Ridima Sharma - Self Reflective Essay

The impression I had when I first decided to take this course as an elective, was completely different from what the course is actually about, and I can’t be more thankful for this. I thought it would all be about reading different forms of writing. I thought it would only involve a lot of reading and less of writing. But I was wrong, and I am glad that I was wrong.

Although I feel a sense of regret for missing a lot of classes for this course due to my own problems, but in all the classes that I have attended in the course of these 4 months, I had a constant feeling of realisation. I realised that in the last couple of years, I almost forgot how to write for myself, I forgot how to write something which can make me feel that I am actually writing and ‘presenting’.
Ways of Reading took me back to my days of reading and writing, as a street theatre artist – the only thing that has given me utmost satisfaction and contentment without any fail.

Whether it was my first WoR class when we read Elizabeth Bishop and Agha Shahid Ali’s poems to learn about the Art of Line-Break; or Aditi Rao’s enriching workshop; or whether it was the last WoR class that I attended in which we wrote the missing chapter from Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’, each class played it’s own part in my self-realisation.
I quit my job in Bombay and came back to Delhi for various reasons before joining Masters in Film Studies at AUD, lack of job-satisfaction being the most prominent one. This is what I used to tell people too since a few days ago, when they asked me about why I quit my job in the industry.

It won’t be too much to say that, this course played a major role in making me come to terms with the fact that it wasn’t only the lack of job-satisfaction. I machined myself to write for others during the time I was in Bombay, so much so that I never wrote anything for me when I was there. The Image Observation and Poetry exercise was the first time I reminisced that I consciously or unconsciously, ignored my own thoughts for a long time, in order to create the ‘perfect pitch’.

I still don’t believe that I have started writing the way I used to in college, but at least now I can figure out and identify the nature of things that I write, in terms of my own creative understanding. The struggle of not being too self-critical and still keeping the essence of the original thought has never been this real.

For the mid-term assignment, I chose two subjects which are very sensitive for me to write a poem on and the other four were simple and basic everyday things. Yet I remember how after completing the assignment and posting it before the deadline, I read it again and again and I felt that the essence was missing, but I couldn’t figure out what exactly was wrong. The Feedback session helped me more than anything, and I know I will always be improving myself on the writing part, remembering the humble advice I received in the feedback session.

The course also introduced me to the graphic novel. I never read one before, though I used to love reading comics in my childhood but Art Speigelman’s Maus (both the editions) are my current favourites. It made me explore the graphic novel form, and although I still am afraid to use it in my own writings, I started searching for more such graphic novels to read and found a couple of them too.

I also found the end-term assignment prompts quite motivating. When I first read the mail, I was smiling because most of the prompts which are given, seduce you to explore them, at least that’s what I felt. I so wanted to write about Delhi because that is one of the most prominent things, I find myself fascinated about in almost all my writings, and in my life too. I also loved the non-fiction family history prompt and it was very interesting too. And I have already mentioned writing the missing chapter from ‘The God of Small Things’ above.
I have decided to work on writing all these prompts, amongst other thoughts of mine, for my own-self and that is the gift I have received from this course. It is not something which the Creative Director has asked me to write, it is not something which will earn me some money. It is something which will make me feel good about myself, if I write it with full honesty and devotion. And I can never be thankful enough for this.

But now I would like to mention, why I chose the prompt that I have chosen for the end-term. A short-story with a substantial co-presence of one or more non-English languages along with English – the people who know me, they know my love for Indian languages and how I try to include Hindi and Urdu poetry, dohe, and sayings in my own vocabulary as much as possible.
And the story is a mix of so many personal experiences woven together in a fiction with shayari and ‘Bolti Zubaan’, and also my favourite place on earth – Dilli 6.

I still know I haven’t reached back to where I first started as an artist, when it comes to writing, and I have a very long way to go after reaching that ground zero. But I am also very much sure about one thing, that I have never been more positive and serious about writing for myself before, and nothing but this course and of course, the professor hold the credit for this development in my adult-self.