09 Jun How I discovered my voice
No matter how busy I was with work, with business, there remained this irrepressible urge to express myself, little by little, on a different computer, in a different room; peaceful, tranquil, looking out over the sunlit, afternoon back lawn, form the coolness of the blue chandeliered room with its silk black cushions, blue upholstery, light blue curtain frames on the French window like doors.
There was a story to tell, not yet clear but waiting to be shared.
There were the changing seasons wanting to be described, each with its own intensity and passion. To make “A Man for All Seasons” out of each one of us .
There was a kunstlerroman about a musician with talent in a small city in Eastern Europe who deserved to make it big.
Inspiration also came from certain characters whom I had the pleasure to encounter, whose personalities and traits got mixed up,as did their stories. Many things were invented, imagined both in the narrative and in the personae of the characters, as it should be in fiction.
The late 60’s provided such a watershed. They were seminal to thought and behaviour. Youth rebelled. There were student revolutions world wide. It was a conflagration. Despite communication being not so instant. From Berkeley to Paris to Warsaw to Tokyo,even in universities like Delhi, where there was no overt revolution, everyone felt a part of it .
In the time of Herbert Marcuse‘s “One Dimensional Man,” they were multi dimensional. Sexual, political, cultural (and I am not referring to China’s unfortunate cultural revolution, which was doing so much damage and paradoxically was taking place around the same time), in thinking, in philosophy,in behaviour (for example buying).
A sense of values that Sloan Wilson had written about earlier underwent such a radical transformation. I had lived through those times. They were over all too quickly. But I wanted them to be felt and tasted by those who hadn’t. And to remind those who had, once again, of what they were like.
I was inspired by the romance of India and its ancient monuments, its profound spirituality that is unique to it and is incipient in every leaf, every blade of grass.
Above all, inspiration came from the love and longing I had experienced as well as the universality of these deep feelings, the intensity of the pain and ache, the bliss and completeness of it, and the sense of fulfillment. The circumstances that pull people asunder and the effort to reconcile conflicting goals inter-se as well as within one self.
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