Note to self

Since I landed the new job, I have been meeting interesting people. I have met an ex-pickpocket who told me that in their trade the thumbnails are grown slightly long for that extra grip; a gang of boy-thieves who rob travelers trying to grab a wink or two in the grounds off CST Terminus and who all unanimously lied to me that they were planning to go straight; a man who had been written off for dead by his relatives to grab his land in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh and who then struggled his way back to life and then started an association of dead people; a girl who has a genetic disorder which is trying to kill her but who is refusing to give up no matter what despite a brain surgery and a liver transplant; a man who had been abused for a decade as a child but now uses that trauma to do acts of kindness expecting nothing in return; a tribal woman from Gujarat who saw a pamphlet and then took a train to Bihar where 100 people were walking 100 kilometres in the state’s interior and in which I was one of them…you get the drift. What concerns me is my inability to empathise with any of them, of being a party to that human condition which they are all experiencing in the full. All I feel is curiosity and that is enough for the journalist, but for the writer, curiosity will take him nowhere near the truths that he must reproduce in the worlds that he should create. I find myself near such truths and completely unable to comprehend it, much alone reproduce it, much alone create worlds with it. Note to self: send imagination for servicing.