The Juvenilia Files

Dear Students,
This is just a reminder that our first class will be on Tuesday, January 11th. By now you should have received your 1st assignment, but just in case you haven't...

1st Assignment:

Write your own credo. What do you want to bring to the world of fiction? What is meaningful to you? What do you think makes a story great? Who are your favorite writers? Faulkner has said that the tools he needs for writing are paper, tobacco, food and a little whiskey. What do you need?

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Many sunsets ago, when I first felt the need to write, I wrote an article titled ‘Juvenilia’. I wrote primarily because I liked the title. It was a very convenient and liberating, one-word disclaimer that boldly said, “Dear reader, I know that this piece of prose is embarrassing and pretentious but I’m still OK with it. Because it constitutes my juvenilia and I’ve grown up since. And I look back at it indulgently the same way I look back on my childhood years”.

Writing, in one way or the other, helps me grow up. It helps me filter and get rid of the multitude of thoughts and ideas that plague me day and night. I’ve learnt that the only way to ascertain the true worth of my thoughts is to transcribe them onto paper. If I like what I write, I put it up on the web and make sure that Google can find it. If I don’t like what I write, I label it my ‘Juvenilia’ and still put it up on the web and again make sure that Google can find it.

I want to write because I have a lot to say. And I think that a good book is, in many ways, like a good conversation – engaging, provoking, discursive, obsessive, humorous, amorous, vacuous, scandalous and largely irreverent. I think that it was a character in J.D.Salinger’s book ‘Catcher in the Rye’, who remarks, “You know that you’ve read a good book when you want to pick up the phone and call the author even if it’s just to say ‘hi’ and talk vacuities”. I haven’t written much but a lot of my friends and other acquaintances often call to talk to me and I think that it’s a sign. They want me to start writing and I have to do it for them.

The idea of a good book as a good conversation was largely influenced by my obsessive readings of Salman Rushdie’s works. His books, as the cliche goes, have no beginning or ending but only a thick middle. He once wrote, “Writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things – childhood, certainties, cites, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves – that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers”. Long before I read that line, I knew that I wanted to write to reclaim my own past. Initially, I thought that it was a case of acute nostalgia, the kind that you are prone to when you leave your country (India) and spend a sizable amount of time in another (U.S.A). But soon, I realized that this affliction was more widespread and the cause had less to do with spatial displacement and more to do with temporal displacement. I am, we all are, growing up and a healthy stimulus to dust our memories frozen in the recesses of past seems inevitable.

While an engaging, discursive conversation is the hallmark of the modern mind, the classical mind is purposeful and relentless in its dealings though the same might not be immediately apparent. I like books in which the seemingly desultory conversation is actually being steered by some broader structure and themes with a universal appeal. When asked what inspires him to make his movies, Manoj Night Shyamalan, the director of the movies ‘Unbreakable’ and ‘Signs’, said that the conflicts in his movies are something a ten year old and even a ninety year old can identify with. ‘Unbreakable’ was about finding one’s true vocation and ‘Signs’ was about our faith – themes that are still being explored in different contexts and books.

“One writes”, V.S.Naipaul once wrote, “to learn about oneself”. I think that this is true because we only know how to begin stories. Once begun, the story has to evolve and write itself and in the process reveal who and what we truly are. Because, as Umberto Eco said, “Writing is a cosmological event”. We get to play God and determine the fate of the very characters we create. We begin by setting the rules (such as, in this story the Animals shall take over the Farm) and then evolve the story within these bounds. As an engineer by profession, this kind of interplay between deliberate design and inspired improvisation is very appealing to me.

I like books which can seamlessly merge truth and fiction and history and memory. I like books in which authors have successfully dumped their visions of cities as they remember them or as they ‘want’ to remember them. I haven’t been to Bombay in a long time and have never been to Dublin. But I love the way they are recreated in suffocating detail in Salman Rushdie’s and James Joyce’s books. Joyce, I’m told, frequently wrote to his friends and relatives in Dublin asking for precise answers to questions such as ‘how high a particular tree in the backyard seemed when seen from a window in the attic of his childhood home’. These kinds of details, conceivably, do not constitute a sparkling conversation. But I like irreverent writers who still record them to largely amuse themselves and not the reader.

Beyond all these loaded reasons is a more sober pretext for writing. Writing is a very narcissistic exercise. We write because the writer of a memoir is also an exhibitionist, who by design, never comes off as being the second best. Our writings, however bad they are, always make us feel good. And remember, these days, a little vanity is everybody’s favorite virtue.

These and other contrived excuses compel me to defiantly write my own tales. In spite of my predilection for the beginning-to-end experience, I often find myself trying to structure my narratives with the right pace, a sound plot and the optional surprise ending. I try to write regularly, but in the same line, let me confess that I’m not trying hard enough. I picture myself waking up early, having a warm cup of coffee and getting down to the business of writing. But unfortunately, I don’t drink coffee. So I find myself feverishly scribbling on any piece of paper I can find, late in the night, drunk on a grande sized container-ful of some other stimulant. And the next morning, I wake up a sober person, bemoan my self-wrought torturous indulgences and put away the write-up along with my other ‘Juvenilia Files’.