What's your number?? - Week 2

The most imaginative thing that any writer can come up with has already been done. It was by the genius who came up with the notion of a writer's block. There is nothing more fictitious than that.

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What do you do, when you've nothing to do? These days this question's answer will be mostly centred around the usage of our smartphones. Our incessant craving for company is satisfied by this gadget. Please remember that I'm accepting that I'm myself indulging in this timepass.

But before our phones became smarter than us, before we had everything at our fingertips, how did you spend time when you were alone? If you can't imagine a scenario, think how you had spent your time on a journey some ten years back.

Reading of books - novels, comics and otherwise - and listening to music would be the more popular answers now. I had two peculiar pass times​ of my own. Ever since my father taught me that I could decipher the location of my presence by reading shop boards, I used to spend my time on the window seat to do just that. Almost all the nameboards of the shops have the name of the place towards the bottom left corner. It's really helpful when you're traveling to a new place.

My other hobby is to read vehicle registration numbers. The inspiration for this one comes from a quest to find out other vehicles with the same number as the one under my possession. And if you've tried doing this, you would know how hard it is.

In spite of the hundreds of vehicle registrations happening daily at the thousands of RTOs in all the states of this country throughout the year; in spite of all these vehicles moving from one point on India's map to another; in spite of all these vehicles only getting a number from 1 to 9999; you would be hard pressed to find another vehicle with the same registration number as yours. True story.

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Now, if you would allow me to use my writers liberty, I would like you to replace in the previous paragraph - vehicle registrations by childbirth, vehicles by people, registration numbers by their personalities; and many other such nuanced substitutions - at the end of which that paragraph would be the perfect analogy for a person finding another person who is just like them. That's also really hard to do and extremely tough to realize.

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And as we celebrate the second year of our marriage, and the third year of our realization that both of us have the same "registration number", I would like to thank God - for he had put me in the right place at the right time to meet the right person.

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Until next week.

Marks - Week 1

You know, I write plenty these days too. Mostly on paper. Entirely based on requests people have made towards the Bank. Poetic artistry and the drive for stroking the reader's imagination has been replaced by cliched jargon and a need for soothing of the reader's mind.

Unfortunately, while I could share with the world my earlier creations, the current batch of prose is strictly official - "for your eyes only" kind of stuff.

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I happened to go through the earlier posts here a few weeks back. Even if words of praise are rightly held at a premium, a sculptor has the right to admire his work. Likewise, I did - and I felt both elated and deflated. Elated cos of what I had once written, deflated cos I don't write anymore.

Past glory is never enough - no matter what people say. I enjoy the thrill of throwing together words to watch it form a sentence; many such sentences join to become a paragraph; few such paragraphs together become a blog post. And in the middle of all this will be an idea that I wanted to convey.

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I happened to buy a book yesterday. The fuss is because even when I was writing every week, the amount of reading was limited to other blogs, internet and the odd piece of paper you find. I had actually stopped reading books after I reached​ College - the Harry Potter series being the last major book I read. Afterwards whatever was read was for timepass, not for the thrill of reading.

And yesterday wasn't the first time I tried buying a book to make myself read again. The complete collection of Sherlock Holmes, More William, The Indian Epics Retold, Ivory Throne and a few other books have filled my shelf, but not my mind. It's for this precise reason that I went in search of a book in the self improvement section. And I have come back with "Katha Chanakya" - stories about Chanakya and what we have to learn from them.

My first impression was negative. The stories were too short for my liking and the preachy tone of the book was irritating. I finished my reading yesterday with the chapter which has Chanakya keeping his shikha untied, until he overthrew the king who untied it.

Waking up today morning with that story fresh in mind gave me a new direction to ponder. What if I do the same. What if I make a mark - a mark I'll have to see everyday - which would remind me that I have not been reading or writing. The lack of Shikha made it hard, but I've come up with something.

Now, on the back of my front door are two pieces of paper. On one, I'm writing the last date on which I read atleast five pages of a book. On the other is the date on which I last wrote something. Let's see how good self improvement books really are.

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Until next week.