- We make amends, right wrongs, pay penance through the written word
Writing serves many purposes. We write to communicate, to express feelings, to see before our eyes the chaotic thoughts in our head, to issue orders, to show submission, to exert authority among many other things. Writing, for some, is an outlet to shout out loud. For others, it is an escape. Spoken word, it is said, withers away. Written word stays and echoes through eternity.
Reality is a brutal beast. Eventually, it makes cowards of us all. The unbridgeable abyss between world ‘as it is’ and world ‘as it ought to be’ makes for a horror show. Hope and denial save us from lives we are condemned to live. Hope tells us there are greener pastures just around the corner. Denial convinces us that the gutter we are in is the green pasture. And for the imaginative ones, writing serves the purpose to atone for everything that ever went astray.
Be it the political writer who struggles to bring emancipation to doomed ones or fiction writer creating spectacular worlds and exceptional characters, to write is to atone. In the former case the attempt is to atone for injustices and excesses of those in power, in the latter, to provide an escape from the boredom filled existence.
The writer inculcates courage for the unconventional questions to be asked. Axioms that have become sacred are challenged and the quest for man’s eternally incomplete, eternally insecure existence continues through the written word
In the midst of ‘Banish the thinking man’s mentality’, the slogan that has become a rallying cry of those who join the chorus, toe the line, live sheepishly and belong to the clan of righteous ones. The writer inculcates courage for the unconventional questions to be asked. Axioms that have become sacred are challenged and the quest for man’s eternally incomplete, eternally insecure existence continues through the written word.
It is literature that makes sure that never it becomes possible to have a land where everyone falls in line and conforms to the same things, same ideas, same idols and same principles. There have always been dissenters and oddballs who see through the ‘One People United Forever’ ploy, all thanks to literature and those who pen it.
Just a mere glance at history and rummaging through rusty old pages of history from Socrates onwards and you’ll find the Mansoors, the Marxs, the Sir Syeds, the Wildes, the Iqbals, the Dostoevskys and countless others who were pronounced as heretics and abandoned during their lifetimes for the words they uttered and words they wrote. Now, we know best how passionately they are loved, quoted and owned by the very sons and daughters of people who once loathed them.
Along with literature enters religion, arts, dogma, culture, literature, ritual and other avenues of self-expression and solace. Religion offers satisfaction and refuge in a world where everything was perennially hazy. Art provides an outlet for expressing hopes and dilemmas of what it means to be human. Dogma unites people against earthly foes while invoking celestial support. Culture was handed over from one generation to the other as a sacred trust. Literature chronicled the goings-on in the world within and without. Ritual ensured that the collective will triumphed over individual idiosyncrasies. And in all these expressions, literature triumphs for it chronicle the inner life of an individual in a society he lives, thrives and dies.
Literature is endangered, dear folks. The wisdom and seriousness is slowly withering away. On our tiny little screens now we hoot when we see someone being made fun of his missing leg, we howl when we hear the fictitious tale of elopement being attributed to someone’s sister, we savor the nasty innuendos, covertly-sexual insinuations and allusions that disparage another human being. We revel every time someone falls; every calamity that has befallen someone else is an opportunity to giggle at as it didn’t choose us to be its victim. Our glee, it seems, lies in all things abusive, shallow and horrid.