The writer sat there in disgust, appalled by the mediocrity he has churned out, sickened by the fact that he was unable to see the sense in discarding it, repulsed by the very thought of how the world is going to change itself entirely the day after reading it. He hoped, against hope that he hadn’t written it, or thrashed it immediately after he indulged himself. Now, there was no option for him except to be the spectator. 

The writer is a funny guy, for he has the illusions of grandeur. He lays back on his chair, stark naked with his lips forming themselves into an uncomfortable smirk, resembling a bad painting messed up by a child crawling over it after wetting himself. He looks into a utopian future, where people read and quote him widely, arguing over his work, never questioning its intent or the genius behind it. The work pervades their dreams, people stop sleeping, afraid they may forget what they have read, and wait for the deeper meaning of the work to present itself. The writer never explains anything. He looks at them all, trying to make sense, to implement, to live by it and to swear on it. He finds it amusing. 

The writer is not a stupid, for he can see the alternate reality too. However, painful it is for him at the moment to accept his failure in this dystopian world of indifference. His work has no coherence, no perspective, no structure, no precedent, grammar or punctuation and a thousand other things gone wrong after the thousand things he had taken care to get right. It was an inhuman and insensitive piece of gibberish the writer is known for producing time and again. He visualizes people attacking him from all parts of the world, claiming his work to be dangerous, blasphemous. People shouting out loud, each of their voices engulfing and nullifying out the others’, chaos prevails and the writer finds it scary he stood at the center of it all. He dismisses it.

The writer, for all his merits and demerits, is not a person who knows how and when to be pragmatic, at least about his work. Not for him the anonymity, not for him the ignominy of failure, not for him the meaningless success. He doesn’t know how to view his work. He needed a benchmark. He needed an assurance. He wanted to be measured against. He wanted to influence. He never stopped dreaming about his work and the influence he is going to have on generations to come. He needed no one to tell him about the importance of his work. But, none of this happened. He still wrote. He still hated it. He still hoped. Someday, they will understand or become so numb they can’t. He has to wait and he has to write. His time will come, of that he was sure. 

The writer is an illiterate for he never studied the people, who surround him, those who make him the man he is. He believed there was a power in writing, and that he has some of it, most of it but he never knew what to make of it or how to wield it. He wondered, if with his power he could change and if the change would be better than what he has to live with. What better could be than his life? Than the fact that he was allowed to lead this life? How else can he change and what else should he change? 

The writer can write, for that was all he ever wanted to do. He has no idea what he wrote about, why he wrote what he wrote, whom he was communicating with, whom he was dedicating to. He did not want to think about any of them. His material was just that, a material, without which he could not sustain but with which he never had any use. People who read him are insignificant and most of them are like him. They can’t write, or won’t write. He does not write for them. He should not believe for once that he was writing about them. That would be plagiarism. He can’t live with that.

The writer is a ridiculous guy, for he still deludes himself into writing, and dreams of sleeping.

[Written for Indispire Edition 35: Is there power in writing? Can writers bring social change & change the world?]