Preeti Bhonsle's Blog

She is late this morning. She isn’t usually. Today morning she keeps aside just for me. But she is late today. It is a cold winter morning but my coffee is still warm and a little into the distance of the road ahead I see a tall thin woman walking hurriedly towards my house.

I go downstairs, open the door and let her in. In the lawn we sit, me with my back towards the sun, she with her face in the light. I hand her a tissue –

“You missed a spot there on your face”

She isn’t embarrassed. Why should she be? Being embarrassed by your job if it is not a good one, is a middle class concept. We go over the alphabet and I give her a notebook to write down the words I have written, ten times over. Just like how we learned when we were children by mimicking and repeating.

Her children join us a little later. I help them with their homework. While the mother works on the basics her children are writing essays on festivals of India.

After the session is done, she usually stays back and we have tea. Education is the only way to rise in this country, she often tells me. My kids will have a better, more comfortable life. They will not have to worry about the daily number of customers, or be dependent on a daily income. You live so nicely in a big nice house. I want them to live like you, worry about better things than their next meal.

What is it about humans that always makes them want better things?
Survival, I suppose.

In the past three months that she has been seeing me, I have taught her the alphabet, she can read words now, we are moving to simple story books and soon I hope she will be as good as her children. I have helped her open a savings account, she deposits one fourth of her erratic monthly income in this account. I do my bit too, I cut out on one outing and add 1k to her account, that money means nothing to me but to her world it makes a lot of difference. Every now and then I buy things for her kids – story books, colouring books, puzzles, lego sets. All children should be surrounded by avenues they can creatively alter.

Education in our country isn’t a birth right, it is a privilege. Some of us, most of us can accept inequality as a law of nature, they do not seem to perturbed that only a section of the society has the privilege to have a mid-life crises or to face an existential crisis or that only some of us are able to have to knowledge to self-diagnose ourselves with depression. If you can read this and understand it I only ask you to spare it a little thought and do some good with your privilege. Go ahead, add some meaning to your life, find fulfilment, make a difference.

Whether we pay them or not, I think, most of us, always have those few people who inadvertently become our editors.

So let's say you are a blogger, or you just write on paper, and then lets assume you have an audience, it is even okay if you are your own audience. You read your work again, and now and then you find a skipped verb, a missing preposition or a misplaced adverb. Either your small audience ( your friends who are kind enough to read your writing ) tells you about these chance errors or you find them yourself.

Because you have been writing, once in your head and then on paper, probability is higher for you to miss these typos, extra, lacking or misplaced words, or a bad paragraph arrangement ( structural or line ).

To save yourself some time, a lot of effort and to give your writing that proper look, I think it makes sense, to get an editor for your work. You could even hire one. Like has already been answered before, they charge, per page, per word etc.

P.S. - You can be your own editor. It just requires a lot of effort, you need to distance yourself from your work, you need to work on the voices in your head while reading your own writing, you need to get into an analytical frame of mind and judge your own writing. It is not easy, but then at least, it is how you want it to be.

On writing/keeping character plain



A large part of reading is in making it your own. A story does not come to life till the reader arrives in its life. It is the reader who breathes into the words of the writer and shapes the existence of the created work. A great book is not great till someone comes along, picks it up and says bloody hell that .. was .. amazing.

I keep my characters extremely plain. I also refrain from crowding my stories with too many people. Readers can pick up my character and write their own story around s/he. She is a girl and she goes to work everyday. But the path that she takes to work, the clothes that she wears, the city she lives in, the food she eats, all these details are not mine to fill, the readers have the freedom to bring her into their own lives and paint her a little.

I think this is the closest I can get to the mind's of those who read me. You have my words in your head but the words are really not mine any more, once you read them, once you see them, once you play with them, you have played a little with me, you have walked a mile along my thought track, we have fabricated a reality - a little yours, a little mine - together.

Do you know why that which is simple is so beautiful?

Because it is free. I do not want to bind you with my words, I want you to feel this freedom.

Different people and different cultures have different reactions to differences. Some acknowledge, others deride, a few try to understand. Differences more often than not, form a popular premise of low humour – remember men, women, religion, blonde stereotypes? – and in this manner some find differences funny, though the mockery in their mimicry is hard to miss.

Anyway.

Differences of any kind can always be understood by relatives. A person, like you and me, usually has certain norms for different areas of their lives and whenever, you or me, come across something new, something different, we see how it contrasts to our existing set-up and then we inadvertently compare, and we place the differences along a relative scale.

But contrasting and comparing is one way of understanding differences. Are there more? How do you understand the different things that you come across – norms, cultures, values?