Story of A - Part 5

Continuing the story of which the first five parts are given below.

A Short Essay about Myself

“Many, no doubt, are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by habit, and they cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they are, accordingly they pronounce this man insane, for they know that they could never act as he does, as long as they are themselves.” – Henry David Thoreau

My name is A.

I am a writer; at least I like to think that I am a writer. But then I am only a writer because I have a friend, a very close friend who grew up with me, was one of my first readers, who was there when I first dreamt of becoming a writer, who was only person sitting beside me by the lake behind our school throwing pebbles into the water, when I declared to the whole wide world, shouting at the top of my voice that I will be a writer someday. Maybe that long forgotten evening beside the lake had some impact on my friend, because as soon as he became the editor of The Sunday, he called me up and offered me a column, to write anything and everything that I want. I had not heard from him for a long time. Shortly after that eventful evening he had left the school and went to a different city, but before leaving he had promised that he will keep in touch, and that day a little over a decade later he proved that he was not one to make empty promises, a virtue which I would abuse a lot during our friendship. But the reason why I decided to become a writer was not because he offered me a column to write, it was the fact that he had kept alive my dream, a dream which even I had long forgotten, like a powerful dream which holds your attention for a few minutes when you wake up but before nightfall is long forgotten, banished to the deep dark dungeons of memories, the dream of becoming a writer. And in keeping alive this dream of mine, he gave me something that I had lost, he gave me a will to live, a will to fight for life, a will to dream again, dream of what might still happen, dream of all the fantastic possibilities that life offered, dream of all the adventures that I could undertake through the newspaper column. Before he called, I was seriously contemplating about ending my miserable life, ending this wearisome drudgery through life without any hope for joy or prospect for happiness. But this column offered me a ray of hope, a way out of this quagmire called despair into which I had fallen, a chance of redemption, to make something out of my life, to do some good by telling all the people what no to do through stories about my life. And so I became a writer.

I write short stories which appear on one of the middle pages, the right one, squeezed between the editorial on the left middle page and the world news on the other side of the right middle page. This helps me a lot; people generally do read the editorial, they need it to form opinions which they can then discuss in parties, in office and try to project themselves as an intellectual who reads a lot, thinks a lot and then forms a esteemed and highly valued opinion, with which they then educate everyone considering it their moral duty and obligation. Little do they know that everyone else also reads the same editorials and forms the same independent and, let me stress, highly valued opinion. So all the discussions are just reduced to people quoting from different paragraphs of the day’s editorial and if possible few paragraphs from the editorial that appeared a day or two before. But that does not matter, does it, as long as they have an intellectually stimulating discussion, so everyone aspiring to become and discuss like an intellectual reads the editorial.

The same breed of people also read the global news. They want people to know that they have a global outlook, so that they can discuss about politics, wars, crisis happening in countries around the world, and suggest possible solutions and remedies. The fact that they are unmindful of the same problems being faced by people who are their neighbours, colleagues, countrymen, does not bother them. After all when you are solving complex world problems, how can you be bothered with mere trifles like their own city’s and country’s problems? Surely the world needs them more.

So between these two critical pages, my stories appear and due to these two pages, my stories attract the same lot of hypocritical pseudo intellectuals, and because of the sheer numbers of people who belong to this group, my stories gather a lot of eyeballs as the ad guys at the newspaper like to say, and because of these eyeballs I am a somewhat famous writer, and because of all this I am free to work as I like, from home, away from the hustle bustle of a regular office, I just have to turn in a new story every friday of the week, so that it can be published on the sunday in The Sunday.