Blinders

It’s kind of funny that I wanted to be a physician-writer and in some ways I became one. I still do not consider myself a writer though I do write very regularly. A time came when I ditched conventional publishing and decided to publish on my own, on my blogs and I might even end up publishing any books I write by myself. I’m wary of being a part of a cabal, a clique or a circlejerk until and unless it is just a group of friends who just like chilling out and having fun together. Writing is not an easy thing, though it looks easy. It is only easy to the privileged, for common individuals it comes about by walking. Mastery in anything is a result of privilege or through suffering, toil and relentless hard work. I prefer the latter but in the times we live in, most of the present masters in any field are products of privilege and a lot of them can be called as charlatans whose mastery is dependent on secretive access instead of synthesis of their field, hard work and struggle. People have been realising this now and so they have stopped respecting the ones in power and hence respect now is artificially extracted from them. Original insights are a byproduct of continuous struggle combined with original thinking and while struggle is not unknown to people of this country, original thinking is rare because it rarely goes unpunished here. It kind of sucks that by the time I became the age of becoming a writer, writing and reading became redundant. I never wanted to become a writer for going to books stores and lit fests and signing my copies, this is capitalism. I wanted to become a writer so that people learn from my books or get entertained from them. I have always respected pulp writers more than booker prize winning ones. The truth is that a good writer knows that for the majority life is terrible and why would he then write a depressing book that makes people experience terrible things about life? There are exceptions, like Kafka, Orwell, Huxley, Philip K. Dick and others, because they dealt with absolute truths. They presented, even if through metaphors, the truths that they encountered. The truth that they presented only ends up in two ways, diagnosis for suffering or death. Though the truth is that once one comes to know the actual truth of the world, death starts seeming to be a valid option. What a writer writes becomes part of the system and it is then used to groom or manipulate the reader, so a writer who is true to his craft must always write in a way that his words can’t be used to gaslight or manipulate the reader. If writing is meant for entertaining, it should entertain and equip people and if it is for knowledge it should, again, help in seeing clearly. The ultimate choice the writer has at the end of the simulation is to either kill the injured horse or tend to him until he becomes well again and a writer should make sure that he should, always tend to the horse and at the same time remove its blinders.