DR.SANTOSH BAKAYA
Today, let me harp on the theme of the interconnection between creativity and curiosity. In my writing career, curiosity and creativity have gone hand in hand. Curiosity, they say killed the cat, but thankfully, I was not a cat, hence did not get killed! I am still alive and kicking – and very, very curious!
Curiosity only stoked my desire to be more and more creative.
After the first tottering steps, toddlers gain a certain surefootedness and are bitten by the curiosity bug- the birds, the mud, the flowers, the pots and pans, the duster, doormat- the fan, the cockroach, grasshoppers, butterflies -everything catches their fancy and they want to know more and more about things that they are seeing for the first time.
When I was in the sixth standard, a new girl joined our school. I would always find her scribbling and would curiously peer into her pages. She informed me that she was writing limericks. That curiosity started my obsession with writing, and I too started writing limericks. , My teachers in school were secretly thrilled that I wrote well.
A limerick of Edward Lear enthralled me no end.
There was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket
He had a daughter named Nan
Who ran away with a man
And as for the bucket – NAN TOOK IT!
My obsession with limericks was buried for some time, but, years later, when challenged by one of my MPhil students to write a poetic biography of Gandhi, BALLAD OF BAPU took shape, written in the rhyme scheme of aabba of a limerick.
I read more and more about Gandhi, getting more and more curious and found it so intriguing that I continued writing. Before I knew it, I had in my hands a complete poetic biography of Bapu. It was the curiosity bug that had bitten me in school, that resurfaced and BALLD OF BAPU happened.
As I was so passionate about writing, and curiosity had not killed me so far, I continued writing, perennially curious about everything around me, consequently, I wrote about the everyday ordinary affairs in 58 essays in Flights from My Terrace. Needless to say, my creative curiosity triggered the curiosity of the readers as well, and they hankered for more.
Then came Oh Hark – a narrative poem in a hundred pages for which I received the International Reuel Prize for writing and literature for the year 2014. I used to write it every day in the FB writers group, THE SIGNIFICANT LEAGUE, and gradually, the readership increased. Everyone was riveted by the poetic narration. What would happen next? They were curious. When I did not write for some days, there would be a wave of indignation. “Where is the next part? “
Their curiosity made me more and more creative.
In one of the chapters, I killed a very important character, and there was a deluge of messages, “Why did you kill the drummer? You are the writer, you can do anything. Bring him back.”
So I had to pull him up from the cliff where I had made him fall.
Writing for me is therapeutic, cathartic, magical, and mesmerizing. Who can deny that writing leads one to an intriguing world, we can come and go whenever we want, and it opens new vistas.
At times, I see myself as’ the sower ‘[1888] of the famous Van Gogh painting, sowing words which will enthrall the readers, will die, and then again regenerate.
In 2016, I had been to Accra, Ghana, West Africa.
Standing next to the Atlantic Ocean, disembodied voices came floating across to me, wanting to be written down as poems. Curious to listen to the notes of music in the ripples of the waves, Seamus Heaney’s line, ‘the tidal wave of justice’ kept hammering at my head, and right there, many poems were born on the theme of justice.
Bitten by the curiosity bug, the first poem that I scribbled in school was about a ramshackle Fort, one eye cocked at the blackboard, one ear tuned to the teacher’s lecture. But let me confess, as years pass, I do not want to be a ramshackle fort; I know I will continue to be curious and creative till my last breath, frantically penning my thoughts away. Never stopping.
I keep telling my students: “Never allow yourself to become smug, or get stuck in a rut. Never kill that bug of curiosity- and you will always be creative. Keep rethinking, innovating, and renewing. The more you think and rethink, the more that elusive spark of creativity will keep lighting your path. Taking things for granted can take us nowhere; we must try to look at things with fresh, new perspectives, and we will once again find things wondrous spectacular and beautiful”.
Let me quote Walt Whitman here,
“Curious, here behold my resurrection after slumber.
The revolving cycles, in their wide sweep, have brought me again Amorous, mature – all beautiful to me – all wondrous.”
The author is an academician, poet, essayist, novelist, and TEDx speaker, with more than twenty published books to her credit.
