Still Not a Writer

What Counts as Writing

A few days ago, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary conversation about how everyone spends time, a friend mentioned about me "…but she writes.” This was technically true.

What followed was predictable.

“Kahan chhapta hai?” (Where does it get published?), asked the questioner.

“Online,” I said.

A pause.

“Haan, lekin kis paper mein?” (But in which newspaper?)

I said I write a blog.

‘Oh’, she said, her face looked - processing and contained, like the outside of a blender whirring on hard, dry spices.

The conversation died its own death.

This is not an isolated interaction. It is a pattern.

Somewhere along the way, it has become clear to me that ‘writing’ is not a verb. It is a whole different category with eligibility criteria.

This is not new. Even on a newspaper desk, feature writing occupied an ambiguous space, written, published, read, and yet not quite ‘real writing.’ And blogs, unfortunately, do not clear the prelims. A blog is what you do on the way to becoming a writer. Or perhaps after failing to become one.

The most efficient demonstration of this came during a dinner couple of years ago. A lady smiled brightly at me when I introduced myself, “Ah, I read what you write.”

A psychology professor spooning paneer cubes out of shahi paneer onto his plate, got distracted, and asked with a very economical movement of his eyebrows, “What do you write?”

“A weekly blog,” I said.

There was a brief nod. Not agreement, more like closure on low priority information. The matter had been assessed, rejected.  

He moved on to the next dish which, to be fair, appeared more tempting.

I have a feeling it is not personal. We do this with many professions. We carry ready-made versions in our heads.

Politicians are corrupt, actors are conceited, influencers are shallow, sportspersons are inspirational, lawyers are expensive, and writers?

They are supposed to look a certain way—slightly dishevelled, possibly intense, ideally published on pages that require subscriptions. They have opinions in columns, or their photos appear on the back cover of books. Not here, uploading a post as the aroma of the cake somewhere between a butter cake and a pound cake, refusing to fully identify as either, drifts through the house, while I try to remember if I’ve already adjusted the sugar once or twice, and whether that adjustment was confident or speculative, which, now that I think about it, is how most things here get done.

So, when someone says, “I write a blog,” the listener’s mind does a quick substitution- a hobby with a Wi-fi! Like bringing your own tiffin to a catered event.

To be fair, the confusion is understandable.

I don’t sit down to write every day. I don’t have a sharp routine. I don’t announce ‘New Post Coming Up’. Most of the times till Thursday morning I don’t even know what I shall write about. I am not on social media, partly inertia, partly a reluctance to turn writing into a full-time exercise in self-announcement.

So, there is no evidence of my writing except the writing itself, an unreliable, inefficient system.

There is, of course, a small ecosystem that makes this visible at all. Mani ensures my posts travel further than I would ever manage on my own. Some readers pass them along in ways I don’t quite track.

There is just the writing itself, appearing at intervals. There are no book covers, no launches, no panels where I hold the microphone to say, “That’s a very good question.”

Just a website, updated irregularly, with pieces that people read, or don’t, often without informing me of either decision. And yet, the writing continues.

Not dramatically. Not even consistently. Just persistently enough to have lasted some years.

In that time, I have written in fragments, while cooking, while I wait for the washing machine’s ill-fitting nozzle to start spraying water, while listening, while replaying conversations that should have ended earlier. Occasionally, I have written things that travel farther than expected, thanks to people who pass them along.

None of this improves my classification. That can also be because I do not have a specialised area to write about. My post can be about -general observations, irritating social habits, facets of English as a language that surprise me, my travels, an experience remembered, various foods, pictures of hilarious signboards that stop me in my tracks, anything.

Last week, I wrote the Hindi-Urdu script for a musical evening on Jagjit Singh: fourteen ghazals, each needing a bridge. No one asked where that would be published. Was it because it was happening on a stage, in real life, with chairs?

I simply do the thing—return to the page, arrange words, publish them in a corner of the internet, and repeat.

It is either persistence or a failure to correctly understand feedback.

Either way, the blog turns six this week. No reclassification. Just another post, going online, where it will continue to not count.

Note: I’ll be travelling from this weekend, so this space will be quiet for a couple of weeks. I’ll see you here after that.

                                                                                                                - Anupama S Mani