Flannery O’Connor once wrote “people without hope not only don’t write fiction, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them”. For me although my writings short stories are an expansion of scribbling during short spell of stay in outskirts as also an attempt to get the grip on story telling almost a decade back, many though lost. I really don’t have a pretension as a writer. I do it for fun but when I do I try to do my best, although mostly the attempt is mediocre (sometimes I even forget that I do write. It is quite strange!!). I do carry that naïve hope that one day I will write one great short story. Well, I guess there is no harm in hoping. Off course I try to use the story as a pretext to communicate an issue, whether on Language or unemployment or other pressing problems and so on. It has more to do with the strata of society I am in wherein it is many times difficult to ignore things, previously it almost consumed me. Short stories are mostly impressionist in nature. It carries an impression of an event or surroundings in a most urgent sense. Although when I first attempted to write I had no idea about the ‘field’ of short story. Having realized mediocrity, I have in last few years spend more time in reading about short story. The world of short story is so vast that it makes one so very miniscule. But my ardent desire remains, as it is been for last one decade or so, is to write one great story. The more you read more impossible it seems. My favorite short story writers are mostly classical like Chekhov, Maupassant, Kafka, Faulkner, Poe….also Bashir, MT and so on. I also prefer contemporary Spanish Short Stories from South America. I consider Gogol’s The Overcoat and Kafka’s Metamorphosis as the greatest short story I have ever read.
What makes a good short story interesting is that there is more to the story than what we read as Hemmingway said ‘the story reveals a tip of iceberg’. In every good story there is a universal emotion but the story line or characters carry the context of culture or tradition. At a deeper sense a story is an act on redemption, an act of faith. In the stampede for urgent, stories provide the space for significant, the immortality of life. I always held that each life is a brilliant story and much interesting than any fiction or movie, if we have time to observe. Away from the glitter of super heroes and heroes (concepts reflecting insecurities of collective psyche of people) are the very ordinary people. Now here one may say the “ordinary” as the office going young or middle aged millions of people we see on the street but for me the “ordinary” is mostly the so called peculiar or shades within ‘normal’ people. There is nothing normal about office goers or family, these are social construct we are habituated, infact the mainstream thinking and occupations, particularly in the contemporary is deviant if not absurd or lunatic. Like the protagonist in Camus’s ‘The Stranger’ whom the conventional understanding would fixate as crazy but he was normal all the way or the Barber in the movie ‘The man who wasn’t there’ (To give a fresh example since I saw this movie in my CD yesterday), the similarity in these two is that both the characters are executed by the State. Nothing extra ordinary but very stirring. I prefer to read stories that are actually about nothing. Like for instance the character in the Latin American writer Julio Cortazar’s amazing story ‘Axolotl’ I read last month and liked very much (Another one I read recently is Italo Calvino’s ‘The Spiral’). The guys who are actually the most normal people we can ever come across. I have always been riveted to such characters. At certain level I identify with them, particularly my stay in Chennai for a year (‘94-95) was formative. It was also the time I took up reading fiction in a serious sense. This period and few following years in Ernakulam (kerala) and early part of Delhi when I look back was kind of hilarious. I took up more than dozen odd jobs not lasting even weeks in some cases. Also no two jobs were same- ranging from some crazy set of guys who made programs for TV channels (and their very wild parties) to publishing to insurance agent to salesman (hawking odd engineering products to flats!!) to Flying club to god knows what but I do cherish the brief period were I behaved like a tourist guide (knowing foreigners, free food and working on spoken English with original saippu (!!!) was a terrific combo). Off course the early part was very frustrating and could have ended up tragically. But somehow in every turn you come across situations wherein you get lesson which in immediate sense tragic but extra ordinary, here I am referring to deaths of people whom you consider close, people acquainted, people strangers. These events straighten you up and tend to remove that complacency towards life or makes one appreciate the beauty of life. As one matures or shall we say ages, death is a common occurring, a routine like news reading but at vulnerable age it can leave lasting impressions. To take an example from public space: the pictures of mutilated body of Rajiv Gandhi left me very upset for a long time. Any event like this if it happens now, god forbid, I don’t know whether it will impact me as much. Yes one gets upset like when I was going through pictures of Darfur recently, and creates a kind of uneasiness so that one is forced to address it, may be through blogs or scribbling- classified as poems, or even short stories sometimes. These needn’t be international issue but some ‘ordinary’ non happenings in the streets. If I don’t do these I kind of become very uncomfortable with myself, like not able to keep a promise with oneself. The attempts may come out as egalitarian but I for one do it for myself. It is about dealing or shall we say answering oneself. It’s about redeeming ones own self. Like for instance taking an example, something which left me very upset in my stay in Delhi was suicide of the boy who used to stay next to my room. It brought forth lots of things I never took that seriously (although I have already dealt with the issue of suicide in detail) like alienation, domination (also interest in cooking) and so on or the guys who come from bihar or UP for ‘better prospects’ to delhi and the kinds of problem they face. Incidentally it rarely occurred to me that this could be about me too. Frankly I always saw myself as an outsider looking at things sometimes with intense amusements. To end this introduction to the blog I leave with what T.S.Eliot said once on Stories
“A ‘living character’ is not necessarily ‘true to life’. It is a person whom we can see and hear, whether he be true or false to human nature as we know it. What the creature of character needs is not so much knowledge of motives as keen sensibility; the dramatist need not understand people, but he must exceptionally aware of them”.
