Pithy Prose

              Pithy Prose                                             

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.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night

A poor life this is, if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

The essence of the poem ‘Leisure’ by famous poet William Henry Davies stands redundant in the byte-sized modern times of tweets and e-singles. Tweets have been packaged by the literary inclined as TTT – Terribly Tiny Tales, at par with a potent 30-sec ad film, which renders a complete story. Each hour of our kids’ lives is structured and programmed to deliver saleable productivity.  Dayanita Singh, the bookmaker and photographer, launched a campaign on Facebook regarding changing bookshop presence in the Indian milieu. Jairaj Singh penned an article in the New Yorker regaling us with the receding façade of his father’s bookshop ‘Fact and Fiction’. These were the deeply entrenched symbols of yesteryears, where book-lovers browsed and curled up on sofas for hours on end, reflecting and contemplating their readings. These oases of rumination are struggling for survival in the face of recent Rs 1200-crore single largest funding for Flipkart, the Bangalore based burgeoning e-bookstore giant. 
Short films like Bombay Talkies opened to critical acclaim and success of Short+ Sweet Theatre festivals in the Indian metro for the fourth consecutive year are proof of the literary world striding hand-in-hand with T20’s and  quick power workouts. A play as short as ten minutes is a doorway to a novel idea in scriptwriting. Short films termed as celluloid nibblets by the Times are the demand of the hour and creating waves at film festivals and multiplexes.  The short story is the new literary format digestible during lunch hours on easily accessible/portable kindles and smart phones. ‘The Gorkha’s Daughter’ is a short story collection by Prajwal Parajuly, born in Sikkim to an Indian father and Nepalese mother. He signed a record-breaking two-book deal with UK publisher Quercus. The five-figure deal makes Prajwal Parajuly, 27, Quercus’ youngest author and the youngest Indian ever to sign an international book contract. The book is out in the market and was discussed critically at the Jaipur LitFest, a sure indication of the popularity and resurgence of the short fiction genre in the contemporary world. The fever has caught on and novel writers are now switching over to the new demand of the digital era and new formats of writing. I recently read a short story collection ‘Difficult Pleasures’ by Anjum Hasan. She revels in the luxury of variety, of trying out so many different garbs or voices. But the perfection lies in its brevity and pointedness and really, in the feeling of expansion into life that penetrates our consciousness by means of a style that produces a sense of truth and richness.

The good side to the new pithy story is that more people are reading.  Creative juices armed with technology are flowing and making numbers experiment and explore roads not travelled so far. The so-called loser or the twit, who floundered in mathematics, law and sciences, is the new success story, albeit with different marketable creative ideas.  Is this phenomenon an avant garde movement which has taken us unawares? No, not really. Short stories have been around since the times of the caveman who regaled his community with his tales of the day’s hunt.  Samuel Becket’s play ‘Breath’ and Haiku, the ancient form of Japanese poetry belie the fact that it is a modern artistic fad.  The difference maybe that its staging and prodigious production no longer shocks and stupefies audiences, and the bizarre, the better.  We could conclude that literal brevity has been around, but is now rampant and a more appreciated art form.  

The grouse with writers of the lengthy genre is that they abhor brevity. They wax eloquent and enjoy getting deep into the complexities and intricacies of their characters. Is there a market for their writing heavy with metaphor and figurative language? The statistics indicate that it is shrinking, but would become extinct, is hard to say.  No, definitely no. And I am very emphatic here. The masses may follow a particular trend, but there are the cultural creatives who need leisurely hours in time and indefinite space to live, breathe and be themselves. They are the sussegads of the world who believe in the moment stretching into eternity and adhering to one passion for entire life spans, albeit, voluminous books like Meditations, Summa Theologica and Ulysseus.

I recently viewed a timeline video on books in the next century. A boy walks into a store which is lined with books and is flabbergasted with what he sees. He cannot fathom, what are these voluminous bundles stacked endlessly on the shelves. Hearing the exclamations, an old man emerges and is delighted to see the young teenage boy. He introduces him to the sublime feel of books in your hands and turning of pages to follow the progression of the book. The boy is amazed and carries home a stack of books to read at bedtime. A completely new experience to him, rather like seeing a vintage buggy and wanting to drive it and test its engine.

Books may not be printed at the rate they are now. Over the years, a time will come when they will be coveted pieces of treasure owned by a few elite of the world, just like old masterpieces of art. Each copy will be estimated in millions of dollars and will grace the shelves of museums and those who can afford it and love to read from it – an experience par excellence and euphoric. A time machine which takes you back into the leisure of William Henry Davies filled with the wonderful world of celluloid books with their wispy markings of ink recreating characters into larger than life human beings.

More than two centuries ago, the great poet William Blake offered the world the most extraordinary of possibilities to teach us to see the sacred in the mundane and the profound in the prosaic.

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

and eternity in an hour.

Innumerable miracles occur every day.   The morning sunrise, to tides in the oceans, the appearance of flamingoes heralding winter; waiting for us to see them, to notice them and, most importantly, to find our essence and core in them.