I Should Write

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

Before I begin typing, let me change the font, just a second.

Avenir? Calibri? Lato?

Yes, Lato seems to be the sweet spot. Neither as plain jane as Arial, nor as pretentious as Avenir.

See, this is the issue when I begin to write. I find myself drifting into the land of typefaces and font colours more often than I’d like, leaving my thoughts suspended in a bubble that seldom bounces off the keyboard, and when it does, it bursts.

I have been called a “good” writer ever since I was a kid and was churning out 400-word long essays in examinations with 200-word limits. Were all of those 200 extra words necessary? Were a score or two superfluous? My twelve-year-old self didn’t care, as long as he was able to convey all that he had in mind about how he spent the summer vacations. Teachers would often convey in red the severity of the breach that I had committed but I don’t remember a single instance where they penalised my extrapolation. Perhaps, most of those words could justify their presence.

Seasons changed, I moved to college, where again, people seemed to appreciate the subtle wit and humour that percolated through my sentences. But I was told that college is the place where you unearth new talents and find new passions, so writing became the neglected mistress and I fell into a love affair with cameras. Mind you, this wasn’t what people these days would call a “toxic” relationship. Capturing time in pixels introduced me to a part of me that knew more than numbers and equations. A part, that wanted to learn about things not because people told it to, but because being curious felt right, felt natural.

But like all jilted lovers, writing kept knocking on my door, reminding me of our good times, and how I left her too soon. And like all smitten, unfaithful lovers, I kept taking her for granted, assuming her presence beside me to be eternal, and unwavering. It kept trying its bit to win me back, by hitting my brain with now-forgotten ideas for articles that could have been, and stories that deserved to be shared, but you know how aloof people can become when they are in love.

Soon enough, words started bidding their adieu to me, and my once obese vocabulary started looking increasingly emaciated. I found myself struggling to find an adjective that was just right for the situation and not one that felt like a half-hearted proxy. It was when my father asked me to write a Happy Diwali message for his annual office WhatsApp forward, and all I could write was “May the glow of a million diyas light up your life with wealth, health and success” that I knew.

My mistress had broken up with me.

I was losing my skills.

And at that moment, spurned by my ineptitude, I decided to restart writi…

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Nah, that didn’t happen. Though it could’ve been a pretty strong pivot point in a “who-am-I?” Ranbir Kapoor movie. Alexa, play Kabira.

The truth is that I never let writing slip out of my grip altogether. How could I?

I believe that writing democratises the expression of feelings. Not all of us are endowed with a free hand when it comes to saying what we feel out loud, but writing somehow provides a sense of solace and liberation. It gives the reticent a sense of empowerment, a belief, that they can stir people’s emotions, that they can make someone smile without saying a word, that their thoughts matter. It is this comforting trait of written language that makes it all the more endearing to me, and perhaps countless others.

It all seems counterintuitive though. You see, speech is an ability that we are inherently endowed with, something that comes bundled with the membership of club homo sapiens. So a million years down evolution road, most of us should be Churchill level orators, right?

Writing, on the other hand, started life a paltry 5,500 years ago as drawings on a stone. Far from an inborn trait, it is an acquired skill, an art as some might say. Yet, humankind somehow found a way to produce a greater number of skilled writers than speakers. One can argue, that the act of writing is an art that has been perpetrated so widely and learnt by so many individuals that it has risen beyond a niche talent to become an indispensable skill necessary for human survival. The propagation of written language has propelled human evolution as far along as the invention of the wheel, if not more.

Photo by Jeremy Bezanger on Unsplash

Words enchant and baffle me in equal measure. When you come across words written in an unfamiliar language, it’s hard to infer much from the seemingly random squiggles inked on a blank canvas. Well, that’s because if we come to think of it, that’s what words really are: random squiggles that make sense when arranged in a set pattern.

How ginormous a task must it have been to develop a script with a defined set of characters and get people around you to accept it as the norm? Who wrote the rules? Who bore the power to decree that a b sounds like bee but if you flip it, it sounds like dee? Who didn’t realise that there will come a time when people will be confused between an O and a 0 and perhaps, we should change how one of them looks? Who drew a V and then another one beside it, and thought, well these two look pretty darn cool together, let’s join these bad boys and we’ll have another one that sounds about the same? And was it the same person, who saw his new creation W’s magnificent reflection in the water and realised, man, this should sound like that Mmm sound all of the cows keep making?

And they didn’t stop there, no sir. Soon they figured, well these squiggles aren’t half as powerful alone as they will be if we put them together. So put them together they did and in what spectacular fashion! Litterateurs from far and wide must have sewn their fair share of words on a common fabric that eventually became the language that we speak and write. Some must have added small but essential ones like “the”, “but” and “well”. A few more eminent alchemists who knew how to fuse more alphabets together and squeeze out meaning from them must have come up with “brilliant”, “ecstasy” and “camaraderie”. A few esoteric souls must have fought hard in courts to explain that in order to say the word knowledge, you need a k at the beginning, even though we won’t make that sound. A cult of people must have decided that the singular letter “I” would suffice to convey the depth of meaning that the self contains.

There probably would have been battles amongst the followers of these wordsmiths in order to establish that “best” is better than “better” and that the humble “good” isn’t as good as the other two. There must be millions of words that must have lost these battles and faded forever into obscurity. And in this Darwinian battle of survival of the “most accepted”, there must have been thousands of languages that died a silent death with their last believer, forgotten forever.

During the Shakespearean era, the modern English language was less than a hundred years old; which in the lifespans of languages is the equivalent of infancy. At this young, malleable age, our Bard of Avon introduced about 1700 new words and usages of existing words. “Exposure”, “bedroom”, “scuffle” are just some examples of words that were about as meaningful as Covfefe before one fine British lad decided that these should mean something.

When I look at all the groundbreaking discoveries in science that challenge the status quo, I feel that innovation in wordsmithery has plateaued over the years. Don’t get me wrong, I am fully aware that new words like selfie, bromance, mansplain make their way into our lexicon from time to time and a few years later, will be an inseparable part of the zeitgeist. I am also aware that waking up one fine morning and finding that “Good Morning” is now said as “Goud Mornia” will not be a pleasant experience at all. I realise that new additions to a language’s vocabulary are bound to stagnate as it ages.

However, I can’t help but envy the thrill that a young student must have felt in 1594 during an English lesson when her teacher, who had just finished reading “The Comedy of Errors” would have spelt out an alien word on the chalkboard. Amidst hushed whispers, students would have tried to decipher what this Farhanitrate-esque word is supposed to mean. And finally, when the teacher would have told her that the chitter-chatter she engages in during recess over food is called “gossip”, that must have been all that she gossiped about that day.

I realise that my digression from my writer’s block to the etymology of the English language might have stretched a tad bit too far. You see, when I started writing this piece, I had no concrete idea about what I wanted to write about. So I decided to let my fingers loose on the keyboard, guided only by the stray thoughts that meander through my brain’s alleys. And a week later, here we are with 1600+ words of brain-goop that hopefully weren’t a complete waste of time.

See you again, soon, I hope.