Joys and travails of writing

   Joys and travails of writing

                                                  Raj Bahadur Yadav

 Albert Camus, the French philosopher and the author has said,"You cannot create experience. You must undergo it".  Last week, one of my old classmates  asked me,"How did you learn the art of creative writing?"  I thought for a while and told him, "From the artless people of my village,particularly my grandmother. Having finished our night  meal, my grandmother used to light a bonfire, using  dry dung cakes and logs of wood. All the family members sat around it and she would anchor the long story session". Her  tales,intermittently backed  by pithy folk songs, kept the audience spell-bound and enthralled. At the end of every tale, I underwent a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" as a listener. The seed was sown, and the first cotyledon sprouted from my creative urge in the form of  a short tale"Sachcha Nyaya"[ True Justice]  published  in the Hindi daily, Punjab Kesari ,in 1975 under a weekly column "Baal Katha". I was studying in the 10th class then. In those days, we didn't subscribe to any daily newspaper. I was in the air when I came across my first published piece  at a hair dresser's shop. I requested  its owner," Uncle, can give you me this newspaper as it has carried out my short story today?" The middle -aged owner said," Quite nice,  but I cannot give it to you right now as I have myself  yet to go through it. Come in the evening to collect it."  As soon as the sun set in , I rushed to his small shop located in the local market of Hisar city. The moment I got that newspaper, I felt I had come to possess the most precious treasure of the world. This tale[ with its genesis in an ancient fable] related to the greedy milkman who mixed water with milk in order to make a fast buck and a monkey snatched his purse full of coins. Sitting on a distant branch of the tree, our primordial ancestor  had dropped half of the coins into the nearby pond and the other half at the feet of the milkman who cheated his innocent customers. 

                           Henry Miller , an American writer, aptly thought,"Writing is its own reward".  While studying in the Government College, Hisar, I contributed a poem ," Matmailey Gaon Ki Or"[ Towards the dusty villages] to the college magazine in late seventies. Justice Surya Kant [ then a student of this college] had edited the Hindi section of the magazine and appreciated my poem, extolling the virtues of rural life. From the 1980s onwards, I started penning down my thoughts and feelings in English. One day, while taking rounds of a  public park in the morning, I asked Prof MM Sharma,my English teacher,"How can I write better articles,Sir?" To this question, he promptly replied," Write,write and write!" I have authored several middle articles in the recent years. Some of them have appeared in The Tribune too. I have continued writing despite  struggling hard to come out of a debris of rejections. The editor's thoughtful reply,"I regret we will not be able to make use of  it",  leaves me floundering around and I find myself getting nowhere. On sober reflection, I am able to discern the flaws in them. Then, once again, I sit back and start musing about some new theme.The day my article appears in The Tribune, I am extolled as a genius by my friends. But  I am fully aware that my  craft has not yet reached the threshold of "flowering" though every fresh piece I compose  gracefully shows  that my last published write -up  was no fluke. I happen to be a writer with a little modest success , believing firmly in Benjamin Franklin's famous quote," Diligence is the mother of good luck". 

Dr RAJ BAHADUR YADAV