Thinking on Paper

"Writing is thinking on paper." I studied medicine and had a special interest in psychiatry since the start, so I don't need writing for clarity on my life, I do it for creative pleasure but that doesn't mean writing doesn't help me when I'm overwhelmed. There have been countless times when writing my journal has provided me with clarity on my thoughts and my life. Writing can save lives, and I recommend that people write journals, though I also would like to tell them to keep them private. Writing a journal gives you an idea about the state of mind you had in the past, and also keeps you aware of the chronology of your evolution, especially when memory fails. Not boasting, but I have immense clarity on life and my relationships and a little part of it can be attributed to my writing, my journals and my writing in general. I like to think on paper. The past decade was tremendously tough for me, but I carried on and I kept writing. I have wanted to be a writer since my teenage and I committed to it. Now I don't want to be a writer in a social or professional sense but just in the sense that I want to create and create things that I wanted to read that noone wrote. The advent of artificial intelligence has, at least in my eyes, ended professional writing, and so has the narcissism perpetuated by social media. But one can write, if they can, for personal pleasure and for honing their craft of writing which I do on a daily basis. The past decade has been unreal for me. What it taught me was about different levels of narratives for different social classes and regions in this country, and how these narratives are imposed on random people in this country by the controllers of the narratives. There was a popular culture when it came to literature in this country once. I remember I had read Chetan Bhagat's Five Point Someone when I was in school, and I remember liking it. I now realise that I liked it because it had an honesty about it. I did not like any other Chetan Bhagat novels after that. I was in school or probably new in college when I read novels by Taslima Nasreen and Khushwant Singh. I remember authors like Preety Shenoy being famous back then. I was an avid reader and read anything I got my hands on. I regularly read short stories by the masters of short stories, like O. Henry, Guy de Maupassant and others. I read Kafka. I read English and Russian classics in third and fourth years of my college and paid heavily for that, and it is then I realised the true character of this nation. I remember getting inspired by Anton Chekhov and his quote: "Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other." It was after reading Chekhov that I wanted to be a physician-writer. For quite sometime I applied Chekhov's stream of consciousness technique while writing until I realise that this country's political situation doesn't really allow for a stream of consciousness approach. How can you do stream of consciousness when you can't even find yourself within you. It is then I realised that this country is totalitarian state with illusion of complete freedom where a person's actions done in the illusion of freedom are later exploited. I went through a lot of delusions but writing came in handy in their resolution. I do not have any delusions anymore, not about myself and not about the political state of this country and the world. There is no doubt that we live in a situation worse than slavery, but we have multiple distractions to keep our attention away from it and it is these distraction we need to focus on to keep happy in our lives as in the end it is the happiness that matters. Writing is my happiness so I seek it. I like thinking on paper, and I like creating.