my world my writings

I have asked myself this question everytime I felt dejected… why do I write?

This question comes in many guises. When I feel the immense strain and stress of writing, when I find that writing has given me a lot of pain, made me stay away from the simple and easy pleasures of life like watching TV for hours or going on a shopping spree … whenever I feel that for a piece of writing I have been harassed or criticized…I ask myself this question. The answer, my friend is blown in the wind. I got everything from my writing. I got myself. 

But to get yourself back in writing, you must first loose yourself first in the world.

And that is why the connection is important between my world and my writing.

What is my world? How is my world?

In one way my world is what takes me away from writing. What snatches me out of my reveries, pulls me down from my ivory tower. Whenever I am embroiled in the day to day activities, in my quest for earning the daily bread, and do not come back to the act of writing for days on end.

But then I feel a gnawing pain growing inside me.  A sense of unrest, unease, starts building up, and it gathers momentum. Gathers pressure. Then like a pressur cooker whistle, my self tries to erupt into a scream.

That becomes my poetry.

Everytime I forget my writing , I have to come back to it in tears, in utter depression. Whenever I stay away from it, I feel so claustrophobic , so wound up, dejected, that I have to come back  to it.

My world has always given me a lot . but it has also given me a lot of gaps to fill, lot of absenses which became a boon actually. An acute loneliness in childhood, losing my father at a tender age, all this accumulated to my sense of void. Which I had to fill up with my writing.

I grew up in a typical Calcutta urban middle class  household, with nothing much to do apart from my studies… a Bangla medium middle class school, which taught a good dose of literature, specially writings of Rabindranath Tagore et al. I had not many friends, did not have games to play , wasn’t the sporty type. A lonesome , shy young girl who could only pour her heart out in her diary pages. I was unable to communicate myself through any other means.

My poetry started there, on those hidden pages, not meant to be shared with anyone.  The journey which started from those diaries, and ended in the magazines read by millions, was long. But it seems everything happens by some providence.

I could never feel at home without penning down my thoughts then. As I already told you, and even now, some days pass by when I do not write a thing, after a few such barren days, I feel suffocated, restless , and  full of unease.

In the meanwhile so many things happened to me…from a lonely childhood I have gained a society full of friends, relatives, work colleagues. And in a crowded situation I still feel alone.

In our lifetime, on the other hand, we have seen a lot of transformations. In a way my generation stood on a threshold. I have seen feminism pass us by,  I have seen the objectification of women like never before growing with the sense and desire  liberation of women like never before. as a woman I had to address these issues.

In the meanwhile, in the beginning of my writing career, Indian  society underwent transformation with the times… 90s was the era of deregulation, globalization and  free market. The public life changed and so did the personal.. each one of us was affected even if in a small way. Human relationships changed because of  the economic and political compulsions. This phenomenon fascinates me. Such happenings always cast their shadow on me… and make me scribble  a few lines  here and there.

On a second thought,writing poetry was a subversion for me. I have never written anything without being perturbed by something. I am not a typical anti establishment poet, but somehow through recounting my life and times I have registered a version, an interpretation wholly mine.. a protest..

So , in a way, my world has always been my source of inspiration, even in the guise of an enemy.

I have been embroiled in my world, sometimes lonesomely, sometimes in a crowd, and always tried to derive my own absolute freedom from its various shackles. That , i think consists of most of this world’s writing acts. Trying to unshackle oneself from the immediate situation. A flight of fancy.

I personally feel constructing a poem is like waging a war, throw back something on life itself. It is also pacifying, therapeutic. Sudden urges or contemplated emotions… all get covered by poetry… and calms me down, prepares me for more contemplation, more living…