CHEERS ME!

It started with a fantasy! Fantasy to play with the spoken word, just as my parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts seemed to do. But somehow the second I opened my mouth it was funny to everyone. To be entertained by a comedian is one thing; but to laugh at sounds emanating from a little mouth is actually stupid, if you were to ask that kid. It felt strange at times and sometimes delightful. 

Thus began my association with vocabulary. A child, trying to articulate something that made sense and everybody around seemed to be enjoying my struggle.

The most funny part; its been years down the road, but the story does not seem to end! I am still struggling with the words and my tries seem absurd. Once, during my school days, I was writing a piece about trees visible from my classroom window, in my essay notebook. But somehow, right words seemed to elude my writing. 

To make matters worse, the boy sitting next, Ahmad, saw that I was writing something in a free period; a class when the teachers didn't come in for whatever reasons. It was something between ridiculous and outrageous for a student, with relatively complete notes, to write something at such an ebullient hour when other students were doing all the 'regular stuff'.

"Are you mad?", he said; This being the first ever comment on my writing, if one excludes 'good, v.good and can do better' from my exams. We could be enjoying the precious few minutes shouting, hooting, jumping on our desks and benches trying to be funny to impress girls (now I cannot see how that could be!). 

All this is what a mere stare of Ahmad told me. Meanwhile, others joined us at our desk. "Look everybody, Prashant is writing something ON HIS OWN!" It was not even an essay for tuition teacher because I did not take any extra classes after school. 

This was what surprised and bothered my friends. I was too normal to engage in such a thing as writing without it being a homework assignment or an English test. They did not stop me physically but the gazes and puzzled looks were enough for an adolescent to give up and join his comrades in regular behaviour.

I had these occasional bursts of penning something at a particular hour, egged on by a certain stimulus, in the above case 'the trees' outside the classroom window that somehow appeared different that day. The urge persists. I have always been mesmerized by the way certain writers handle their vocabulary. I, too, wish to be able to play with words with the same dexterity and maneuvering skills as writers in my English texts to the once I read now, seem to do so effortlessly. 

The fantasy to play with the spoken word as a kid, added the written word over the years. It is not that somebody is actually stopping me. But circumstances and priorities act in the same way as Ahmad and fellow seventh graders did years ago.

Writing, for the joy of it, is what I seek. That is why I hate the discipline life has brought onto me just as it has on everybody else I know. I am pushing hard against the walls that seem to be closing on me trying to squeeze me into conventionality. You see a boy who gets an 'A' for an essay should not be whiling away his time on 'unproductive' pursuits. 

Now, I fear that I may be sufficiently disciplined to waste away my instincts in favour of the extraordinary life that every sane person should follow. Extraordinary is to be successful in one's career, which sums up to being able to earn good money or salary.  But the way I see it, it only seems (extra)-ordinary and I don't want the word 'ordinary' to be associated with me.

The dilemma of a 'stable' future unfolds a little issue; which is to change but in conformity with the pack. Isn't that a contradiction, to change with conformity? I hate this. I hate to conform; whether in my academics, my looks, my handwriting, my writing or even in everyday life. One of the great joys of being born and having lived for whatever span, is to explore life in all its uncertainties.

This write up, as a toast to that uncertainty in me that holds on to my quest for writing about what I care and what I like!