Mirror, mirror

Well, this happened some time back when I was going to a friend's birthday party in Priya's. Now I just happened to be waiting in Satya Niketan for a conscientious autowallah who would agree to take me there by meter (major optimism involved here, mind you) when suddenly this bike whooshes by on which one of these two "superstuds" aboard yells "Hatt Chinky!" at me. And before I can even look around to spot the perpetrator, they are gone. Physically, at least. Though the effect of their words linger on for a few humiliating moments. I mean, this is a full marketplace we are talking about here. So the thing which was going through my mind was, "what to do now?" I felt bitter of course. Responses varying from running after the bike and hurling back similar complimentaries to the bastard to filing an FIR rushed through my mind in that frenzy of mad fury before rationality finally set in. They were gone. Actually gone. And there was nothing I could do about it now. No matter what I did, that moment wouldnt come back. Almost in a dramatic moment, a similar-looking youth stopped by and asked me for directions to the South Campus. Red-faced as I was, I still managed to blurt out a polite and helpful enough reply after which the guy smiled gratefully and said "thanks man" to me before leaving. Now a sweet gesture of course, but the mood that I was in made me zero in on the emphasis on the "man" term. Why is it that people have to presume that to talk level with a northeastern youth, you have to mandatorily use terms like "yo", "man", "brother", "dude"? Why do we have this huuge tendency to generalize and stereotype people according to their looks, place of origin, religion, etc etc? One bollywood star gets abused for the oily Indian chicken dish she has prepared on a British reality show and the whole world cries foul. Not that I'm justifying it, but then why does this internal level discrimination have to go unnoticed? How about looking at a magic mirror which shows you that for all your cultural diversity, you arent really the fairest of them after all? People scream of racism in london and new york, but at an instance like this, I practically get the feeling that I might just be facing more racism in New Delhi than New York. After all, I am sure that in new york, the cab driver won't quote me a fare thirty bucks higher just because I "look" like a "foreigner". But try negotiating with some of the autodrivers here to lower the 30 rupees surcharge they are offering and see the look you get. Ditto for stalls, stores, Sarojini nagar clothes shops, etc etc. Now dont get me wrong, I am not commiting the same mistake of bland generalization here. There's a vast majority out there which is indeed sufficient enough to balance out these few thankfully minor sections of illiterate vulgar assholes. I have seen loads of people and attitudes out here which have been exemplums of human nature. There was a time when I had accidentally dropped my bag during a bus trip after which I had got a call from a scooterist who had picked it up on the way. He had actually gone through the trouble of fishing out my number from my college register to call me up. This is the kind of thing for which I will always remember Delhi. But now the issue is that even if the offenders fall in the minority, does it justify the rest of us who turn a blind eye to such things? After all, not every Britisher is a Jade Goody, but after that incident, we saw constant media feedbacks of how the entire nation was reacting in opposition to the event to show they were different from the impression the rest of the world was getting. Why can't we do something like that? Why is "forgive and forget" the usual stance we are suggested to take? Why isnt there something which can be worked out?

Past and Present: A Writer's Perspective

Flashback

It all began when I read my first Harry Potter book way back when I was sixteen. I guess it was the third book in the series at that time, the Prisoner of Azkaban. I can still remember in vivid detail the refreshingly cool, cloudy weather that day in the backdrop of my living room window in Kota, Rajasthan, along with the background laughter of my dad and his friends in our garden outside as I skimmed through the pages of this masterpiece. When I arrived at its climax, a strange magic happened within me too. I can still recall whispering ‘whoa’ to myself as a strange chill spread throughout my flesh starting from the base of my spine up to my arms. While around 70% of my reaction was attributed to the sheer ingenuity of the plot and Ms Rowling’s imagination, the remaining 30 % stemmed from a source within me I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

It was only when I wrapped up the book and closed the covers that I finally realized what it was: the discovery of a new-found possibility of an ambition I had never considered before. Suddenly, I wasn’t just another one of those million readers and fans of the series; I was someone with a dream.

I wanted to do that.

For the six or seven hours that I had been engrossed in that book, I had been transported to a different world. A world of a secretly located castle in Great Britain where I moved hand-in-hand with Harry to the various classrooms, dungeons, common halls, Quidditch matches … hell, I could have been one of Harry’s classmates myself! For those six or seven hours, I was living an alternate life, no CBSE, no boards tension, no career-related anxiety, no peer pressure … just the simple passive satisfaction of being a silent participant of some real kick-ass action happening in a world I had never been to but could totally relate to.

I had been … transported.

I wanted to do that. I wanted to transport people. I wanted to be the transient imaginative messiah of masses in desperate need of some fantastical escapism from the worries of the real world.

I wanted to be a writer.

I wanted to be famous.

And that’s where it all began.

Present Tense – Reality

I was sixteen then. I am twenty-one now, about to be twenty-two this year. Five years have passed approximately. And I have yet to become famous, much less a published writer.

Welcome to reality.

There was the initial euphoria, of course. That very day, after completing Harry Potter, I had gone to my Dad’s PC and typed out a few pages on Notepad of the first fictional story I could think of just to get a feel of the whole thing. It was actually the most clichéd story you could think of: a thriller-in-the-making of a psychiatrist who gets this young psychotic patient. Ground-breaking.

But whatever, the feel was great.

The story progressed up to page 5 before I decided it wasn’t really accolades-achieving material especially in the age of works like The Sixth Sense and Gothika. What followed next was a spew of well-begun, mildly-inspired, half-finished works, most of them scribbled in my diaries.

The books and ideas would come and go. But what would remain was the vision of being the next J.K Rowling, both creatively and, well, financially (Well, duh! Who would mind getting a billion dollars side-by-side in the deal? J).

Upon entering my XII, I became even more serious about contemplating writing as a career option. This was the period when I got involved in full-time research on fantasy fiction and Ms Rowling’s life (her problems, her inspiration, her real-life twists, websites, articles, and any other stuff I could get my hands upon). I can speculate a total of around 6-7 works begun by me during this period. Out of them, I got damn serious about one. I had managed to write about half of it by then and for me, it was the next competitor to Potter for this year’s Guardian Best Children’s Book of the Year. Beware, Ms Rowling! D.S Irengbam is here!

Now that I look back on it, I actually feel a little embarrassed at the naivety of the whole thing. While the will and dream was there, the practical knowledge certainly wasn’t. So incredibly deficient was I in the technical stuff, that I actually used to think that “double-spaced” meant pressing your space bar two times before every word!!! And I had no idea how to justify lines in Microsoft Word so most of my text used to resemble an abstract Da Vinci painting in terms of layout. And this was the state in which I would send out my manuscripts to publishers like Penguin and Harper Collins! No wonder I didn’t really get the most favorable responses from them in return. It’s a miracle they didn’t get me arrested.

Then came my XII boards, the mother of all CBSE senior secondary exams, the make-or-break point of the career of thousands of lakhs of students around India. But guess what? While most of my peers were into revising last-minute stuff about hydrocarbons and Probability theory and contemplating which stream of engineering to take up, I on the other hand, the great bestselling author-in-the-making, would sit in the rocking chair in the living room, scribbling the future of the Indian Children’s Fiction scene in my seventh diary of the year.

But with the specialty that Time gets at times for passing away in a flash just when you want it to go slow, my board results came out some months later, and having no prospects in the field of Engg Sciences, I decided to get into Delhi University for an Honors degree. This was actually quite a major decision considering the social setup I lived in at that point of time where Humanities was considered to be the undeclared Refuge Of the Academically Uninterested.

Soon, I was in first year of BA (Hons) in English Literature from Venky. I was a DU dude. And I was yet unpublished. No probs. I was still seventeen for another two months. Plenty of time to become a teen prodigy. Then came my mid-terms, then finals, and so my first year swept away. No book yet, but you see, it wasn’t exactly my fault, I didn’t have a system at the hostel, and there was academic pressure of a new course, and there was the new lifestyle to be adjusted to, and a new venue . . .

Then second year came, and went. This was the period when teen prodigies and young achievers were in vogue courtesy a Miss Sania Mirza. I would look at their glossy photo galleries and barrage of articles detailing their “before and after” stories and get gooseflesh thinking the same thought again and again – I was next.

Of course, it was when it came to executing that inspiring self-belief into reality that my noodle started getting boiled. At one point of time, I didn’t even know what to write. I tried loads of stuff: short story compilations, new concepts, and even a bit of poetry at times, but it was of no use. After the initial excitement, they all seemed so … alien. It was like I was trying to be someone else, to fit in someone else’s shoes, to copy someone else’s style. And that would have been a disaster. So in this way, with loads of creative dissatisfactions, roadblocks, and dead-ends, most of my second year passed through.

It was before the beginning of my third year that I made a breakthrough during my summer vacations when this totally unique concept entered my head in the form of a one-line dialogue during a rather boring, depressing hour: “Sometimes I wonder why did this have to happen to me?” On the basis of that one-liner, my main protagonist was created, following which the concept shaped up.

I am still working on it.

A major portion of my final year of Eng Hons went in writing that book. After it was near completed, I sent it to a few teachers who were encouraging and frank. The final response I got was: the concept was brilliant, but I needed to work on the execution. And frankly speaking, I couldn’t agree more.

I mean, I was damn satisfied with the fact that I had actually completed a book on my own: my own book. But then … that weird knotty feeling of “There’s something missing here” remained inside me. You know, like when you have created something remarkable but still get this gut feeling that if something more could be added to it, then it would become truly awesome …

Ladies and gentlemen, I feel proud to tell you that I have recently, during my first year of MA, got a pretty fair idea of what that “something” could be. I have rewritten and reformatted the entire script and now am I getting that full feeling of “Uh-huh, this is what it should be like”. Know it sounds rather like a Bollywood movie ending but trust me, the tale is far from over. I haven’t deceived myself enough to feel that it’s gonna be all smooth sailing from here. I still have some minor hurdles, and I still don’t know how much more changes might be required in the near future to come.

But whatever, that’s life, and boy am I prepared for it.

At least, I hope so!