Writer’s Block
I haven’t written for a couple weeks. While I never planned for it, the break has been nice. Save the period when I was writing my PhD dissertation — I still can’t figure why it took me as long as it did— I have never had a problem with Writer’s Block fortunately. Naps help and “creative” drinks are handy but I don’t typically need those to write, which is a good thing. I write for fun, to escape from the daily grind, to take my mind off all the negativity published in the newspapers, and as an excuse from the monotony of thinking about the next breakthrough at work.
I just realized: It’s actually fun writing about writing.
I was writing during the break, just not in a genre suitable for Medium. I published a couple work-related technical articles and made a few exec presentations that I rather enjoyed for a change. I also did some reading. Bought myself Harari’s Homo Deus, read a bunch of Amar Chitra Kathas with my kids (and read Wikipedia to explain backstories of backstories of the characters that appear in those ACK stories) and somehow got into researching medieval Indian mathematicians, whose accomplishments between 400 CE and 1400 CE blew my mind. I learned that Bhāskaracharya’s work on calculus predates Newton and Leibniz by over half a millennium and that Brahmagupta’s works in geometry and astrophysics were surprisingly more advanced than those by European mathematicians centuries later. I also read the hypothesis that much of the work of Indian mathematicians was carried over to Europe via Persian mathematicians who themselves first translated Indian mathematics into Arabic. Per conspiracy theorists, European Renaissance effectively and essentially advertised age-old Indian mathematics as their own.
I started reading Kautilya’s Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft, economic policy and military strategy. Kautliya (aka Chanakya) apparently wrote Arthashastra in 2nd century BCE; I could not help but marvel at the accuracy and relevance of the concepts in 2020. Take the following for example:
Avoid War
One can lose a war as easily as one can win.
War is inherently unpredictable.
War is also expensive. Avoid war.
Try Upaya (four strategies).
Then Sadgunya (six forms of non-war pressure).
Understand the opponent and seek to outwit him.
When everything fails, resort to military force.
— Arthashastra
Suffices to say, I have managed to keep my creative side going during the break. I almost forgot to add that with my allergies subsiding finally, I started playing Tennis again. Yayy! to July 4th, which incidentally marks the end of the allergy season for me. And am now back at writing.
I went back and looked at what I was writing before I took my mini-break. With COVID-19 lockdown on, I was cooking a lot and was taking a tonne of pictures of nature— I wrote about both. With a desire to expand my repertoire, I concocted a romantic fiction, which became a sleeper hit with my extended family. My kids complained one day that I only write stuff for adults, so I composed a kids story and wrote about their favorite toys —it’s another thing that they didn’t really like my take on their toys because my article focused more on the business of toys than on the toys themselves. Personally, I had the most fun writing (and reading later) the essays I wrote on AI systems and Deglobalization, maybe because they both represented a good cross between my work and personal life.
As I was flipping through my articles, I recognized a pattern in my writing style using visual deep-learning AI (all pun intended): Save for a couple outliers, all my articles drew heavily from my own personal life. Even this one does. Our kids, my wife or I figure in majority of my write-ups. It was not a conscious choice, definitely. I started wondering if all authors — pros and amateurs like me — do this. Most of the articles from my friends, colleagues or past acquaintances have this characteristic as well, which made me ponder if it is not just symbolic of the lives and times we live in, with our nuclear family setup and increasingly non-altruistic behaviors. My intent in stating this observation is not to condemn our conduct but rather to make the point that it is probably incredibly hard to create completely fictitious backgrounds, characters and story-lines, much like in movies. I unknowingly attempted, I’d like to think somewhat successfully, and penned a non-personal setting in a conversational piece where a couple septuagenarians spend a lazy afternoon chatting up random topics.
The above observation increased my respect for authors like J.R.R. Tolkein, J.K. Rowling, George Lucas and C.S. Lewis who created entire fantasy worlds, new languages, human and non-human characters before scripting reams of intertwined stories. Even the fiction writers like Stephen King, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum and Sidney Sheldon — authors I grew up on — are masters of fabricating a web of plots. The fiction genre, is by the very definition, story about “somebody else”, I get it. I did manage to write Aloo-Baingan — a full-blooded fiction — inside 4 hours but I unconsciously ended up burying a few personal anecdotes into the narrative. Ditto for the kid story Balloon-Baba, where the entire premise was based on my earliest memories of waiting for an old balloon seller when I was about 5 or 6. Do all authors — pros and amateurs like me — do this? Do they conceal their personal lives in their stories? But some of them are such prolific writers; how many lives have they lived? Maybe I am yet to fully understand the power of imagination.
