For the uninitiated; I’ve been running a campaign, of sort, titled ‘One at a time’ (with hash tags #OBAAT, #OMAAT, #OPAAT, #OSAAT) wherein I take up an artwork and write my thoughts on it. You may know me as someone who writes well, but I don’t give that credit to myself. In fact, remember that article that The Hindu published on Mother’s Day which I wrote? Frankly, I don’t recall writing it so well. I knew that I wrote it, I knew that I sent it without reviewing it, but I never knew that it was written so well. Till date, I’m in disbelief. Despite all that writing and pen craft, I have trouble articulating my feelings. I have no qualms thinking out loud, but when it comes to the emotions and actually putting down substantial words on paper, I’m severely limited.

I had great difficulty writing, like I used to write before. Earlier, I had trouble expressing my emotions. Now, I have trouble expressing my emotions and my thoughts. And, that is detrimental to me. What if I told you that you are to breathe to be able to live, but you can’t breathe because your nose is stuffed with cotton? To remedy this situation, I started going to eat in the places which had a good vibe. Take ‘Amethyst’ for example, it’s a garden restaurant in Chennai. I went there, had a Caesar salad all by myself. I went there just to put myself in hitherto unfamiliar places, hoping to rekindle my spark. I went to an in-room concert, travelled for a long weekend to a hill-station, and even tried to get sloshed in a bright afternoon – all because I wanted to see and feel enough to write something about it.

That is why I started this campaign. I had 300+ books (physical and digital) at my disposal, and I had watched and listened to ample number of songs and movies to start it. I demanded something very simple of me. I set up 4 generic questions that I had to answer for each artwork that I was to post about. Be it a song, album, movie, series, book, painting or anything that was created as a result of the pursuit of art. And, I sometimes wrote single word answers to the generic questions while I posted about them. Even when I had a lot in my head, I could only write in three or four words that barely formed a sentence.

I know, all of this qualifies to be a rant, but it is essential that I write it so that the next couple of paragraphs develops the gravitas and helps the reader understand that perspective I am coming from.

I’ve not cried at my sisters’ wedding, I happened to chuckle when I heard about my maternal grandmother passing away, and I came to the point of trapping a free bird that got stuck in our apartment’s stairwell just so that I could write about it. I was willing to cage a being, albeit momentarily, so that I can walk outside and inhale fresh air before going back inside the humid, moldy place. You know what, now that I have been able to write a page, I want to talk more about the wall that is around me and how it broke down.

My childhood years are nothing but a haze, an after-smoke. Thinking about it now, I remember the little things I used to do that brought me unadulterated joy. I used to take a fistful of rice and count the grains. I used to take a thread roll, de-thread it and then re-thread it. I used to find unwanted strings of thread of various colours and sizes, I used to knot them into one long string and re-thread it after de-threading it. I learnt to ride a bicycle when I had grown taller than 4 feet. I proposed to my school teacher to hold monthly seminars where students can talk on a topic of interest. Consequently, I was chosen to talk about Ramanujan (renowned mathematician) and nuclear reactor on two separate occasions. I liked to have friends, and I would go all out to impress them and help them decide that they wanted to be with me too (I came with perks – I was good in studies, I was on good terms with teachers). I never spoke overtly about my religion and the rituals, fearing that the folks around me would deem me uncool. I ended up developing a closet relationship with the Gods, who I now see as an omniscient and omnipotent version of me.

My entire life, even the life I am living now and the one I will live in future, has been about being the guy who people will like. So, there came moments when the image of ‘the guy people liked’ clashed with the image of ‘the guy that I was’. And naturally, I let the image of ‘the guy people liked’ win. On an afterthought, it was good I did it. That way, I became self-aware and empathetic. I was an ambidextrous individual from the start; I used to write with my left hand, until I was forced to write with my right hand. And now I was an extroverted introvert. I developed great hesitation asking favours for myself, because it dawned upon me on multiple occasions that people like getting help not giving help. On the contrary, if someone was in trouble, I was able to go out of my way to help that person. In high school, my friend hurt his ankle. There was a police jeep stationed near the school. I went to the police inspector and asked him to drop my friend to his home. He was surprised at me asking it, but he agreed. Had I had a broken leg, or even a femur protruding from my thigh, I’d never have asked for help (fearing rejection).

I was quite poor in sports and you can’t play football or cricket all by yourself. So, I found a willing refuge in books. I used to love reading comic books, so I naturally picked up magazines I found in my home and started reading it. So what if they were women’s magazines, they had some good stories. In Loyola College, I discovered the library beneath Bertram Hall. I saw the amount of books neatly categorized under various departments, I felt like I was in heaven. One of the first books that I read from the library was Jonathan Livingston Seagull – and I was strangely able to relate to Jonathan. From there started my tryst with books of all kind – from Small Is Beautiful, The Goal, The Alchemist to Atlas Shrugged.

I picked books at random, liking either the book name or the cover or the length. I didn’t realize until later that the books I picked up were under the realm of philosophical fiction. My parents remarked that I read such books where characters were outcasts, and thought that I was an outcast myself. But, it was the other way around. I was a misfit for as long as I can remember, I never had peers of my age who were not from my school. My moral compass didn’t allow me to not report my friends who brought hairstyling tools in school when school did ask them to not bring it. I never really had friends who helped me, and when they did help me, I had trouble believing it because the helpers would end up exploiting me. They’d team up with me, make me come to their home in the other side of the city, make the presentation together, and end up hijacking it and present it as a one-man show.

Naturally, I felt a closer bond with the dead and skinned pages which were strategically disfigured by ink, than with humans. And then of course, I wasn’t allowed to adopt a being. Once, my music teacher’s pet cat delivered a litter and she encouraged that I take a kitten or two for myself. I took them home, only to be scolded upon, and made to return them to her. I started watching movies and series for the same reason why I started reading books in the first place, to experience a world that is not my own. At first, I watched the silly movies – the movies which had no head or tail whatsoever. I received recommendations from friends to watch a movie, and they vouched for the movie. I started accepting their recommendations and liked their movies. Soon, I started combing the World Wide Web for movie recommendations and the web didn’t disappoint me.

I’m not able to recall the movie or book or even song that first made me cry over an artwork. But, I’m forever grateful for that piece of art. My empathetic self never allowed me to hate others, even when they metaphorically castrated me. I could always put myself in the shoes of my perpetrator and give that person a clean chit, having able to see things from that person’s view. But, that left me both exhausted and hurt. I didn’t have anyone to shout at, kick at – not even the door because I placed feelings on a door too. The artworks that made me cry helped me a lot by nudging the dam open. Schindler’s List, Inside Out, Siddhartha, and Life Of Pi were a few artworks that helped me cry. I doubt if I’ve written all that I wanted to write, but I’m starting to feel the light dying. Before that happens, I’ll write about the song that made me write this piece. My parched throat can wait, my sweaty underarms can wait, and my hungry stomach can wait. It all can wait.

B is for Braille – the piece I was supposed to write before I ended up writing this piece

Now that I have written about the song, I feel at peace. It feels like an empty mind that you feel just before you drift off to a dream in the lap of Mother Sleep. I will try to write again. Of course, my novel ‘Homebound’ can wait. So can my second and third books of the ‘Be Trilogy’ – ‘Becoming‘, ‘Befitting’ and ‘Believing’.

For now, I’ll write for the sake of writing.

My first true encounter with art was when I read comics. The characters in the comics had a life of their own, independent of the handful of panels they occupied the space in. I always thought that even after I’ve read the comic, the world goes on for the characters. Characters like Chacha Chowdhary, Sabu, Pinky, Suppandi, Nagraj, and others seemed to keep me entertained with their stories and anecdotes. Then there was Phantom which was as elusive as the character itself. I knew that I had to read all the previous comics to understand what’s going on in Phantom and Nagraj, nevertheless I used to read them and savor the experience – you will not always know whatever your real-life human/being has gone through, you are a passing cloud and not the person whose life you just entered.

Whenever I hopped into the train for a long distance journey (any journey more than 10 hours is a long distance journey), I made it a point to have my mom buy me comics. And, I used to devour it in a couple of minutes and would go on and re-read it.

Then came the era of children’s magazines – it had a healthy mix of comics, anecdotes, short stories, out-of-the-world events, puzzles, and quizzes. One magazine would easily keep me entertained for more than a month, I would read and re-read it – as if to extract the last drop of the nectar. Now that I think about it, it’s funny that I am talking about it all and not include my age. True, in one way, my growth can be measured by the kind of books I read. There was the comic books phase, then came the magazine phase, then came the fiction phase, and so on. I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll go chronologically.

With magazines, I found my love for reading articles. Some articles used to be merely half page long, some would run to 4 and 5 pages. I didn’t realize that such articles were simply preparing me to read novels and non-fiction material which ran over 1000 pages at a time. I didn’t bother playing much, and I was good enough for myself. When I used to be bored and didn’t have anything to read, mom would give me a fistful of rice and ask me to count. It kept me occupied. On other days, I used to take a sewing thread roll and unthread it only to re-thread it. I was a cat.

Probably in my high school days, I got myself my first novel. ‘Chanakya’s Chant’, it was called. I got it in the Chennai Book Fair. I loved (still do) the concept of a book fair – books and books, and a child can get lost in the umpteen counters! It was around the same time that I got exposed to non-Indian music. The songs I first listened to are naturally the ones that I still hum today – Wonderwall, Fireflies, what not. Now, here is where the lines get blurred. I went into an experience overload and started gorging on movies, series, music, instrumentals, books, maps, paintings, murals, and anything that I could interpret for myself.

I had the joy of reading the works of giants of humans in their own right. I had the honour of watching movies and series made by visionary filmmakers. These ‘escapades’ immensely shaped me.

I took a dive into the deep ocean, head-first. I tried to find why a movie was made the way it was made. I started to appreciate the background music of movies. I used to listen to the background music, and it had a calming effect on me. The entire experience was so intimate, so personal that I doubt if I’ll be able to type it all and do justice to my experience in the first place.

As I type, my mind is playing ‘Kagome’s Lullaby’ for me. It’s from Inu Yasha, an anime series. I was so deep in the ocean that the soulful voice of Natalia Lafourcade found me. And yet, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface. There are only 7 ragas (notes), yet I’m humbled by the sheer number of original music churned out by the maestros. Whenever an artist exhausts his muse, he or she takes liberty and creates a world of its own. Lovecraft – Octavia – Gaiman – Mary – the list goes on. I realized it too late that I could have made a career in art or critiquing.

But then again, I also know that I write only for the sake of writing. I tried; I tried so hard to write and print pages so that I can sell a good novel and get myself a Wikipedia page. Who am I kidding? The minute I try to write something that I can impress someone with, my pen’s ink bleeds dry. You know about article that got published in ‘The Hindu’? I didn’t even proof-read it. Before that article I wrote on motherhood, I had sent more than 5 articles to the newspaper for publishing. I never got a reply. So, one fine day, my muse took over and wrote the article, and I sent it to the newspaper via e-mail. I forgot about it until it got published.

As I type, I have a fully formed novel idea (replete with character arc, plotline, chapter summary and preface) and 2 nascent novel plots with me. I simply am unable to write them. Yet, I’m able to write what I’m writing.

I started writing this piece in hopes of capturing a few of my escapades with art. Turns out, I’ve merely listed out the reasons why I can’t do so.