From the confines of my strictly business writing as a Corporate Communications professional, I look at Salman Rushdie’s Indian English and drool. Literally. His style is forbidden; not for the logically correct, grammatically quarantined, absolutely to-the-point English I write, or am expected to. Not that I want to go Rushdie at work and hand myself the pink slip, where my manager would have included a note with the city’s best Psychiatrists’ contact, being the caring fellow Cancerian.
All I am saying is this is not the writing that I want to eventually see myself doing. The current form lunges me to the sea of writers — analogous, stereotypical, one impossible to recognize from the other. Like the slew of feature writers in the newspaper supplements, for example. You cannot tell who's who the way you can make out a Jug Suraiya from a Bachi Karkaria. But when it comes to signature styles, nobody can beat Rushdie - I bet. The way he dives into the infinite ocean of adjectives and determiners, pronouns and verbs, punctuations and idioms — to emerge with an English of his own; impregnated with his Indianness; chiseled to such impeccable perfection that sounds completely different, yet surprisingly 'correct'. And how effortlessly the man does it — unlike my obtuse description here! And that, during the 1981s, when the Indian English genre was still grappling through its nascent stage — he had the nerve to 'tamper' with the a “borrowed” language - take it, slice it open, chop it into fine pieces, blend it with his Indian spices, dry it under the Indian sun, bottle it and stamp it with a "Rushdie".
So while I breathed my first in some nook in the Solar System part of the Universe, Salman Rushdie published his Midnight Children…that went on to become one of the greatest influences in my life.
For a Corporate Communications person, to relish such libertine fantasies of meddling with the language is sheer profanity, I agree. But carve my thumbprint style, unique and completely mine, I must before I lose myself in the murky waters of stereotypical business writing.
Conclusion: I must continue to blog!
P.S.: I wish I could declare "I am back". Not yet. But I will, and very soon. The sabbatical is beginning to weigh down heavily upon my blogger's conscience---more so, because I deliberately shrink and deflate my thoughts these days to squirt them at Twitter. If you have read this, thank you so much for coming back. Pray for me!
All I am saying is this is not the writing that I want to eventually see myself doing. The current form lunges me to the sea of writers — analogous, stereotypical, one impossible to recognize from the other. Like the slew of feature writers in the newspaper supplements, for example. You cannot tell who's who the way you can make out a Jug Suraiya from a Bachi Karkaria. But when it comes to signature styles, nobody can beat Rushdie - I bet. The way he dives into the infinite ocean of adjectives and determiners, pronouns and verbs, punctuations and idioms — to emerge with an English of his own; impregnated with his Indianness; chiseled to such impeccable perfection that sounds completely different, yet surprisingly 'correct'. And how effortlessly the man does it — unlike my obtuse description here! And that, during the 1981s, when the Indian English genre was still grappling through its nascent stage — he had the nerve to 'tamper' with the a “borrowed” language - take it, slice it open, chop it into fine pieces, blend it with his Indian spices, dry it under the Indian sun, bottle it and stamp it with a "Rushdie".
So while I breathed my first in some nook in the Solar System part of the Universe, Salman Rushdie published his Midnight Children…that went on to become one of the greatest influences in my life.
For a Corporate Communications person, to relish such libertine fantasies of meddling with the language is sheer profanity, I agree. But carve my thumbprint style, unique and completely mine, I must before I lose myself in the murky waters of stereotypical business writing.
Conclusion: I must continue to blog!
P.S.: I wish I could declare "I am back". Not yet. But I will, and very soon. The sabbatical is beginning to weigh down heavily upon my blogger's conscience---more so, because I deliberately shrink and deflate my thoughts these days to squirt them at Twitter. If you have read this, thank you so much for coming back. Pray for me!
