“And the dormant dragon… ” I felt as if I had gone blank; I could not remember the next line.
“….And … And the dormant dragon has already spread its claws……” I stammered. I got nervous and looked around.
The hall seemed to be overcrowded today. The students of schools from all over the district occupied a maximum area of the ground. The judges and the principal occupied the seat at the centre; I could see them smiling at me trying to encourage me, I turned to my right, where all the teachers sat; Unable to locate, I was about to get down from the stage when I finally saw her standing at the corner of the hall, smiling proudly was, my mother. I closed my eyes took a deep breath and resumed my speech. I completed the speech confidently without stammering any further. The crowd broke into applause and everyone appreciated me as I took my seat in the audience. I was the youngest participant for the evening and it was my first experience at public speaking. I had bagged the second prize which I and my mom celebrated later in the evening.
I had grown up listening to the stories my grandfather told me. I remember how I would listen to a single story for few days in a row and later tell the same story to the other members of the family. The art of expressing myself was inculcated in me at a very young age. A new word or a new expression never failed to attract me. Gradually, I got interested in reading and slowly it developed into a habit. Comics, short stories and novels the reading list kept on expanding. I remember the day when every year the new books for the school were purchased, I would spend the next few days reading all the stories from mine as well as my sister’s English textbook. Then there came a time when I started exploring the world of writing and playing with the words. Even as a kid, I would write my own essays and would come up with something new each time for the same topic. Over the years I started spending more and more time improving upon my writing and speaking skills. I started participating in various competitions and emerged as a winner in most of them. My talent started getting appreciated in the school and there came a time when my essays from the exam papers were circulated in the staff room and read by all my teachers. It was also acknowledged by the principal a couple of times.
I remember in the entire journey, one person that I could always rely upon was my mom. We both would sit for hours preparing my speeches and practising speaking them. She had inherited the art of writing from my grandfather and I, in turn, had inherited it from her. But one thing that pricked me always was the fact that both my grandfather and my mother did not continue with writing. Over the years, they just got busy with their profession and writing kept getting limited. I had already made up my mind; I did not want to limit myself just to a number of good essays and speeches. I wanted to write more, write something that was meaningful and would reach out to people. I developed an interest in news and started seeing myself writing for newspapers and magazines. I also saw myself writing a book someday.
As my passion towards writing kept growing, there was something else growing with it too. Me. I was getting older. With the end of my primary school days, a lot of things started to change. One of them was my mother’s support for writing. I had to prepare for my competitions alone, she would listen to me and help me but most of the times the feedback that I would get was “Yes, it is good. You will do great tomorrow. You do not need more practice, go and study.”
Time passed by, my inclination towards being a writer increased with each passing day. I passed my board exams with flying colours. I wanted to opt for arts but in India, arts stream is never seen as a good prospect. If you score well it is mandatory for you to study science. Good students always take up science, they become engineers and doctors, the average ones opt for commerce and arts is never chosen for. Only the students, who do not get admitted in science and commerce, study arts. This was a common belief in the society. My parents being a little open-minded gave me an option, they let me choose between better ones. Stereotypically, arts was not even in the list of options. I tried to convince them by telling about my aspirations to become a writer and my dreams to write. But I was considered naive. I was convinced by them to go for the best stream. They said there was no good school that provided arts subject in my town and were also not ready to send me out before I finished my twelfth standard. They assured me I could take up arts in the college. I fell for it, I took up science. Indeed naïve I was.
I struggled through the classes; I developed a phobia towards math, neither the physics nor the chemistry classes made any sense. I started to happily pen down my thoughts on the notebooks rather than taking notes from the blackboard. The last pages of my books filled rapidly than the front pages. My words became a medium to expresses the anger, the frustration that was stored in the heart of a teenage girl. All the notebooks, random papers and my old phone, test papers and answer sheets I used anything near me to write on. It started affecting my studies and reflected on my grades. Once a sharp student, now I barely managed to pass my subjects. I lost the image I had in the school, I was now a just a random student in the class. The bad results resulted into pressure from my parents and the teachers, which on my side only increased the frustration.
I performed badly in the boards; still, it was not bad enough to get me into an arts college. I again tried my best to convince my parents, they were still adamant that I go for engineering. I was ready to sit back home than getting into engineering. I declared to quit studies if they forced me to get into engineering. They put in all their efforts to convince me, one day brought a girl who had left the journalism course midway, she said "it is not the course for girls. The life in the field is not good." I smiled. All I could think of at that moment were the number of people who were not happy doing engineering, few had given up studies and few their life. I said nothing. The next day they tried to lure me with the kind of life an engineer enjoys the money and the luxuries. I was not ready to give up happiness each day just for some so-called better happiness in the future; I could not do something I did not enjoy on each day expecting that it will make me happy someday. When none of the things helped, the last thing was to play with emotions. Dad said, “We want to see you happy, we want you to get the best in the world.” “We are saying it out of the experience, you are still not aware of the real world out there,” Mom added.
After a lot of arguments and a cold war, I ended taking up architecture for my undergrads. I decided to focus on the subject and not to mess up my studies the way I did in the last couple of years. I was depressed but I decided to start afresh. I focused on the subject, tried to grasp as much as possible. My scope for writing was again limited to few class presentations, random competitions. Students around me recognized my talent and the opportunities to write came in the form of leave letters and applications for them. I smiled and kept working to improve my design skills.
Years later as I sit in my office working on the designs for my clients, the writer within me strangles every moment. Ironically, the only time the writer I get to breathe freely is when I put my frustration into words. Only if she had been strong enough to stand; stand for herself, fight against all the odds. Sometimes when I sit flipping the pages of my favorite novel, I wish I could turn back the clock and bring the wheels of time to a stop when my words did not succumb, when I had not followed the footprints of my mom and grandfather and decided to give up my passion for the sake of my profession and for the sake of the happiness my family and society. Only then a child today might have read a book written by me and also I could have cherished my dream of entering with my mom into a bookstore that sold bestsellers written by me.
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