Apparently

Often it is nice to have some one to point out ones mistakes. An unknown friend has done this for me. He or she invited my attention to the posts I wrote sometime back. Those posts would not rate as the hottest in the world. But strangely on occasions I seemed to have got things right, expressing myself tolerably well, but on others I was more than a little muddled, struggling to find words and the correct forms and expressions to say what I wanted to say.

I felt both delighted and sad at my performance. The delight of course was at my rare successes in expressing myself and the dispiritedness was at not being able to do so constantly. It is futile to say that those were mere first drafts. When you have set out to do something, it is incumbent on you to do it well. It is also of no use saying that I was expressing my thoughts in English in which I do not normally think. That is a lame excuse, for if you can’t do a thing well why go on doing it?

Good question no doubt! I have been racking my brains (the little of it that I have) for an answer. It is not currently forthcoming. May be my poor brains can’t handle it at this time. I have heard of things like the Brahmi Oil and brain boosters. Possibly they could generate more cells in it, who knows. I am waiting to get my hands on them. Let’s hope for the best.

As for thinking in English, well do I think at all, I mean even otherwise? Well…N..o…. not really! Though I could still remember a time in my life in which I tried to do so. It was terrible, terrible I must tell you. I never thought that the few ounces of grey matter I had in the head would be so hard to move. Talk about inertia. Mine was primordial; it was massive and wouldn’t budge.

I would start off somewhat like this:

It’s through our senses that we gather our information about the world we live in.

Dead end, cul de sac (or whatever that is walled-in on all sides) No further development!

It’s through our senses……

Nothing.

It is through………

Total oblivion.

Man! (Pinching an American expression) It was unimaginable. I would sadly consider the case of that character of Alber Camus’ in ‘The Plague’. He at least got through to the end of first paragraph every time. I could not go past the first sentence even.

It was totally unacceptable to say the least.

I don’t know if any of you have experienced intellectual stupor- If you haven’t you lost something very valuable. It teaches you great lessons. It has taught me humility. Before I took up the task of writing the first great intellectual classic of our times, my pride had extended from heaven to earth.

I too secretly suffered from it. But after the “It is through…” incident I was cured for all time to come.

In any event I had definitely developed a philosophy of life all by myself. Oh those dear days of my youth! They seem so distant now, so lost for ever.

You don’t want to see it do you, the treatise? It might prove a literary accomplishment of sorts. I wrote it without bothering to divide it into paragraphs (What is it anyway, this thingy called the paragraph?). Sadly I have lost the manuscript (what a terrible word) to time.

A good thing you might say. Well I just don’t know. Youth is something wonderful. The work might have contained ideas to shake the world. It attempted at a syntheses of the then western and the old eastern thought. It spoke of the subatomic ‘field’ and the wave particle paradox and how these can be coalesced into the system of thought of Kapila.

Who knows, the few ounces of cells I had at that time in my head may have done their work well, coupled with the irrepressible imagination the youth has.

Well in any case those heydays are over. I have taken up a pen after a long while. A pen? Actually I do not even use a pen anymore. I have perfected the one finger typing technique( TM) (Mind you it is ‘Trade Mark’ and not Transcend…. whatever Meditation. How do you spell it? Hopefully some can pronounce it I think) over a normal key board.

Anyhow that is nor here and nor there (I am still at the old habit of starting somewhere and getting nowhere I see!). The posts I wrote at the time were a mixed bag. There were some good ones, indifferent ones and thoroughly inane ones. Some had no grammar to speak of and others had old grammar all too evident. Some of the sentences had vacant spaces in it that only the most imaginative can fill.

Were there any ideas in it? Well what is that anyway (I have got a fixation of sort on this ‘anyway’ thing it seems. It crops up every now and then, pretty disturbing. It is not as if I don’t have options.)

It’s like that character in Chekhov’s ‘After Three Years’ who says “moreover’ at the most inopportune of times, if I remember right. May be it is some other character of some other novelist.

Nevertheless (There I go again) thanks friend, your silent advice has been heeded. I am waiting for a brainwave to spruce up my English, may be with your prayers it would come.


Apparently that too is a possibility.