Destructive Distillation

2 months and 3 days since I last updated this blog. It has been a busy few weeks but still not an excuse for not having written anything. Barring a few film reviews I haven’t written in a long time. I feel frustrated, angry and bitter in such circumstances because this is one of things I do well and definitely the most gratifying. My love for writing is immeasurable and I keep pining for free undisturbed time with a pen and paper (or a keyboard and computer even). My feeling here would be similar to that of which one would experience when missing a loved one. My relationship with paper is deep and strong and I have talked about it before. Now I am trying to articulate the reason I need that paper.

Any writer knows that his imagination is most fertile and his work more interesting when he has new experiences in life. Excitement caused by various circumstances fuel the fire to burn words onto paper. The last few weeks have been exciting and enriching with new experiences as I got to travel, explore, and face challenges among other things. These experiences create a gold mine ready to be tapped. When I am left to reflect and observe in a new place, under new circumstance; it is almost as if I wear a miner’s hat and start digging around the mine I have been put in. Everything I do, everyone I meet, every interesting train of thought I have is a potential mine.

The plot only gets thicker and deeper and darker. For someone who is so submerged in the desire to write and has got a natural inclination to do so, subconsciously every moment passes through the sieve for writing material. May be it is in the way I think, way I experience and the way I act that the writer in me emerges from. When I always live out of my own skin studying the situation I am in, I feed this writer with more source material giving him different perspectives, narratives and treatments. Or is it the writer in me that has overpowered me to behave in such a manner so that everything I see, I screen and the valuable material I capture and chronicle? Regardless of whichever is true I always find myself thirsty for new sources of inspiration and hungry for new scenarios to live and thereafter write.

If you ask me at any given time the thing I most want to do is write. As I had described before the way I function makes my head an industrial workshop constantly churning out ideas and there are only so many that I can contain and handle in the few cu.cm in the cranium of mine. To address that issue I have an effective note taking system to safely catalogue the ideas I have with key words. There have been so many ideas, thoughts and premises that I have thought of that the 3’x2’ white board hanging on my wall has no space to add anymore. Wherever I go, whatever I do it I keep getting the ideas which I need to pen down in order to save from extinction. I make notes and move on as I find myself to be too busy for writing at that point of time. Several folded white papers used for making notes lie on my desk I sit here staring at them wanting to pick one and just write. But where do I start, what do I say? There are just so many things I want to write on/about that I feel like retiring to an inaccessible place where I am cut off from everything else in the world and no one would be disturb me. There, in that serene heaven comparable to the grey havens on middle earth; I want to pick up each paper, start typing away the blog post, the poem, the short story, the novel or the film script I had planned on a particular idea (or set of ideas).

Each of these ideas is as dear to me as a child. Some get sent to prep school and prepare for a brighter future (the really good ones which are grand), Some die prematurely due to bad health (weak concept), some get old and lose their memory (never being executed and the keywords losing their meaning) and the remaining are fed suitably and sent to work as soon as they learn their trade (the ones which make to my blogs and archives). Times like these I am uneducated and gullible dog (bitch rather) giving birth to children by the scores and not tending to them properly. And I don’t like being a dumb livestock animal. I want to learn to be productive and raise these children well.

In short, I am constantly thinking if I can write this, if I can write that and hence I am unknowingly always looking (and finding) for things to write on. Also I am contemplating upon how I would capture this or that in all its intensity, enigma and emotions it invokes in me and others. Writing is a key component of my existence and fuel for my fire is activity. Activity in the last year has been at precariously low levels and the mind of mine has gone into overdrive in compensation. As a result I have been wanting to churn out a lot of stuff and expect the free time I have now enables me to materialize those thoughts into words. I hope this post sets the ball rolling.

p.s: Long post I know. the ball was just rolling. Here is some comic relief