattained and casting shadows on their self-worth.

Somewhere in the trajectory of life, as we clawed our way up, ‘struggle’ became a clumsy word and remained so until we notched up emphatic wins. Those who made it, came to be labelled as ‘successful’. Those who didn’t, languished forever in the wasted lands, nursing their deficiencies and lacking.

How misplaced our understanding of the word ‘struggle’ has been! That which should be merited became an index of hopelessness. That which must be applauded came to be derided. That for which one must take pride turned into a cause of embarrassment. Or worse, pity. The relentless effort it entailed was condemned, once and for all.

‘Struggle’, I now realize, is a beautiful word. A great leveller, like sorrow, and like all other abstracts that make us equal sons and daughters of God.

There is glory in struggle, for only those who have crawled will know what going forward means. Only they can say what the sand and gravel feel like. The scratches and scars are their trophies. There is an anonymous power that fuels their determined soul. There is a spirit within them that craves to be alive despite it all. This spirit knows no success or failure. It merely exists, for its own sake. Its apparent battles don’t have closures, for it knows not what gain and loss is.

As for struggle, who in this world doesn’t struggle, after all? Rich or poor, for this or that, for little or more, for success or survival – we are in it in varying measures. No one is spared from life’s free-for-all. Who then is great, who small?

There are no definite successes nor failures in life. All there is, is this trek through the peaks and valleys. The climbs and descents. This relentless struggle to go on. To be alive. All else is fiction. Fallacies of a damned mind. Ask yourself.

(Dedicated with great respect to all strugglers in the world; those thrashing about on different levels, for different needs and purposes.)

The Story of How I Became a Writer

I have not learned to write.

No one has taken me through the literary paces.

I didn’t have literature growing in my backyard.

My parents weren’t professors, professionals or high achievers.

I was an average Jane for the longest time.

Although I did my schooling in an English medium school, we spoke the language minimally and wrote it essentially as part of our studies. I just knew my tenses and my spellings. Nothing more fancy.

Later in college, I chose literature for my Bachelors because I sucked at science and math. Emboldened by the tidbit prizes I had won in stray contests and a compliment by a relative who had read my embarrassingly amateur poems, I decided – Literature it will be.

However, I didn’t fall in love with poetry, prose or drama as one would have expected. With due respect to the teachers who walked us through the three years, I must say this – I couldn’t appreciate literature and nothing I learned there contributed to whatever I am today. No one showed me the glorious side of poetry or touched on the nuances and said, ‘Look, feel, relish the subtlety in this line’.

I could neither identify a beautiful metaphor nor go euphoric over an imagery. I was probably aesthetically challenged then or my faculties hadn’t matured enough. As a result, I merely graduated in English Literature. With neither love nor understanding. My relationship with the subject could at best be described as ‘ambivalent’.

But I loved to read. I loved the new words and fancy phrases that I came across in the bits and scraps I read. They gave me a high. I systematically wrote them down in a diary, revisited them and marveled at their lexical beauty time and again. While I did this, a bond was waiting to establish between the written word and me. I would like to call it some sort of literary serendipity.

Even so, I hadn’t the slightest intention of becoming an author in future. What absurdity! Ordinary people like me didn’t become authors!

Being a writer meant holding enviable academic degrees, having a handful of books in your name, being on the bestselling list, having impressive tags, being talked about by people and a lot more. And that was such a long shot in my estimate. No, ordinary folks didn’t become authors. They merely lurked around writing mushy poems in their diaries, sent stories to women’s magazines and waited for rejection slips all their life. (Who then had even thought of social media and such?)

And then, sometime in the mid 90s, Marquez entered my life. Who Marquez? The ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ guy, of course. I bought a dog-eared copy of the book from a second-hand seller. I carried it with me like the Bible. I sidled through it with great effort, without realizing that I was reading the translation and the language wasn’t originally the writer’s himself. But the book knocked me off kilter. Inspired by it, I was seized by a fever to give expression to my thoughts, in words that created pictures.

Even through the initial scramble, I didn’t make efforts to learn the technique because I was blessedly ignorant about ‘writing’ having a prescribed method. I didn’t know that people went to universities to master it and then went on to become established writers. I just went by instinct, writing whatever came to my mind. It was a period of free writing with no purpose. It was exhilarating. I reveled in it like a surfer riding the ocean wave, without the slightest idea of becoming an author still. A story here, a story there, a few dozens of poems and short articles constituted my pointless, unread repertoire.

And then one day, Roy won the Booker and it changed my fate. Strange, but true. Reading Roy was a turning point in my life. It said to me that to be an author, you just had to write from your heart. It didn’t matter where you stood presently. There is a way forward, to some place. If not to Booker, at least to a reader’s heart.

I created my own maxim and pinned it to my consciousness. ‘Every time you write, write it as if it is your own life story.’

In 2001, on a whim, I started my first novel, Sand Storms, Summer Rains. What an intrepid soul I must have been to set out on a blind project that took four years to complete and ended at 450 printed pages! How insolent towards the craft of writing to have ventured it without training or practice! The purists would have skinned me alive. What a huge leap of faith it was for me!

Somewhere between then and now, over reams of words and phrases, over crumpled sheaves and deleted passages, I morphed into a writer. Without me realizing it. I stamped every little piece I wrote with authenticity. Slowly, what I wrote began to touch lives. And as it happened, I mellowed from a fierce employer of words and phrases to a simple raconteur whose only aim was to tell stories that only sought to warm the hearts of fellow human beings. No highbrow themes, no definite genre, no veiled activism, nor any specific literary style. My writing, in short, became a kaleidoscope through which to watch life.

I may still not fit the technical definitions of an established author, but I know a lot has changed between the time I believed I could not be a writer and now – when my book ‘After The Rain’ coyly sat in the bestseller seat on Amazon. I take this as another poignant moment in my rites of passage from an average Jane to an author who can strike a chord with those who believe the joy of life lies in the small things.

Success isn’t about where others see you. It is about where you find yourself. It is not about how many miles are there to go. It is about how many paces you have come.

(My new book ‘After The Rain – stories that bind us’ is now available on Amazon all over.)

Parents, This Is Your Lesson From The Post-Chandrayaan 2 Moments

It isn’t often that I stay awake into the unearthly hours of the night, not even to watch a cricket match on the other end of the world. But this Friday was different. After spending an evening to give Ganapati Bappa a ceremonial send-off in the placid waters of Dubai creek, when I returned home and tuned in to witness what in my view would be a hair-raising moment, the lander was already in descent.

The overall sentiment on the TV screen was one of huge anticipation. No one said it was going to be easy. The risks were calculated and factored in, but we believed we would make it. We had faith in the efforts of all those who had pitched in. Hard work should pay off handsomely, shouldn’t it? So there was no second-guessing.

And then, when the odds went against us, and the gloom in the frames grew, I remembered Murphy, shook my head and smiled wistfully. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

What followed were poignant moments. Moments that taught me several life lessons.

It will take a long time for the video grab of Dr. Sivan sobbing into the shoulder of Mr. Modi to fade from my memory. Here was a man heading the country’s biggest space mission yet, a man who had set out to make a remote possibility a reality surrendering to the most innate of human sensations – pain. The world saw his deep anguish at having let down a billion hopes, like a child who had sweated through his terms but had fallen short of his parents’ expectations when the results were announced.

On the other side was a man, patriarch like in stature and manner, who held him close, patted him through his bitter tears and bolstered his shattered spirit. He represented a tribe that we are beginning to see less and less of – a parent who stands by his/her child who despite his best efforts couldn’t make the cut.

Suddenly, the scene assumed a totally new meaning for me. It wasn’t about an almost-there space mission, it wasn’t about the touch-and-go nature of expeditions, nor was it just about how we had all begun to redefine success and failure in the light of what had transpired.

When I watched the Prime Minister reinforce his confidence in the ISRO Chief and his team, I saw in him a parent who knew what his child was capable of, but hadn’t made it only because it wasn’t destined to be. It was a lesson in parenting to me. To be able to tell our children that life is all about taking chances and giving it one’s all, to be able to stand by them when they come home with a result that falls short, to give them the stimulus to get up and start from where they stumbled and fell, to give them credit for their persistence and to instill faith in them when they flounder is what sensitive and sensible parenting is all about.

Nobody is discounting the disappointments of the best-laid plans going astray, but the road ends for us only if we stop. If only, as parents, we could adopt this attitude that our Prime Minister demonstrated yesterday and give our children the leeway to shape their lives, if only we can hold them tight when they have their ‘almost there’ moments and reassure them that we are with them come what may, we would be raising a generation that will commit itself to rewriting histories.

Let us be their props so that they reach for the skies. They will then touch the stars, at least. Or if all goes well, they will kiss the moon and be back to tell us a fairy tale.