We take so many things for granted. Life, breath, movement, the smooth operation of our four limbs. Until something happens to us to remind us of our fragility, that we are just bits of self-conscious cosmic dust floating around the universe.
And something did happen to me: it was a long and painful mess. But at last, after being freed of my arm sling a week back, I have enough flexibility in my shoulders to raise my arm till desk level at least for a few minutes. And to type with both hands, which is much faster than with one. I blurt out: Thank you, thank you, for two arms, two hands with which to type. I have lived for the past 7 weeks in enforced silence. Freedom of speech and expression, which for me is 99 percent verbal, is very heaven.
I have been typing with two hands since 15, when my father, decided that I learn typing as an essential job skill in case I got an “office job.” I developed a speed of around 50 words a minute, used my new skill promptly: to become a writer, publishing my first paid newspaper article at 16: in the Deccan Herald, the premier English newspaper of Karnataka state at that time.
April 29: I’m much better now, but recovery was much slower than anticipated, and I have still some way to go to regain my earlier energy and drive. Looking forward to getting back to writing full or half time, soon. Meanwhile, my books exist on major retailer web sites and my own platform and they need love, they need friendship, and they would love reviews.
And if you haven’t read “The Revised Kama Sutra”, here, totally out of context, is a rowdy paragraph from that rambunctious and multifaceted book–a rant against the colonial project and its manipulation of colonial minds:
The West owed me something, because it had given me dreams. It had used my life, it had made me and people like me a tool in its grand design of global primacy. Saintly fantasies, a Western consciousness, misfitness, Bertrand Russell, a love of rationality, technological solutions, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, sexual super-consciousness, clitoral versus vaginal orgasm, Sexercises, I’m OK You’re OK, Will Durant, Reader’s Digest, Laughter the Best Medicine, psycho-cybernetics, vertical spaceship cities, endless love, a yearning for streaking and be-ins, linear progress, success, How To Become a Millionaire, private Cessna aeroplanes, Marilyn Monroe, Stop in the Name of Love. In sum, it had pocketed my country’s original destiny for me and replaced it with one made in the West.