I write to heal my childhood wounds

'Hi, Latu. Did you read my latest post?' I ask my sis on the phone.

'Do you know why you are so broke, why you don't have a proper job?' she asks.

I think I know what she is going to say. 'Because you are obsessed with your blog. You need a shrink. Please get cured. Stop blogging.'

'Too late. Wild horses wont take me away from the key board.' I respond.

Today was my weekly creative writing class. Out of twelve students, three were absent. When I told them that instead of the movie in the afternoon, we are going to clear the backlog of previous writing assignments, two of them developed health problems by lunch. By tea-time, a boy was suddenly called for an appointment by his doctor, across town. His girlfriend sneaked out with him.

So it was an intimate group of writers that stayed back for the last one hour. I asked them, 'Why do you write? Do you know?'

'I write for the satisfaction I get when I express myself.' she said.

'Why do you need to express yourself?' I probed.

'I don't know and I don't think its necessarily to know this. I just like to write so I write.'

'Fair enough. And why do you write?'

'I write when the milk boils over with emotions.'

'Hmm.'

'I am an emotional person and I like to arouse the same emotion in the other.'

'Yes.'

And then I cycle back home, open my blog, scroll down the fellows, and find Chetan Bhagat's post. 'I write to heal my childhood wounds', he says.

'Writing is about thinking. I write to gain perspective.' says Amandeep Sandhu.

'Asking whether you have got it, whether you should stick with writing or quit, is like asking if you should continue living. For most writers, being unable to write is tantamount to suicide.' says Betsy Lerner, in her beautiful bible for writers, 'The forest for the trees'.

'The natural writer is the one who is always writing, if only in his head-sizing up a situation for material, collecting impressions,' she continues, speaking for James Thurber, 'I never quite know when I am not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, 'Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.' She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.'

Enough about others. Why do I write?
. . . .
. . .
. . .

Maybe one day, I will become articulate enough to answer this question. May that day never come, for Khalil Gibran has already given me an answer, one that beats all logic.

Ask not for a reason to love, for love is sufficient unto love.