CHAIDHANYA JAYAMOHAN- SELF REFLECTIVE ESSAY

Self Reflective Essay:

     I’ve always depended on writing, more than anything, to express my emotions and to find myself again. But during the last few years I’ve grown increasingly aware of my limitations as a writer. My confidence had decreased tremendously and one of my greatest fears, even now, is a blank page. I had been trying to write or rather express my bundled up emotions in sudden bursts. They always end up being inane questions and meaningless phrases put together in a haphazard manner. These are some of my ramblings.

Even the sounds or noises that you hear are vacant and meaningless. Now…I hear a loud honking followed by a distant one, the whirring noise of the air conditioner fills in the background. An entire city of people expressing themselves in short, intermittent bursts of anger and frustration.

I look around me now, walls… Without music in my life, without this promise of recurring things, how would I be? The patterns if only they never repeated and stretched on like waves…oh! They too have patterns.

Sun, rain, cold, flowers, autumn, wind, heat, dust and more of the same. Seems like I’ve stopped living, a few years after my birth.

The clock on the wall ticks every second the world around me stays the same. Tick…it’s the same now. Tick…it’s still the same. Tick…the same. But it’s not, every second I get more bored, more aware of my existence, its absurdity. Every second my ties to this world tighten and sorrow grows. Every second… If I break it, it only grows stronger. Where did I lose it? What am I looking at?

Why would you answer?

    My thoughts are mostly all over the place and I’ve never been able create an entirely original story or narrative. During the course of this semester I have realized that originality is not essential for someone to creatively express themselves. Most works of art are blatantly derivative. What is important is to find a niche within that work and explore it unlike anyone has ever done before.

    The poems that I wrote for this course were the first ones I had ever written. I had never tried my hand at poetry before. I was quite surprised by how easy it was for me write poetry when I knew what to focus on. My poems were derivative. They were based on the novel ‘Venmurasu’ which is again, a retelling of the Mahabharata. I chose to focus on two separate characters, Yudishtra and Arjuna for the two poems. They were the characters that I related to most, in the novel. And I chose two separate instances in the novel where I could feel the emotions of these characters closely. I focused on those emotions and wrote from their perspective. It was as easy as that and I was quite pleased with the result.

     The suggestions for the end term assignment also helped me in a similar way to focus on a single idea and explore it as much as possible. I started writing a short story about two strangers in Delhi for the term paper but couldn’t before the deadline. Although I am quite sure I would at some point.

Reading Maus-a survivor’s tale prompted me to try my best at creating a visual narrative. I tried my best at creating cartoon and I wasn’t going anywhere with it. So I just started doing pencil sketches which came out better than I expected.

Doing pencil sketches helped me focus on one object, its relation to its surroundings and the way the light plays upon it and so on. It really altered the way I observed the world.  I have to get better at it somehow and create the visual narrative that I already have in my head. It’s a challenging and time consuming process but I believe that it is worth the effort. Even if my works comes out as being too derivative, it would at least give me a better understanding of the original work and would provide me glance into the creative process behind it.

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