The Writerly Life

"The Writerly Life" is a book that I picked up recently from the Strand Book Stall in Bangalore. It is a book that contains the entire collection of non-fiction writing ever doled out by one of my all time favourite authors, R.K.Narayan. It contains a whole host of essays of varying sizes that he wrote over the length of his entire career, and like anything else written by him, they are a real pleasure to read.

Sitting alone, on my warm cozy bed in a vague part of Scandinavia at 11:00 PM on a thursday evening, it is the words of this gentleman that creates this wonderful atmosphere that I was thriving in, nay, revelling in,with the rain falling outside the window of my hotel room, and me snugly tucked in bed with a warm cup of hot chocolate by the side, melodious strains of 'box of rain' by The Grateful Dead playing away on my ipod. Solitude never seemed more inviting.

I have always considered this as possibly the best scenario to sit and completely enjoy reading a book, and I must confess that this was all that I could wish for and then some.

The title of this post might be a tad misleading, because one might end up thinking that this is related to my life or my endeavours as a blogger who aspires to have his blog reach the stellar heights of popularity that some very well written ones have managed to achieve. I am not really sure what I am going to write about in the lines that follow, though I have an intuitively good feeling about it, all the same.

Sure, I dream of being an author someday. I bet every single person who maintains a blog and is regular about posting in it harbours a secret desire to want to be a published author and bask in the glory that follows, and reach a level of unparalled self-satisfaction that goes with the territory.

I have additional motivation to be a best-selling published author someday. I would like to invest a lot of hard work towards writing the book, and then sit back on a hammock in the sun with a Sombrero covering my face and sleep all day, occasionally waking up to sip a fruity cocktail, as I rake in the moolah courtesy of the royalties generated through my book.

This is a pipe dream, though I hope it never remains this way forever.

For seven years of my life from the age of thirteen to twenty, my family used to live in a beautiful locality in Mysore named Yadavagiri, and our residence was on Vivekananda road, barely a couple of hundred metres away from where R.K.Narayan's Mysore residence was located. He passed on while we were still living there, though I never did have the good fortune of being able to see him at his residence since he never did come back to Mysore during that time.

There has been an ongoing campaign in Mysore to have an indelible RKN stamp on Mysore city, and you can read more about it here. There is a proposal to name the Mysore-Chennai Express as the Malgudi Express, and I personally endorse this suggestion wholeheartedly. It is very much on the lines of the GoDaan Express named after one of PremChand's works.

I must have said enough number of times that I profess a deep love for Mysore city, and one significant part of the reason is because of RKN's wonderful descriptions of the city and its various people and the sights and sounds. The manner in which he has managed to bring the city to life had awakened me to realize how wonderful the place I lived in actually was.

Mysore is a far cry from the idyllic town that he portrayed in his autobiography 'My Days', but there still are traces of the old grandeur and remenants of the city that his words have made me aware of.

As a teenager, Mysore seemed like a boring pensioner's paradise, primarily because that was what people kept on calling it then, and Bangalore was just waking up to its new found glory as the choicest of destinations for all and sundry, specially those in the information technology domain, which is now currently proving to be its undoing.

With all the 'happening people' visiting Bangalore, its emergence as the supposed rock capital of India, with all its avant-garde people and all the international concerts that it was host to, not to mention the ever-so-elusively-popular Brigade road and MG Road, where, we were told by those we considered lucky enough to visit the city with increasing frequency, that each and every woman is by herself, a wonderful sight to behold, it was but natural that some of us less-informed ones were in awe of Bangalore and everything that it stood for.

Enough has been said about Bangalore's meteoric rise and its equally spiralling fall, and this post is not about that. Bangalore does have its good points, and no words from some inconsequential Mysore-phile are going to negate that.

Pretty much everything that RKN has written, fiction or otherwise has something or the other that I can associate some part of Mysore or some part of my life with. It could either be some location or the atmosphere or the general ambience, or something totally beyond description. The power of suggestion is very potent here.

One is engulfed by an entire flood of fond memories of different kinds as one goes through some of RKN's books. I can distinctly remember pestering my father for a kite in class 5 because it was the kite flying festival back then, and every other kid in my neighborhood had one. Not wanting to be left out of the pleasant melee, despite knowing as much about flying a kite as I did about women back then, I boldly ventured to go fly a kite, and had one of the best times of my life doing so.

I can recall this other instance when it was Ganesha Chaturthi, and I was made recently aware of a custom of visiting houses to prostrate before a hundred and one Ganesha idols, and did so with the intent of being blessed with greater academic prospects and ending up with sore knees in the bargain because of having worn shorts that time, and for also having my faith strengthened and having had another fond memory to add to my basketful of recollections.

There are of course, the innumerable instances of having been very naughty at school and having done things that I was ashamed to death of, at that point because the teachers made me feel that way, but those very things would now bring about a chuckle or a huge grin in the least.

I could go on and on about a lot of such cherished recollections, and have a feeling that I am drawing parallels between some parts of my life and that of Swami's, and it wouldn't be entirely untrue. Power of suggestion kicking in once again.

As I sit here, typing away on some Norwegian style keyboard, hunting for the special character keys that are arranged in some weird manner, I can't help but count my blessings and feel thankful for all the great times that RKN's books have provided me with.

Thank you, wherever you are.