Reading & Writing

3 months of unexpected nothingness have reduced my penchant for writing. For quite a while I haven’t been able to keep pace with publishing posts on this blog as I used to 2 or 3 summers ago, but even then I was always writing something or the other …. just kept piling it on in the drafts section. Some were too incomplete to publish and some were just too random and obscure to unleash on an unsuspecting reader of this blog. I always wondered whether I would be able to write more frequently and perhaps even episodically culminating in a rough draft of a book. Well if the last month is anything to go by, that assumption lays shattered. All I have written is a book review and several facebook status messages. The fact that I am citing status messages as a part of my work should give you an idea of the situation.

On the reading front though, things are looking up. I have read quite a few books from diverse genres going so far as to challenge myself by issuing a book on ‘How to write better screenplays for Video games’ and finishing it. Actually quite enjoying it too. On the downside I have also been reading this. Definitely lost a few grey cells in the process. I had lost precious time in the last 2 years working on inane things like academic projects and presentations when I could have been reading. Well not that I was short of reading material, I had about half a tonne of case studies. But somehow academic authors aren’t very engrossing. I think the worst authors are assigned to writing cases for business classes. I know they are supposed to be objective and straightforward in presenting the facts of the case so as to stimulate a vigorous discussion but from my experience they fall short on both the counts. Firstly if the facts were presented in a straightforward manner, how would the professor show off his intelligence by quoting an obscure line form page 3 paragraph 2 as ‘the key to the problem’. Secondly the only time I see a vigorous discussion is when the professor and students decide on the time of presentation. Everything else just passes in a distant chatter of frontbenchers. Imagine if a case study on the valuation of blue-chip contained the sordid details of VP’s affair with the brand manager. Or a time bound case where you have to decide on investment proposals as a mad gunman(ex-employee) empties his AK-47 in the HR department one floor below you. The only way to stop him from killing you is presenting an airtight investment plan for his severance package to him as he comes for you. The possibilities are endless. What stops Harvard from engaging the services of Tom Clancy and Fredrick Forsyth is frankly beyond me.

In the meantime, I read my own blog from top to bottom, starting from the earliest pieces till now. Some of the things I wrote back then make me cringe now that I read them. I was tempted to delete some of it, maybe make something better here and there. But I let it stay, it gave me an idea of what was probably going through my mind at particular instances of writing a blog. Also I think I did get a little better over a period. I also realized why I was struggling to write now. Most of my writing has been reactive and very topical in nature. An incident in classroom, something going on with my friends, a report on foreign internships, a relevant current political debate … I have always written in reaction to something or someone. And though I have tried to write fiction, it just hasn’t panned out the way I want it to. It seems my imaginary characters are never so funny and farcical as the real people I write about. So for now I have given up on aspirations of writing more than 1000 words on a single topic. I would rather just read for now and hope my imagination gets better over time.