When The Musics Over

So I finally finish my engineering, another milestone achieved. My Alcatraz is over, the debt to the society paid. Long before I arrived here I used to think about the sense of achievement and enthusiasm that would prevail once I am through with this, and yet all I am left with is this wonderful feeling of freedom, that’s all. Morrison once said “It’s the feeling of a bow string being pulled back for 22 years and suddenly being let go”.

I am the arrow, direction less but finally out of the bow. It’s a great feeling to travel without any direction or any responsibility, to get lost in the wilderness only to be found by your own wanton thoughts, to get away from all those you love and to miss them, to lie besides the giggling river beneath the silhouette of the starry night and hear the old grass hoppers tattle.

Sometimes somewhere I would stop on my way to my company thinking how once I detested the very person that I am today, for soon I shall be like you all running behind buses and trains trying to get a seat and reach home early, listening to my wife, boss, mother, and children about the vagaries of life and then to their solutions. I would only smile then for there would be nothing else I could do. A la Mid-life crisis I see is in the offing, but I guess I have gone too far.

I don’t recollect anything significant in the past five years as far my engineering goes, I can hardly remember five or six classmates by name. The whole degree was done with a detached feeling I guess, more like a hobby. Most of my time in college was spent in trying to understand the understandings of my professors. Deprived and a much abused childhood could be the focal point of their behavior was my analysis, but then I was too abstracted to care about anything. I guess the only interesting thing that ever happened was some lady teacher was caught watching porn in the computer lab and was suspended. One look at my class shall remind you of the sad faced orphans in Mr.India, so for them this event was Christmas.

So what next thou ask?

Sleep.

So you want to be a writer? by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriters earching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend
or your boyfriendor your parents
or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-love.

the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.

unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder,
don't do it.

unless the sun inside you
is burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.