Popagandhi

When you start writing for a living, turning out ten thousand words or more over three days, with the pressing need to complete three more pieces within the next five days in order to make them ready for sale, while having to pretend to be a full time student and also employee, what does that say? That you’re mad? Term papers? What’re those? (Maybe it says you’re running away and also make the mistake of equating success/productivity with having a grip, or that you need to feel your head turned around furiously in order to believe it’s still screwed on tightly.)

Somebody told me today that the surest sign of age and growing up is like moving from writing with a pencil to a pen — when you make mistakes you can’t erase them, and all attempts to try still don’t completely cover past flaws. Dare I add: it gets messier and very soon you can’t read yourself either. Maybe this is where I bid goodbye to everything I have loved before; people and places, familiar smells, routines and comfortable practices, and walk away from it all. I am treading that gray space which doesn’t really exist, the one straddling the Old World, people and places I loved for years, and the new. The one where everything is uncertain, so fucking lonely, scary, terrifying, depressing, the one where travellers struggle to find their footing after returning to the country they grew up in, and I’m sure some find sick satisfaction in how even people standing with one foot through the door into what is possibly the best job in the world, also have to learn to deal.

When you start turning out tens of thousands of words on this basis, I suppose there is very little else to say, or write about. A good thing too, I’m not sure I trust myself with words anymore, so I’m prostituting them out at at a piecemeal rate. At least editors, publications and their readers appreciate my efforts.