COME TAKE A PEEK INTO MY WORLD, WHERE I DO MY THING.
I come from a big family in the Malabar, which in its essence, took shape when two intriguing poles of existence came together. My father’s side, whose prior generations owned land and farmed in it, they were people of faith and spent their days in a quiet village, green and far from the sea. My mother’s side, they were Rawthers, where every child is born with the memories of their forefathers, sharing their stories of travel and migration, and they read and spoke Tamil apart from their mother tongue (Malayalam) though they haven’t been taught any. Once as a young boy finding comforts, up until the present, all I have in reminiscence are experiences and memories that I happened to stride through, some borrowed, and much, on the mend.
I have used this, to write.
As a human, I am limited. Limited, because my life is finite. But as a writer, I am far from containable. I live different lives. Here, I am an animal, a storm, an ant, a plague, a flower, I am death, I am alive. A parallel existence made possible through observation, detail, recollection and presence. It has been for eons the duty of a creative writer to tell the stories. All the while tell the stories of those who can’t, and often, of those who never will. I have found power and peace in this realisation and process.
Where sometimes I narrate them, and sometimes, dictate.
Writing copy, and the comfort of challenge I find with in it can be traced back to my love towards English literature. Of how they both are similar, yet worlds apart. Writing copy isn’t that far off from the latter. You write, you create intrigue, something dashing and proper, even allowing the readers a bit of room to bite their nails, you influence readers, but also, you try to sell a product while you’re at it. The product you sell becomes a part of your craft, where my work, the copy which I might have started working on a letterhead alone at my desk comes to completion only when the reader has taken an effort to procure what I was trying to sell.
There are copywriters who became literary giants and there are literary heavyweights who had done their part only to be caught breathing in the alluring world of copywriting.
To be both is quite hard. As there is a zealous process of learning and unlearning to be had.
But, I shall try as my heart has had a taste of both and in moments like these, where the span of what’s out there creeps up around my shoulders, I simply remember what Robert Browning wrote, “Ah, but a man’s arms should exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for.”
And to categorise and collect the light I find in the work I do, ‘The Nurmana Manifest’ comes to my side as an aid that constantly needs my attention.