An Apology

First – my apologies to all the regular visitors of my blog. Last two weeks have been very hectic. I made a promise to myself that I would upload at least two articles every week. Promises are like spoilt children – as soon as you make a promise - somehow, it brings along situations with it and is always bent upon proving that you are not worthy of it.

There are about seventy articles that I planed to write on various topics – I even made a brief abstract about each one of them – but the actual process of writing them down demands a kind of mental and physical discipline that is very hard to command all the time. The natural laziness is always waiting round the corner to catch up with its old friend, and its company is so enjoyable, one tends to forget everything else and spend all the time with that best of friends.

There is a wonderful Sufi story on this theme, published by Idries Shah in his Seeker After Truth. Here is the gist of the story:

A dervish visited a small town in India. He used to give a talk every night, and many people would go to listen to him. The discourse would begin some after dinner and usually lasted for about an hour and half.

An old man would attend the talk everyday along with his grandson. As soon as the dervish starts to speak, the old man would go to sleep. The dervish watched this for a couple of days, and then he called the grandson to him and promised to give him one rupee if he promises to wake up the old man every time he falls asleep.

The next two days, the boy would pinch his grand father whenever the old man dozed off. But, on the third day, the dervish noticed that the old man was snoring as usual.

The dervish called the boy aside and asked him what had happened – “I thought we had a deal. Why did you not keep your grandfather awake today?”

“That’s right. But when I told my grandfather about our deal, he offered me three rupees not to wake him up”.

The first rupee is our desire to do something productive. The other three are – our habits, our natural laziness and the unobserved opposition to truth.

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Writing is very difficult. I know what to write, it is very simple to make up the outline of the article. The difficulty starts from the time I sit down to write the actual article. As I am writing the first line, the second line has to ‘spring up’ in the mind simultaneously. Otherwise, the flow is lost. I also have to think of the actual sentence at the same time, and the mind has to recall its typing experience. All this is just too much for the mind. It prefers to drift off, my old friend is back – and we go for a smoke break after every paragraph.

Sometimes the exact opposite happens. I can’t catch up with the speed of my thought – I can’t type as fast as I think. Too many thoughts flood my mind, and I just can’t type any more. So, I take a break and have a dialogue with myself. Before I realize, five hours are gone! By that time, there is too much content piled up in the head – I get enough content for another ten articles. I end up with a perpetual backlog.

I also have another difficulty. English is still a foreign language to me. The Indian languages and English are not natural friends. They are in fact quite the opposite. All Indian Languages are free order languages - it is so easy to construct phrases in Indian Languages. In fact, most words are not single words – most of them are phrases.

English does not have that kind of flexibility. So, when most Indians write English – they tend to make up wrong kind of phrases. For example, the meaning between “I am John’s friend” and “I am a friend of John” is quite significant depending on the context. For some strange reason, I always write the sentence in the reverse order, and then I have to do a lot of editing and rewriting.

Take the previous paragraph as an illustration. An Englishman would write almost every line in the reverse order: Most Indians tend to make up wrong kind of phrases when they write English. Depending on the context, the difference between “I am John’s friend” and “I am a friend of John” could be significant.

Can you see my difficulty? The previous paragraph was my first attempt. So, I have to apply the principle of inversion even to my English!! I always look for which sentences need to be reversed to make them right!!

I have a difficulty with the usage of tense as well. I still do not get the difference between the simple past and present perfect tense. The difference between I read the article and I have read the article eludes me all the time. For some strange reason, many Indians have a preference for “have, has, had” – they prefer “I have written a letter” to “I wrote a letter”. I am sure without the help of a grammar book, most of us can’t tell the difference between the two.

So, I end up doing a lot of editing on each article. I pray for the day when I can write effortlessly.

Forgive me for the delay. I will be back tomorrow again and continue the series on Semantics and other topics.