No! Seriously, you do not want to become a writer. Writing is hard work without any earning, only learning, learning, and yearning. Behind your back, your friends will call you lazy, or good-for-nothing, or a loser. I suggest you concentrate on your day job. Besides, there is nothing in the world left for you to write about.

Can creative writing be taught? It's complicated.

 Illustration by Dave Donald.

Every object and every emotion has already been explored and explained in detail—the libraries are spilling and the web is exploding with all kinds of writings. Instead of further augmenting the agonies of the readers by over-stimulating your cognitive processes and churning out original stuff, it is better to copy-paste from the web, not from my blog, though.

I sense some of you are still keen on putting down your experiences and thoughts in two dimensions. In that case, I would like to elucidate the two methods of becoming a good writer. You may follow any one of these.

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It so happened that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck were chatting online, and during their passionate back and forth, they accidentally spilled in the chat window how lonely they were in spite of their bunch of ardent followers.

“It’s lonely at the top,” he wrote.

“You betcha,” she replied.

“Heads of state mingle with each other at G8 Summit, business leaders have meetings to discuss their issues, movie stars gather at award ceremonies, even the petty bloggers manage to hold bloggers meets.”

So Palin and Beck decided to have a Rhetoricians’ Convention. Palin then informed me about the meeting and its agenda:

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“Please do not implement your F-Day idea.”

(Picture Courtesy 21 Fools)

This is an urgent request to two of the readers of The Grist Mill. I am reporting from New Delhi, January 8, 2017. I want to tell them how we have been suffering from the consequences of their exploits. I will not name these two troublemakers because their more sensible and mature present-day selves have requested anonymity.

Since January 1st, we have been witnessing nothing but mayhem—incidents of domestic violence, snatchings, stabbings, lootings, daylight robberies, dark-night murders. Our past experiences tell us that this will go on for many more days.

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(Hindi Version मेरे मरने के बाद) 
From Times of India, Jan 7, 2011:
News Story #1: A middle-aged man was killed and his wife suffered serious injuries when they were thrown off the moving train by the train ticket examiner (TTE)
News Story #2: Parijat Banerjee was so engrossed in a cell phone conversation that he tripped on the balcony grill of his seventh-floor apartment and plunged to his death.
New Story #3: The 75-year-old mother-in-law of the advocate general of Punjab was found raped and murdered in her house.
News Story #4: The deaths of 18 lakh girl children in India in the past two decades have been linked to domestic violence against their mothers.

Newspapers are so uplifting, really. Unlike Facebook, where people dressed in latest trendy clothes are either vacationing at exotic locales or celebrating birthdays in style, which gives me acute heartburn, though I always ‘Like’ such updates and post comments like—nice, lovely, looking great….

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Julian Assange (Digitally Altered Image)

The Grist Mill Criminal of the Year award goes to Mr. Julian Assange, the editor in chief of WikiLeaks, for criminalizing the whole world.

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