By Saswat Pattanayak
Amidst hope, there is despair. Nothing astounding. But surely, not a matter of one exercising free will to carve out the hope and purge the despair.
Where I do exercise my free will, is where I blog.
I do not feel vulnerable as I blog. Indeed, I get empowered. There is no feeling as powerful as knowing that one is able to express the voice within. The medium well could be the message, but the message is what counts, after all.
When the Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh in 1913 wrote why he was an atheist, he was blogging his clarity. When George Orwell said, in order to want a picture of the future, one could imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever, he was blogging his frustration. When Rebecca Walker and Wilma Mankiller rejected the earlier versions of feminism movements in The Fire This Time, they blogged their challenge to the existing wealth and class structure. When Vladimir Mayakovsky said “I spit on the fact that neither Homer nor Ovid invented characters like us, pockmarked with soot” he was blogging his anger at the canons of poetry. Nearer home, when Hunter Thompson said, “people are beginning to notice (my state of mind/body), I think, but fuck them. I am beginning to notice some of their problems, too,” he knew he was blogging Gonzo at Las Vegas.
Interesting, that I should say blogging is ancient and quite ironical that I disown what my readers think I own. Four years back, no one knew what it denoted and in the present, no one knows how much it connotes.
Talking of denotations and connotations, isn’t it all about languages? And is language just a means of communication? Does it not enable one to process all the thoughts? For me, the four languages I use daily are of course “acquired” from the external and they shape the way I think. Hence, I come to believe with a sense of certainty: when my language is not mine, how can my blog be? How can my poetry be mine? How can my prose be?
I don’t think I can be copyrighted. I don’t think the word copyright needs to be copyrighted. In distrustful times as this, I agree the words of the world are vulnerable. But I am sure by virtue of the words that the human thoughts experience, no one can own the universal emotions, whose paths have been developed and marred by us all.
Hence I think what I blog is not so much novel. Indeed there is nothing new in what I have to say—they have all been said before. The words are blowing in the wind, facing off the wall, hanging on like Damascus Sword. I just recreate, not create. Manifest myself, not manufacture the literature. My duty is towards using the words to the advantage of the ones who have been deprived the privilege. Not bask in glory with a fallacious assumption that I am the originator of a process, an event, or even a word.
There is nothing new in the words indeed. If there is any, there are new expressions and newer questions. For me, the concern is if I am capable of turning the expressions on their heads and ask the relevant questions. Hence I blog—using a platform that permits me to question the canons and devastate them suitably for the long standing irrelevance they characteristically have represented.