Ernest Hemingway

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

You, eager reader, must have read quite a lot of material on how to improve your creative writing skills. While I was attending a writing workshop recently, I had this brainwave. I actually hit upon a brilliant place to generate creative blog ideas.

The professor was discussing Ernest Hemingway’s writing habits. Hemingway chose a quiet room in his house that was neatly cluttered with his typewriter, foolscap sheets for pre-writing stages, an oversize slipper wearing which he stood and wrote and his wastebasket that contained shreds of initial drafts that he improved upon.

On the third day of the workshop, the writing exercise was on visualizing and describing the scene. For me, who is just a hack writer, the writing exercises were a disappointment. At that moment, I could not write anything more than a drab piece of prose that just rephrased what was originally in the article that the professor read out to us.

First, I asked the professor, “May I stand and write?” He said “If that helps”. Then I produced some poor quality writing whose only good point was that I described a person’s bland face coming alive when he smiled. The professor applauded that and wisely ignored the rest, while I sat expecting a word by word analysis of my writing. Well, nothing happened.

In the next twenty minutes, everybody read out their versions of the writing exercise. One was exceptionally well-written and I really saw how good it was, with good illustrations and cleverly planned. Then the clown in my mind started dancing and making faces. He showed me an image of The Carpenters in concert half-clad and inspired.

So to cover my embarrassment of being a writer and not being able to produce a good piece of writing, I started narrating the example of the carpenters and that I needed a good shower to start working on any writing job I have. Bogus or not, I went home and enjoyed some special time in my sacred space and came up with this piece on Ernest Hemingway.

27: Happy Birthday

When the multiplication tables were in
Twenty-seven stood for three raised to three;
Now it stands for the age of this old wine,
The spirit, inside a big barrel called me.

No humble words, the barrel loves to expand,
This spirit grows mellow people say (God knows)
Though it was only yesterday that I was a kid,
Splashing for hours in the mighty river green.

Now the wrong side of twenties beckons me,
For it’s a freefall that all women go through,
From where you slip into the 30s, 40s and 50s,
Wrinkles, complaints and hassles of old age.

A lousy bunch of thoughts on my special day,
That’s me on my twenty seventh birthday!

The Story of a Mad Woman

People said I’m mad when I told them that I could hear voices in my head. I guess many people could. But I could also hear what others thought and could do what they wanted or did not want at all. This could be called a miracle but it’s not. It’s a modern curse when many days are laid waste just because voices whisper in your head and sneer at you.

One day, they tell you, “You are the queen”. The next day, they explode your head with pain. This has made me silent and quiet and afraid of others. I told my folks that I could hear voices. They took me to a doctor who prescribed a long list of medicines and sedated me. When I woke up, their faces had changed into that of hatred for creating so much trouble for their reputation and wealth.

On some days, invisible hands search my body. I wish I could tell someone who knew the same. Someone who could hear voices in their heads or feel the strangeness of being touched by something you cannot see. Until then, I’m only a mad woman who feels attacked by strange invisible hands that move up and down her body or cause disturbances in life.

Some days, these voices made me believe that you, whom I had lost had come back to retrieve you. Instead my life ended that day. For if it was you, you were not an angel as I thought you were but a demon who set in motion the destruction of a person who loved you the most. Whoever you are, I’m trapped in a world of your invisible beams until death.

Palgrave's Golden Treasury

In my college days, I was a regular bookworm who could finish a book in the shortest time possible (a few hours, a night of continuous reading or reading in the college bus). My treasure house was the college library, where the dust-filled corners, I will hunt some good book or the other.

A book that I found there and later bought a personal copy is The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language by F.T. Palgrave. It has a collection of English poems from the Elizabethan Age till the Modern Age.

Palgrave published his first version in 1861 with the aim of propagating the best that is known and thought in the world?. The present edition was edited and more poems added by the Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis.

My favourite from this collection was the poem, The True Beauty By Thomas Carew:

HE that loves a rosy cheek
Or a coral lip admires,
Or from star-like eyes doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires;
As old Time makes these decay,
So his flames must waste away.

But a smooth and steadfast mind,
Gentle thoughts, and calm desires,
Hearts with equal love combined,
Kindle never-dying fires:?
Where these are not, I despise
Lovely cheeks or lips or eyes.

This book is a rare find to those who cherish good poetry. I was so much in love with this book that I must have read it out aloud to many friends (poor things) who were willing to lend a ear.

Difficulty

Some words as harmful; sharing mouthful of advice on how an uttered word is like a sent arrow: whatever you do cannot take it back. But about those who never utter any word and keep hidden inside all the angst of life. What use is such a silence except for earning a name in each friend's list of tramped people?

Even more strange is those who use words to boost an ego that swells up with pride at victories and they use words to kill other's joys as easily as swatting a fly. But how on earth can you live up ideals in a world of contradictions when the meek and the gentle never utter anything about their selves and the proud boast about anything and everything.

No word is wasted; one who seeks the wisdom of a few words finds them useful. For many count their words with time while others exhaust themselves with talk that breeds nothing but contempt and hatred. While you and me seek words to understand the world of our difficulties and find solace in finding faces whose smiles fade and crack with sorrow.

Search

My search for you began someday when I was ten, when I realized that I was incomplete in this world without you. Your face has changed over these years but you have remained a source of hope always. From that first few lines that I wrote, this other self of mine has peeped in countless words that I have scribbled on lost pages. I never knew that the best words that I wrote were the ones I have lost. But still, from memory that remembers quite a lot of images and turns of phrases and scents and experiences, I retrace this verbal journey from nothing to everything and from everything to nothing again.

Most people clearly remember the day they started writing. For me, words came on a day, here in this city on an idle day, when I was standing on the terrace talking to myself watching the distant church tower and the clear blue sky. I thought of a few lines, then the lines kind of repeated itself and I tried to make it as parallel as possible. That's when I understood that this chanting aloud is of no use: I need to write it down. Finally I went downstairs and wrote my first lines though not in English:

You dream of a heaven as a garden,
With roses that stand fresh and fragrant
That are circled by hungry bees.

Distance

After many days, I hear the quiver in your voice as you recognise my voice. You did not expect me to call you say as a way of explanation. Do you know many days have gone since I last talked to you? Years. Months. Days. Hours. Minutes. Seconds. All messed up and long only because I thought talking with you is a pain because of our lost friendship. Why did you call me, you ask expecting a long answer. Just like that is never enough for you for as always you pretend that you can read my mind.

Sitting opposite a friend, the other day, I realised how much you and your friendship meant to me even with all its flaws. You could never be what I wanted you to be nor could I ever attain that perfection you wanted to see in me. Still, there's a joy in the old meaningless conversations that I share with no other. The same laughter and the same tears that gather in two friends who have known each other for long!

The days of longing and desperation are over. The sea of forgetfulness that swept over the land has swallowed with it the countless moments of anger and frustration. With both of us, broken and still happy, we can stay away at respectful distance without harming each other's feelings. For the mutual knowledge and understanding that we share surpass other bonds just because it was bound by trials and tribulations. On days I try to write, your words come as a reason for laughter and tears.

Laurence Sterne on Writing

There are two sorts of eloquence; the one indeed scarce deserves the name of it, which consists chiefly in laboured and polished periods, an over-curious and artificial arrangement of figures, tinselled over with a gaudy embellishment of words, . . . The other sort of eloquence is quite the reverse to this, and which may be said to be the true characteristic of the holy Scriptures; where the eloquence does not arise from a laboured and far-fetched elocution, but from a surprising mixture of simplicity and majesty.

Ray Bradbury on Creativity

Creativity is a continual surprise.

Goodness

How can silence create so much of love? You must have asked yourself so many times. Is there anything wrong in silence? For those who learn each other with time, love to sit silent and idle by each other. In their togetherness, there are no words nor there are promises. That's something you with your thousand questions will never understand.

But at times, I want to tell how much you mean to me, how the absences of day-to-day life spurs love in me and how I love even when you dream of freedom and of long-forgotten memories. You mean everything to me, even when you are silent, even when you are absent or even when you stop thinking of me.

Sometimes I feel the aura of your grace coming to mind as a picture of all that is good, great and nice- a big heart I have seen except when you are sad and your heart chokes with pain. But with all the goodness that you scatter around minute by minute, you know how to hide your self within those walls of goodness.

Tips for Good E-mail Writing

A good deal of communication takes place in the form of emails that you write to friends, colleagues and clients. In personal or professional communication through emails, you need to carefully follow certain guidelines that will help you write good mails while maintaining the etiquette of email communication.

• When sending a mail to a new email address, send a test mail first. Most of the time, errors in spelling can bounce the mail right back into your inbox.

• State the subject of your mail rather than leaving it empty. This enables easy search and retrieval of mails from a rather crowded inbox. Gmail has launched a feature called Inbox Preview that allows you to glimpse the first line of your recently received mails.

• Use the original mail thread while replying to a previous mail so that the receiver can also track the correspondence in case of any confusion.

• Customise your email by addressing the person. If at all you need to send the same mail to several people use the correct form of address and send it using the Bcc (Blind Carbon Copy) option. But don’t use the Cc (carbon copy) option unless it is necessary.

• Be precise and to the point. Use simple sentences to convey your message. A long mail is hard to read and remember especially for a person who receives quite a lot of mails a day.

• Write about a single topic in a mail rather than bombarding a single mail with a lot of information thereby helping the receiver to answer the relevant topic correctly.

• Delete the list of previous receivers while forwarding a mail so that you do not reveal a big list of addresses of people without their permission.

• Always remember that the web is a not secure enough to hold all your private details. Think twice before sending that angry e-mail or before revealing that extremely private piece of information in an email.
  

• Sound positive and energetic in your mails rather than depressed and drab.

• Re-read and edit the mail you have written, carefully going over the written matter for mistakes in grammar, punctuation or spelling.

• Using capital letters in mails is not advisable as such writing is considered as screaming in the internet lingo.

• Use the formatting tools but remember that the receiver may not be able to view the formatting. Take care about sending rich text to people who can view the message only in the plain text format.

• Don’t forward chain letters that are scary or superstitious.
  

• Don’t reply to spams either.

• Reply to important mails immediately possibly on the same day or the next rather than mulling over them for days together.
  

That Summer Long Ago

A long summer of uncertainties, 

Blazed many unquenchable fires, 

Many that burnt and scorched, 

Swallowing words and feelings. 

A thousand dreams buried soon, 

The flow of nature bottled up, 

In thick maroon curtains of silence

That hung quite out of place. 

A mess of life that stopped there,

In that long summer somewhere, 

From where it has moved hardly, 

An inch to gain back its momentum. 

The words have become sacred, 

The spaces no longer accessible, 

But memory brings back dreams,

In words said, words left unsaid. 

A few lines of poetry can't reveal, 

A love that lies dormant in ashes.

The Case of the Missing Po

There is a bird called Po (the one on the right)in my husband' s chidiyakhana. Yesterday, when I went to see the birds in the evening, I found that the cage was open and that Po was missing from the scene. The others were still there, though the cage was left open. All of us searched the entire corridor, where they are kept. We even searched outside though it was pitch dark and raining.

Finally, today Po was discovered in the room next to the corridor. It must have flown and hid there. Hungry and thirsty, it ran and ate seed when given food. Happy that it was only here and that it did not fly outside through the open windows.

Rivalry

Had you not swore rivalry,
My dear dear yellow rose,
Many lives would've escaped,
The tentacles of hopeless love .

You wanted to fare better
In all six pairs of male eyes,
To be fairer, smarter, lovelier,
Than me everyday of your life.

Your trials were not in vain,
But I would say you were,
Fairer, smarter and lovelier
Than I could ever be any day.

Still you crushed the dreams,
Of many embittered hearts,
Through your lies and advice,
Turned the heads upside down.

Looking back, I feel so foolish,
Surpass me in foolery as well.

Celebrating 200 posts

Journal: Serious and Trivial has reached 200 posts. On this day, the not-so-modest author has made a pick of what she considers as the best of her most valuable sacred space: potpourri blog of poems, silences, reviews and definitions of silence. Hope you enjoy them!

Definitions

Forget

Islands

Love

Meditation

Melodies new

My roots strangely

Needs

Our story

Remembrance

Seasons

Silence

Sublimation

Sweet nothings

The Year of the Metal Rooster

Tiny Feet

Tonight

Tribute to Kamala Suraiyya

Twilight Zone

Words

Yellow rose

Obsessions

You brought with you a little sunshine, a little laughter and myriad ragas of liveliness. Infatuated with you, I could never stop humming songs or stop dreaming of you. You come in those fantasies as an ideal lover, giving and receiving with full knowledge of a lover's desires.

The reality is a cruel world, broken by everyday hassles, mad world that has several faces of happiness and sadness in the single throw of a coin. You don’t appear at all in that cruel world. You like to hide your face amidst the sharp smells of newly printed books and clean sheets.

This love left unsaid has become an obsession that never fades or lets the heart live in peace. May be in the next life, you and I will not have all the words in the world to say why we don’t want each other in reality and might crumble in tears before the mighty silences.

Stories

The bliss ended years ago,
One fine day in March,
When beauty and brains,
Clashed with each other,
And you picked beauty.

What of a lovely mind?
I questioned you eagerly,
In my childish innocence,
I believed in every word,
Your lying tongue had said.

As the years went by,
Beauty reigned with brains,
Your heart was beaming again,
To make this love last, not,
To make excuses again.

This time, you schemed,
Taking days to work out,
The tiny details of your plan
That turned out to be
A castle in the air.

Beauty, brains, money,
What could make you happy?
Certainly not this broken life,
With you toiling everyday,
Far away from all loves.

For you have lost everything,
A soul of music now healed,
But I see life's bitter irony,
In your discarding all rules
To love what you'd mocked.

Less and More

You tease me as heartless,
I tease you as brainless.
This continual bantering lessen,
What was more in life before,
Aimlessness and hopelessness,
Many more sorts of -lessness.*
But this combo is more than being,
Heartless, lifeless and loveless,
As the bantering continues,
Day by day with more wit,
Energy, drive and spirit,
To find each other new epithets.
Still this world of less is more alive,
Than before the day I found you.

For my love on a nothing special day

Some days ago, I fell into a deep slumber,
From which I thought I would never rise again;
My limbs tied with some strange force,
My heart full of fears of the dark.

When I rose, terror flashed before me,
So did my love for you, my dearest,
What if you never know how I love you
More as days and weeks and months pass.

Memories of terror may flash again,
There is no restraining them,
Your love has been like an anchor,
A strong hold that I can depend on.

The words of anger may be a ruse,
For I know, you will be there always.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go, quote Oscar Wilde

Sometimes, I see that life works perfectly if only all the people that you associate with on a daily basis are in harmony with you. Work-life can be in shatters, if you have somebody who irritates you with persistent negativity. Not just me, a lot of people have this habit of blaming others and circumstances for not being focused enough. But how much is enough?


I was just a sit-at-home graduate in English who wanted to work from home for a hobby. I started doing some content writing projects and daily blogging. Nowadays, I am swamped with so many projects that I have forgotten the already rare visits to the beauty parlour, the occasional evening walk (the accumulating fat will tell the rest of the story) and unfinished household chores.

If you see no posts in a place, where there were regular posts (even though they were not great, but readable) please take remember that this idle singer of daily life in the form of writing has become a multi-tasker engaged in her struggles with Good English.