Isabelle Allende - Power of Storytelling

Sometimes good things happen without any anticipation. Like surprise gifts, they come and give you a good mental jolt. You feel unprecedented joy that is specific to that occasion. Still, the feeling lingers on for long after the actual event.

Such a thing happened today to me. In fact, it was a mere interview on the BBC. But it was much more than that in terms of substance. The interview was with acclaimed Chilean-American author Isabel Allende as part of the BBC 100 Women series.

Here was a girl raised by a single mom, abandoned by the father when the girl was just 3. Here was a girl who would not remember her father and would not want to remember him because of his betrayal and irresponsibility in leaving his young family alone. Here was a woman who had to flee the political regime and persecution by the military regime. Here was an emigrant who had to live abroad for decades while wishing dearly to be in her own country.

Isabel Allende seemed to be living a life that was no less than a odyssey, a subject of an epic. And she narrated that story in different forms and formats in her much acclaimed books. Books about dreams, women's issues, issues related to migrants and books that mixed myth with realism for compelling stories. The stories she lived through. The stories of fear and uncertainty as she had to flee her country after military takeover. The stories of dreams and struggle as a migrant in Venezuela and US. The stories of grief and loss based on countless letters between Isabel and her mother, mostly when Isabel's daughter was bedridden in vegetative state before her death in 1992. Human stories in many forms. Stories that touch hearts and minds. In fact her stories have touched millions of hearts and minds. Her books have sold more than 70 million copies in various languages world wide. A truly global storyteller with her own life an incredible story. 

Though I have not yet read any of her books, her interview has prompted me to delve into them. But more than anything, I was struck by two things that she said during the Interview.

First was about her writing and writing in her own native Spanish. Though fluent in English, she said she could write fiction only in Spanish as 'fiction comes from the heart and not from mind' and you have to write in the language of your dream, language of your swearing, language of your 'panting' to articulate the sentences of fiction. 'I can write technical or research stuff in English. I can give speeches in English. But I cannot write fiction in English. It has to be Spanish.', she clarified.

The second was about her profound loss. She lost her 29 year old daughter in 1993 to some medical complication. She said 'the one year that I spent on my daughter's bedside when she was in coma was like a single prolonged winter for me, with no sign of daylight or warmth.' More profoundly, she quoted her mother as saying, "Now that you have gone through the biggest tragedy in your life, rest of your life would be easy. No grief or sorrow or accident or loss now can be bigger than what you have gone through." So true. Literary figures are wizards of words. They can convey so much in a few words. For me, in those few sentences, Isabel conveyed the gravity of the biggest loss to a mother, a loss of her own child. Obviously, no other loss can come near that.

I also was struck by her forthright and candid attitudes and her ability to lighten up the moments with humor. A master articulator and storyteller. A genius and  a source of inspiration. Indeed.

23 November 2018 (10:30 AM NST)

Crazy Kathmandu - Rush

If rush means modernity and dynamism, Kathmandu must be in the top echelons globally. We Kathmanduites are always in a rush. Rush to the offices, schools and colleges from home. Rush back home. Rush to board public transport. Rush to get off. Rush to put on clothes. Rush to take them off. Rush to prepare meal. Rush to eat and clean up. Rush with office work and class work. Rush with homeworks and assignments. Rush to succeed and earn. Rush to do mischief and run. 

We do love to do things the short cut way. We do love even more to get 'something' in return for the short cut. Taxi drivers ask for 'consideration' to give 'some more' over metered amount. Clerks expect 'something' in return for accepting, registering, forwarding files that should have found their way through the process by default. Something 'even more' for putting them on the top of the piles for fast action perhaps. 'Something' is even expected for providing services for a fee that is willingly and readily paid according to the norms. Only the norms will not do. 'Something' is the key. If no 'something', the result means 'nothing' in terms of the actions, milestones and escalations. 

In places where public service providers are supposed to 'serve' people, the service givers rarely look directly at the face of the client. They are too busy looking at the paper in front of them or conversing with their colleagues in adjacent tables. While talking to the person in front, they do not have time to look up and smile. The 'something' in their mind weighs their head downward and they prefer not to face the source of that elusive but mandatory 'something'. And those service takers who are always in a rush to get things done, have no choice but to relinquish that 'something' out of their few, scarce and precious 'things'. Once they get the service, they feel privileged and extremely thankful to that eye-contact-evading service giver who should have readily provided that service for 'nothing' as that is what is supposed out of them as public servants. But Kathmandu and the whole country itself has accepted this phenomenon as a normal behavior accepted and agreed to by everyone. 

The rush does not stop in the homes and offices. It is also seen on the road. Vehicles with power mixed with the driver with courage means no rule applies. You can honk. You can cross lanes. You can overtake from left. You can intimidate fellow road users by your speed and wavy riding. You just stick your hand out and stop whenever you want as if the road were in fact your private lawn. If you are a tipper or bus or truck, you condemn cars, taxis, vans. If you are a car, SUV, taxi, VAN, you take two wheelers as non-entities to be pushed, bullied, overtaken and intimidated. If you are a speedy two wheeler you consider less speedy two wheelers and bicycles as ants crawling on the street, curtailing your progress and disturbing in your rush. If you are a simple two wheeler, you think the pedestrians are pathetic nuisances there to hinder your pace and cause you catastrophic delays. If one were to see the real example of 'big fish eats small fish' adage, there is no better place than Kathmandu. 

Colleague in a rush to outpace and outperform colleague. Seller crying the heart out to outsell fellow sellers. Buyers draining their pockets to out-buy other buyers. Friend trying to outwit friend. Partner willing to outsmart partners. One bidder trying to outbid other bidder. The spirit of competition, wish to be ahead at any cost and a tendency to equate competitive advantage and show-off to fulfillment in life has beset everyone. No one wants to stop till the absolute end. The rush keeps on becoming more frantic. 

But one can't help wondering at the sheer tenacity, tolerance and tensile strength of the Kathmanduites who handle all these stresses and interminable rush with calm without banging their heads on walls or stamping their feet on the hard ground. A rare capacity evolved out of the environment, upbringing and hard learning that only the rush-filled, high speed, chaotic life of Kathmandu can give. 

Writing Long Prose - A Red Herring?

While reading great works of prose, it looks so easy. Get a story. Articulate it and give it a sequential shape. What you get is a great read to provide for the reader. So easy.

But that is far easier said than done. Otherwise, everyone would be a great prose writer which is not the case. Writing prose is not trivial.

Various thoughts and ideas come to mind. The ideas even take shape of a sequence of well-planned events and occurrences. The whole story is composed of smaller sub-stories. One after the other, the scenes, acts and actions take shape in the mental image of the overall story or idea.

However, all changes when it is time to actually articulate those ideas and start writing. It becomes so difficult to write the first line that fits the imagination. It is like climbing a mountain to write the first paragraph that aptly represents the train of thoughts or ideas that instigated the writing urge in the first place.

Once it starts after many attempts, roll-backs, corrections and modifications, all ideas and imagination seem to dry up and run empty after the first paragraph or first page. Suddenly the sequence of ideas and mental image that seemed enough for a tome seem dried up after just a single page or a few hundred words. After this, one wonders at the supernatural capability of prose writers who create a great and thick book of prose with whole imaginary world of its own with hundreds of characters, scores of plots & sub-plots and dozens of scenes & situations. Such level of imagination and such level of articulation to bring that imagination into readable expressions that hook the readers for hours on end towards the written work.

Writing, like any work of creativity, is an immensely complicated task and seems much easier than it really is. One only realizes it when one tries to create a creative writing piece of one's own.

Dedicated to and in praise of all the wonderful prose writers of the world. Dreaming to have an iota of that capability.

Wednesday 14 November 2018 (9:29 PM)