An Ink Blot

An Ink Blot

I have been thinking hard about what should be my first

I have been thinking hard about

I have been thinking hard about what should go up as my introduction

I have been thinking since a week- how am I going to begin my first blog?

I still have no clue of what should be the very first thing that I will write about so that it can be my appropriate first blog.

May be I made a mistake up there. It should have been “I still have no clue of what should be the very first thing that I should write about (I think I should insert a coma here), so that (is that coma really needed?) it can be my appropriate first blog”.

I think English is not very convincing in the very first line. I need to come up with the best first line to set the mode of the rest of the article.

What if I write- having had no other clue but to write I decided to blabber.

Wait a minute- this sounds like self-defence as A.G.Gardiner says in one of his essays “Self attack is the best defence.” Or may be something like that. If I am not sure about the exact words, I better not quote it. Let me suffice it by saying that A.G.Gardiner talks about human nature that attacks his/her ownself to defend his/her ownself from the predators around. No. This still doesn’t sound like anything that Gardiner says.

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 I just went and looked it up in the book.

 A.G.Gardiner writes in his essay “On Being Idle”-

The art of defence is attack. I defend myself by attacking myself and claim a verdict of not guilty by the candour of my confession of guilt. I disarm you by laying down my arms.

Yes those are the exact words. Wait a minute. Why did I quote Gardiner? I forgot. I will have to read again what I wrote to remember what I intended to quote!

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 I had to read it to find out that it was my idea of blabbering that made me quote him. I will cut this off and start with the first line of my blog.

I just realized that I am guilty of plagiarism because this is how Gardiner writes his essay “On Writing an Article”. He writes an article without actually reaching his subject. It’s not exactly plagiarism. It can be called an influence. Influence works wonders. One can never know what might influence-----  I think I used a wrong word here. Influence also means practicing your power over other. Let me substitute influence with--- I cannot find a word in my dictionary for influence. Can I say Gardiner’s way of writing has had an impact--- I have read it somewhere that one can write a poem by putting down words on paper and then add adjectives to it like one adds pepper to food. That was a poem about how to write a poem. I have this urge to google and find out the name of this poem but I better not digress. So let me add an adjective in my line- Gardiner’s way of writing has had a long lasting impact on me. There it is. I put it correctly. But I lost track of what it was I intended to say when I first sat down to write this article.

Day.2

The process of writing is not as easy as it seems. One has to be sure of what it is that one wants to convey through written words. Then one has to choose from the ocean of words, the appropriate words to convey it. English being the language I learned and not acquired, I am definitely not very good at it. Now how can one define what ‘good’ is? Let’s suffice it by saying that I make grammatical mistakes and syntactic mistakes when I write without checking on my words. There are mistakes that auto-correct cannot correct. But there is an urge to write. So I write with whatever is available to me- THE STANDARD ENGLISH. Having had an impact from American Series, Afro-American novels, colonial hangover(English taught in school), Latin-American literature (read in translation), Indian Literature in English… I lose the sense of defining my words in a particular territory. It’s not the standard usage. I mix narrative styles that have influenced me. I choose double negatives to make a statement and often use Indian version of English with ‘ings’ and wrong articles. Then why not write in an acquired language?

I could never learn to write in my acquired languages. I am more miserable at it than I am with English. I was not aware of the political project that I was a part of! Let me take this onus on myself and blame myself for anglicizing languages and the world around me. Today, I can put in an effort to learn to write in ‘my’ languages (I doubt if I can call it that) but my education taught me to think in English. As Bharati Mukherjee says in one of her essays “English is the language of intellectual make up and vernacular languages are the emotional make up.” I fail to convey things in English but I know I cannot even convey it in the languages I acquired. So whatever I will convey in this alien language (in that sense all languages are alien to me) will become an ink blot. I would continue to open windows with these ink blots. They can signify anything and be a new sign in themselves. I decide to paint the walls through these ink marks.

 Even if it’s intelligible, it’s definitely a mark!