The Gritty part: This article, in its unedited form is typed out, completely in my Nokia cell phone. Editing has been done, though I am not bragging on the quality of this art of expurgation.
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| Image Courtesy: Yahoo.com |
I am onto the first day of this adventure. Writing in my Nokia X2-01 is like taking a photograph. It’s a spur of the moment idea, but in a life full of bus-rides, to and from the college I work at, and tight schedule of classes, the best thing to do is to utilize the hours effectively. The spare moments come only during the long waiting at the bus stand and the dreary bus rides, which quite often involve a terrible fistfight between your eighty-kilo body and the iron bar inside the bus. Being seated in these overcrowded buses is a slightly overrated fantasy.
So I found out that the best strategy for effective literary life is to utilize the ‘qwerty’ keypad of the Nokia X2.
I haven’t done this before, at least in such a serious manner, in order to type in full articles, or crucial sections of full articles. I miss my chair. Not a big deal; it is just a fiber chair with no peculiarity. However, I do miss it, mostly because normally when I write, it backs up my butt.
Being a utilitarian does some good to creatures living under the rule of ‘hecticism’—no time for this, and no time for that, work, work, and work. In such a circumstance, only this ideology could save me from losing all this precious time, when I travel in buses and wait in bus stops.
Right now, I am seated in a bus. (I mean, when I wrote it.) This bus is taking me to Thaliapramba, where my college is located. I teach English there. I took the bus from Kannur city. I live in a place called Chalode, a small town, half an hour drive from Kannur city. Chalode and Kannur city appear under different pseudonyms in my book, Wall of Colours and Other Stories. Chalode appears in names such as ‘Chaloke’ as well as ‘Salode’. Kannur comes up in the book as ‘Cannanore’, the name given to the city by the British, during the Raj. Defamiliarising these names were an attempt to avoid any direct reference to people and landmarks, which if occurred, might possibly end up in courtrooms and police stations. These places will continue to appear in the up-coming books in the Hope, Vengeance, and History trilogy.
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| Image Courtesy: Yahoo.com |
The bus ride from Chalode to Kannur is the hardest one. School kids, and working men and women, make the bus journey less short of a nightmare. One advantage is associated with this way of things though, that being, I could witness population explosion first hand. It seems that population explosion is a slightly underrated term for Armageddon.
This is where the metaphor of the photograph comes up. I feel like I am taking a picture of my thoughts, standing right in the ground among all the turmoil. Isn’t this great? However, I do not and cannot tell what you, as a reader might feel about this venture of mine. Great, uh? One of my old friends might call it cheesy. And that same friend of mine, would chase madly after those counter cultural movements they teach in the university, while degrading everything out of the normal or counter-cultural as either cheesy or nonsensical. It is not his fault either. Who would tell them, the pillars of life are set on the ground of an unbending paradox. It is very much like the picture I took with my words, still, without taking a picture.
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