Write choice
I think I must have been in Grade 3 or 4 when I first had this urge to write something of my own. Something like the little poems in my English Reader or the fascinating stories in the children’s magazines that my father used to buy for me.
Only, I didn’t know if I could write. I mean, was it alright to come up with something of my own creation? Did the world appreciate and accept new writers? I didn’t know because, unfortunately, there was no one to help me on this count.
Those were the days when the world was not hyperlinked by the Web, the only mouse we knew was what we ran away from when the rodent scampered between our legs, and social media was, well, who knew what it was. So neither my parents nor any of the elders in my family were exposed to anything beyond the realm of their limited sphere of existence.
Then there was school and our language classes in which we had something called “Composition,” a forerunner of today’s Creative Writing classes.
Except that we didn’t compose anything and there was nothing creative in what we wrote.
We had these composition books that you could buy in any store and when teacher gave us a topic, we had to scan through the pages of those books, find what we wanted and simply had to copy the essay down in our long notebooks, word for word.
Even the topics for the essays were stereotypical. From Grade 3 to Grade 9, I recollect writing about my ambition in life. And each year I presented a different essay depending on the composition book I had with me, which again gave us only what was within bounds.
I am therefore amazed that considering the uncreative background I’ve gone through and having not once been allowed to mention in all those years of ambition essays, I have eventually ended up being a writer!
Vidya Shankar
Published in The Gulf Today / Short Take, dt Jan 06, 2018)
http://gulftoday.ae/portal/1677789e-b77a-43e1-9528-c668cdf55165.aspx
Here's my first book! An ensemble of poetry and photographs.
Click the link below to watch a 30-second promo video.
https://youtu.be/5BhbjMaIwpk
Check out these Pages on Facebook:
Vidya Shankar: The Quintessential Word
Shankar Ramakrishnan: Out of my Focus
Vishnumayam
www.facebook.com
Only, I didn’t know if I could write. I mean, was it alright to come up with something of my own creation? Did the world appreciate and accept new writers? I didn’t know because, unfortunately, there was no one to help me on this count.
Those were the days when the world was not hyperlinked by the Web, the only mouse we knew was what we ran away from when the rodent scampered between our legs, and social media was, well, who knew what it was. So neither my parents nor any of the elders in my family were exposed to anything beyond the realm of their limited sphere of existence.
Then there was school and our language classes in which we had something called “Composition,” a forerunner of today’s Creative Writing classes.
Except that we didn’t compose anything and there was nothing creative in what we wrote.
We had these composition books that you could buy in any store and when teacher gave us a topic, we had to scan through the pages of those books, find what we wanted and simply had to copy the essay down in our long notebooks, word for word.
Even the topics for the essays were stereotypical. From Grade 3 to Grade 9, I recollect writing about my ambition in life. And each year I presented a different essay depending on the composition book I had with me, which again gave us only what was within bounds.
I am therefore amazed that considering the uncreative background I’ve gone through and having not once been allowed to mention in all those years of ambition essays, I have eventually ended up being a writer!
Vidya Shankar
Published in The Gulf Today / Short Take, dt Jan 06, 2018)
http://gulftoday.ae/portal/1677789e-b77a-43e1-9528-c668cdf55165.aspx
Here's my first book! An ensemble of poetry and photographs.
Click the link below to watch a 30-second promo video.
https://youtu.be/5BhbjMaIwpk
Check out these Pages on Facebook:
Vidya Shankar: The Quintessential Word
Shankar Ramakrishnan: Out of my Focus
Vishnumayam
www.facebook.com
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