Another sacred space

Last year in February,the British Council closed its library in Trivandrum. For me, a regular visitor to the library, it was a big loss. Yes, there are other libraries but none to match this library in its vast collection of well-dusted and recently published books and the ambience of a sacred space.

For reading books on English literature as well as on other subjects, this was the ideal place. I used to feel so happy with six books and three journals to savour for may be month.

Mine was a children's membership. Where else will you get to read Harry Potter, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (as you know made into a movie as The Chronicles of Narnia), Roald Dahl, Ruskin Bond, Epics, illustrated books (I love books with pictures, even now) on Greek legends, history, planets, biology, anything.

Still, I haven't been able to find a replacement for that thrill, that spark of inspiration and that thirst for knowledge I used to feel on a day after my visit to the library.

My Home

This is the place where my dreams learnt how to fly
This is the place where I blossomed into a youth
This is where my heart grew in pain and joy.
Like a human heart, this is my home
Goodbye my home of four long years
Before I go I have  treasured each and every part of you
Before I leave you I say for sure
That though I may come back
It will not be the same as now.
Time would have changed me and you
You’d no longer miss my laughter and tears
You’d no longer miss the way I make this place alive
New voices will take my place
Yet I know for sure even now
That you will always be the home I love
Because this is where I have learnt to live. 

Musings

A good piece of writing makes the reader curious. How did the writer write this? Was it based on some life experience of the writer? Or is just fantasy? Will I be able to write like this?

Plenty of books are available on how to become a writer. But a point raised against the authors of most of these how-to books is that they are not great in the sense Shakespeare or Rushdie or Keats are. May be they have written books that nobody reads but they have succeeded in writing the book and getting it published as well. These writers emphasise the importance of persistence.

This fact is quite opposing to the myth of a creative artist who puts pen to paper and thus creates a masterpiece without any previous effort. While studying the great writers, it is found that these writers constantly wrote and rewrote their words, researched more and more about their subject matters and themes, played with associations of ideas and the intricacies of language, to create a collage that became a complete work of art.