BY BISWADEEP GHOSH
Hi-ing. Helloing. Bye-ing. Sighing. But not saying. The heart says ‘come on buddy, go and tell her you are serious about her. She guesses it anyway, you moron.’ But when you find an excuse to meet her, you act all clumsy, speak in unintelligible language and…vamoose! The inability to say what you must is what I call a lover’s block.
Won’t be surprised if someone were to ‘hello’ me and ask why I was going on and on about some hopeless one-sided love in a piece on writer’s block. I think, no, am convinced that these two blocks are very similar as far as the print media is concerned. I remember a colleague of mine telling me a long time ago (an IIT-IIM guy blessed with a very sharp mind): “You know what? These guys who get into journalism, many of these fellows would not be able to do anything in any other field. They try every thing right from the civil services entrance exams to bank clerical exams, flunk everywhere, and then take up journalism. No wonder these fellows don’t come up with one decent sentence in one month!” In the last 18 years in which I have been associated with at least 18 organisations either as a freelancer or as a full-time employee, I have had enough reasons to believe that this fellow was absolutely right. In other words, the industry is full of journos who were typists once, and are punching machines (since they work on comps) today. They cannot write to save their lives, but pretend that they do, which is why they suffer from a ‘writer’s block’ every second day. I call them good actors.
One particular breed I find most amusing is the ‘won’t trouble the barber’ type because, for these guys, an unkempt look is synonymous with deep thinking. I remember this classic case who would come to work, sit in front of the comp for hours, get up at least thrice every hour to smoke, and eventually file a 250-word copy which started with gems like: “In the skies, there are dark clouds. On the earth, there is danger.” Some writing, that!
Some others make it a point to shave, but put up a great show by staring at the comp while chewing nails. Now, I am told that when someone is chewing nails, he is immersed in serious thought. But when these fellows do the same thing, you can be sure they either haven’t had breakfast or are gluttons who can feast on anything. As for their copies, let me tell you about this item number who walked up to me after half a day of thinking and gave me a fantastic cover story headline for a supplement on investment: “Boom Is Happening!” The story was about real estate boom (the most obvious real estate story in any supplement no matter where), but a headline like “Boom Is Happening”? Told you, he knew his job!
The third kind, and this is the one I find most bizarre, are those who believe in profligacy with words to camouflage their inability to make sense with the lucid melody of simply structured sentences. One such guy the society holds highly – but I think is pretty stupid, having seen him slip into spells of writer’s block many times – has given to Indian journalism wonderful sentences like: “The repercussion of leading a nomadic life for meticulous research has resulted in a panegyrical ode about a society suffering from a cultural void.” Pray, what does that mean? It means something for sure, for he actually found an editor who published the copy unedited. (Can’t blame the guy who edited the page. Those were the days when the publication of book reviews was taken very seriously, yet there were times when guys with no idea of book reviews would be asked to handle the books page because nobody else was in sight.)
By now, some of the readers might be thinking that yours truly is on some kind of a pompous ego trip. Not at all, because when some people say I am good as they do to many other people I am sure, they do so because they are really bad and mistake my mediocrity for brains. More importantly, I sincerely believe that the journalists of the writer’s block variety should learn the basics of simple English and write that at a reasonably fast pace because this profession is all about quick thinking and equally quick writing. Briefly, unproductiveness just because one pretends to think is unpardonable. And, they must learn to accept that none of them can ever be a Karl Marx or a Bertrand Russell since there are two kinds of people on earth: gods who happen once in a lifetime, and good mortals who are all over the place in the media from whom they can seek inspiration before getting on with the serious business of writing. Don’t mind being killed for saying that but really…
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