Everyone has their own style of approach towards a craft. Ruskin Bond uses pencils & typewriters, Hemingway used moleskins. One writes in the morning, another at midnight. One writes everyday, another writes only when the muse comes calling. To each his own. Every writer has a flow & their respective tools and setups. In this post I try to explain my writing workflow – How I write? When I write? What are the tools I use?
Mera Naam Joker
A flop when released, but considered a classic with cult following today, Raj Kapoor’s magnum opus ‘Mera Naam Joker (my name is joker)’ is one of my favourite films. Semi-autobiographical in nature, made by Raj Kapoor himself, the story is of Raju a clown in a circus, who must always make people laugh, no matter how unhappy he is within. In the words of his circus manager, no matter what happens, he needs to always have a smile on his face because, ‘the show must go on’. Along the course of the film Raju loves & loses again and again. This circle of hope and pain is conveyed very effectively by the use of a joker doll which Raju owns. Everytime he falls in love, he gifts the toy to that woman, only to have it come back to him in the end. The doll is a metaphor for Raju’s heart which no one wants.
3-Day Monk
I’m often what the Japanese call a 3-Day Monk – a person who picks up a cause, a subject, a skill, or an idea, pursues it passionately for a while, and then gets tired of it and moves on to something else. Most of us suffer from this syndrome. The resolutions we take when the going is tough which are conveniently forgotten when things ease up are telltale signs of the 3-Day Monk. I have these sudden bursts of desire to get something done which whimper out after sometime leaving a trail of unfinished commitments. When I started blogging in 2009, this is what happened. I blogged for a while, then stopped, after a year, ’suddenly realized that I had a blog, wrote one-two posts and again stopped, finally letting it die in 2011. Not limited to blogging but, I’ve seen this in other aspects of my life too. No wonder I got so very little accomplished. I wanted to know if I could do something about it. So I sat and wrote myself some tips:
GTD with Things
Time is scarce today. It’s an oft repeated statistics that the information we deal on one single day, is equal to the information one person used to deal with in a lifetime in the sixth century. We are constantly juggling multiple tasks at any one given point of time. No wonder we are constantly in stress. The ability to allocate time to all the things calling our attention – time management – has become an art today. Are we able to get things done? In short, are we productive? Over the course of the last decade many theories have been proposed to answer this burning question. Some stood the test of time, some didn’t. One such theory, which I feel is genuinely beneficial to all is GTD system – ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen. According to him, it is not just a time management philosophy but a life management one. It has a cult following across the globe. I’ve been practicing GTD over the last 5 years, and though it is tool agnostic, I’ve always gravitated towards the high tech side looking for a one stop solution – the one app wto solve my task management woes. But, slowly I realized that, there is no such solution. We can only find a good app and make it work for us.
Leisure
What is this life if, full of care
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.