Monday 6 June 2011

My literary apprenticeship.

The following was submitted in support of my application for a place on a Creative Writing Program. Your task is to assign it a grade.

When did I become a writer? It wasn't when I learned my A B D (we were too poor to afford C) in a small one-room school in Chennai- or Madras as it was then called because we were too poor to afford that ostentatious initial letter C though some Anti-Brahmin agitators were already making the brave but fool-hardy attempt to *all our *ity *hennai as a stop-gap till the new D.M.K government raised suffi*ient funds to pay for the importation of a C to replace the asterisk.
Nor was it- I'm still talking about how I became a writer- when we moved to Iraq, a country where the letter C is entirely absent. There's a 'Ch' in Persian and all sorts of 'k' sounds in Arabic, but no C.

Actually, this post has nothing to do with the letter C. I really don't know what might have given you that impression or why you are now so insistently harping upon it.  The salient point here is that I'm trying, in the most economical and aethetically pleasing manner possible, to convey to you a history of privation and Third Worldliness so as to present my struggles towards Scription in a sympathetic light.

Anyway, to get back to the theme of this post- vide licet my literary apprenticeship- I will now introduce what Collingwood terms a distinction without a difference which, for that reason, belongs to second-order, hence philosophical, discourse properly so called.  Well, I would have just now introduced that distinction without a difference to you except it's like probably popped off to the loo or gotten lucky with a gate-crasher or something while we were talking.

Personally, I blame David Cameron. That boy aint right.

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