ordinary everyday life

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3 responses to “ordinary everyday life”

1. 

   October 13, 2006

   bellur ramakrishna

   Sanju,
   Nice post on RKN. Everybody walks in a marketplace. Everyone sees what is in the market. But Narayan observed what was there and wrote about them.
   He used to get upset when interviewers asked him if he was an inspired writer. “Please don’t talk about inspiration and all that. It’s a hard task to make one’s writing readable.” he said. Effort was the secret of his seemingly effortless and natural writing. It is hard to put a signboard on Narayan’s art. In fact the most celebrated eating place in Malgudi has no board and its owner serves what he wants to, not what the clients might want.
   Narayan adopted the narrative technique of the ‘katha’ tradition to build up the human interest of characters and situations and left, like a harikatha vidwan, an element of suspense, built up one’s curiosity, so that the listener would be impatient to find out what happened next. His prose does not dazzle the reader. It forges a bond between him and the reader. While reading a Narayan novel, I have always felt as if I was sitting beside the author, enjoying a cup of coffee on a winter morning.

   thank you for giving a link to my post.

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2. 

   December 17, 2006

   msanjay

   [a very late] thanks Bellur had somehow missed this comment earlier! Really nice to read your comments.

   Came to this post while putting another post on ordinariness 🙂

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3. 

   December 17, 2006

   msanjay

   Just recording an exceprt from a comment I’d made on Nipun’s page:

   One needs to get to the point where one can recognize the *choice* between being ordinary and extraordinary, and then maybe choose to be ordinary. Blindly being ordinary does not require any courage 🙂

   An interesting observation is that anything that may appear extraordinary at first eventually becomes ordinary if its taken for granted. Similarly what seems ordinary at first can be seen to be extraordinary if its not taken for granted. Unfortunately this “taking for granted” seems to be one of the strongest habits we have 🙂

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