A Little Something: The Tragedy of Every Passionate Reader

This was up on Facebook for quite some time before I decided to post it here as well.

I would like to thank my room, my laptop and my inability to do productive things for creating an atmosphere that was best suited for a pointless article like this one.

Honestly, it’s excruciatingly difficult to come up with an imaginative beginning for something that comes from the deepest recesses of someone’s heart and even if you do succeed it’s even more of an uphill task to build up on it so that it gratifies the reader’s thirst of reading something new.

Well, I’m not going to dwell upon the usual subjects that every other person writes upon in the hope of being lauded out of mere sympathy.

No, I’ve decided to go about things a wee bit differently. Yes, all of you who enjoy reading grim tales of lost love and forlorn hopes will be disappointed but I will try to put in shades of grey into this in a very limited way.

I will, to the best of my ability try to give you a reason to – well, just smile. Not on account of some funny anecdote you may think I am about to put forth but because of some profound truths that are going to dawn upon you soon, most of which you knew all along but have failed to acknowledge.

Please do accept my apologies for beating around the bush incessantly but you see for a writer that’s the oldest trick in the book- to lure an innocent reader into reading something with the promise of it unfolding into something interesting without it being remotely so. (In case you didn’t notice you’re now far into the trap yourself)

Another nasty trait most prolific writers possess is bewildering readers with high flown language which has little or no meaning at all. Their labyrinthine arguments include seemingly endless bombast, which is designed so as to confound readers, are what you would call perfect examples of affectation.

I daresay I’ve been able to drill my last point right into you. :P

I could just go on and on about the notorious side of writing but that would most certainly amount to discrediting a legion of thinkers, intellectuals and ideologists who, besides having encumbered the minds of many generations, have actually at a few instances in history brought about a paradigm shift in the way we look at our world. This would qualify as one such instance. :)

What I’ve written would appall most avid readers but you must admit that even though these revelations are bitter pills to swallow they cannot be truer. A writer deliberately contorts public opinion, instigates them to disagree with their governments over trivial issues and then leads them into believing what he would want them to believe.

Well this article is sure steaming up to be one hell of an eye-brow raiser but perhaps this crude disillusionment was essential for you to be made aware of the sordid scenario in the literary world.

Of course, you loved three college kids getting high on their college’s rooftop, you adored how Ron and Hermione finally hooked up, and you mouthed a ‘wow’ after reading ‘The Da Vinci Code’ but apart from these small things that make you smile each time you think of them, what’s the draw ?

They say the pen is mightier than the sword and the way I’ve talked about things till now you’d be compelled to accept this. The pen gives you time to think and this dear reader is what makes all the difference. Let me rephrase what I just said, the pen doesn’t just buy you time to consider an argument but it does much more than just that, it deliberately directs your thoughts in a preset direction. While the sword would just chop your head off, the pen on the other hand is above such inhuman brutality or is it? You are disappointingly wrong my friends. The pen is but more heinous in its ways because it can convince you to chop your head off yourself.

Well someone had to bring these skeletons out of the closet and as derogatory it may seem for my brethren (fellow writers), I was compelled to do so by a mind that didn’t have much food for thought during a particularly prolonged bowel emptying session. An ignoble setting for an unquestionably honorable task- Oh the irony!!!! But you see that’s the way life is –you didn’t know a thing about writing did you? And you had a languid dreamer in a stench ridden latrine lay the cards out for you........