Pritam's Blog
Feeding My Creative Inspirations
When it comes to feeding my creative aspirations, I like to see how much I can push myself, up to what extent I can leave behind my boundaries of comfort - physical or mental…
I remember, during my second semester in engineering, we had five days gap before my Mathematics final exam. The day the five days gap started, I thought I would just chill around for a day, and start practising from the next day. I was still serious about trying my luck in engineering, and mathematics being one of my all time favorite subjects, I wanted to give my best. That’s why I thought of taking a break for just one day, and not four out of the five days.
Anyway, I decided to make a few sketches, and it was then it occurred to me that I had been making pencil sketches for a long time, and I should move on, find something new…
And I started trying. But unable to come up with anything new, I started reading a book… A novel.
It was then I realized that when I read a book, I imagine the story in black and white. Not like those black and white photos. It wasn’t clear. The blacks in my imaginations were more like the way people see things after being exposed to bright white light… Unclear, shadowy, blurry, and not distinct. And the whites were like totally blank…
And I came up with the idea of making sketches like this…
But I didn’t know how. I realized it would take me some time before I could master it. I knew what I wanted, but I didn’t know how to start. You can imagine how vague the scenes in my imaginations were, and how tough it was to create them on papers for me who never joined any art school.
But the real problem wasn’t my lack of knowledge of systematic approach. It was, at that point of time, my restlessness. I didn’t want to wait till my exams got over.
So I challenged myself, that I would come up with something before this Mathematics exam, without compromising anything, Mathematics and Art both being my love.
For the next five days, I slept for just one hour a day. I practiced Mathematics for one hour, made sketches in the next hour. On the fifth day, I made a somewhat decent sketch that resembled the way I imagined things … And I scored 95 out of 100 in my Mathematics paper.
Today, when I think of those days, I realize how desperate I was to achieve something I wanted. As a kid, I used to make sketches on my dry skin on winter afternoon with my nails, hiding under a table while playing Hide and Seek. I used to write stories while doing my homework to compete with my grandfather who was a writer and my greatest inspiration.
It was those sketches which I mastered with passing time that I sold and made good money. It was those sketches that brought me in contact with a reputed poet for whose book I made the illustrations.
And it was neither the money nor the little fame that made me work my ass off. It was pure desperation to do something worthy that drove me into insomnia, into doing something at the expense of my comforts…
It was probably this desperation that gave me the neurological problem for which I am a seasonal cripple. It was this desperation that made me write my first novel in ten days after six months of sleepless nights.
The problem is I don’t regret anything.
Instead I feel it has been quite some time since I felt desperate and came up with something new.
Getting 50 likes on a Facebook post isn’t the goal of life.
Time to let the insanity in me rise and destroy me, once again, and make me come up with something new.