Tej Timir :
Hiatus or hibernation ?
Part 1.
I am returning to blog writing after a gap of a few years. The world has changed since my last blog post (and so have I). On the face of it, it was the pandemic that was the reason behind this gap. However, it is not as simple as that. Therefore, in this blog, I am going to try to introspect and find out why I stopped writing blogs and more importantly, why I resumed writing blogs. When I delve deeper into my psyche, I think it would be correct to say that covid was the trigger for my decision to stop writing blogs, not the cause of it. When I stopped writing blogs, I had finished writing three novels, one published and two unpublished. Therefore, when I discontinued writing blogs, I was looking for a hiatus, just a temporary break. This was because I was looking for a theme for my next novel. Since I couldn't decide about it, I thought I should finalize the theme before writing about it. That is how it all started, an unplanned hiatus
This was the time when lock down began. Ideally, such a respite from my professional commitments ought to have pushed me into starting a new novel. However, something was happening in my subconscious mind (which I wasn't aware of, at least at that time) that prevented me from selecting a theme for my next novel and plunging into it. My most obvious choice at that time was to write a novel around an epidemic. There were two reasons. Firstly, it was topical and that theme would strike an emotional chord with the readers. Secondly, in my younger days, I was deeply influenced by a novel by Albert Camus. That novel, " The Plague".is story of a doctor who is passing through the town of Oran when the city authorities declare a quarantine. The doctor feels trapped inside for no fault of his. The novel describes his transition from being helpless to being a helpful medical practitioner and finally, a person who experiences a sense of redemption and empathy. In the novel, the epidemic starts in a literal sense and transforms into a metaphor for the search for meaning into the doctor's life.
Strangely, the fact that I was (and still am) in awe of Camus stopped me from writing my next novel. For me, imitating someone as a writer is unethical. Moreover, to think of imitating Camus is a sacrilege for me. So, I decided to wait for some more time to start my next novel. As the lockdown was extended, I kept on postponing the decision whether to write a novel based on the epidemic or not. In some sense, this procrastination helped me to understand my own ambivalence about the choice of the epidemic as the theme for my next novel. I realized that my reluctance to write a novel around an epidemic was based on several subconscious and mutually incompatible beliefs.
(To be continued in part 2)
vaachakmitra 