Reaching There

Noted Punjabi poet and Sahitya Akademi Award recipient of 1967, Shiv Kumar Batalvi wrote a poem on love, the first line goes like this: इक   कुड़ी   जिद्दा   नाम   मोहब्बत   है   ,  गूम   है   | (Rabbi Shergill did a beautiful rendition of this poem, you can listen  here ) I feel that creativity has a similar relationship with me. Some of my best inspirations have come in the times of extreme seclusion. Is creativity the girl who is envious of anybody else in your life! Only when I give my complete attention and love she opens her to me. If I am in the company of other people, television, Facebook, internet and other possible competitor she won’t give me even a glimpse of her magic. Otherwise fickle on many occasions she is the epitome of faithfulness if I hold onto her. Therein lies the rub, I have to search for her and impress her once I have found her. Oh, she is difficult to find in all the noise that enshrouds me in t...

The  ego  gropes in darkness, while the Self lives in  light   Sometime back I wrote a post about my writer's block . I just couldn't create a new piece of writing. Although there were thousands of thoughts jumping inside my mind but I was unable to latch onto one. This inability leads to frustration which made the process even more difficult. Anybody would tell this period of inactivity is unavoidable. And my mind has been under the influence of this atrocity for over a month now. The coupling of helplessness and uncertainty leads to stagnation of not only intellectual growth but the emotions took a beating as well. In a writer's life these periods are as common & unpredictable as the seasons in a year! The last post was about the symptoms and after effects of this disease. In this post I would walk through the cure for this. I must admit the inspiration behind this post came from my father. On reading my previous post he said something that st...

Indian Ocean, Durban, South Africa A few days back I realized I am going through a writer's block! This got me thinking how I can get out of it? It occurred that the best way to get out is write it out. To go through the storm I'll have to ride the stormy waves! No other way out. And if I can go through this storm I will have to do this self-psychoanalysis. But what should I write about? Probably if I can take you through the writer's block I may find the cause of this problem. So please bear with me while I write it out for you. Writer's block is a "condition" when a writer loses the ability to write something new. The desire seems to have dried out and mind has suddenly become less receptive to inspirations floating around. Inspiration is all around us; in form of trees, birds, people, sky, sea or even divinity. But the challenging part is to wait till something brews inside the mind until it is ready to pop out. The "wait" is the hardest and ...