I have never been receptive to advice given by people, who assume they have the responsibility of making me a better writer. During a one-year crash course I had to endure at Asian College of Journalism, the professors instilled inside of me a kind of hatred that I have since harboured towards newspapers. A warm, glowing abhorrence for these vile filth-mongers who treat language as a drunken pimp would an extremely talkative prostitute. I (along with many) shelled out over a lakh to learn how to suck the beauty out of language and present it in a square.
These self-professed breeders of journalists wreaked havoc on the students’ fertile minds and impregnated them with an almost delirious sense of rigidity. However, my sympathies were reserved only for a few, as a majority of the students in my batch were content with having their words altered and styled to suit the growing demand of old soothsayers sipping coffee in the morning and eagerly wanting to know who inaugurated the weekly Lion’s Club of Chennai seminar held to determine who gets to pluck their nose during the annual meet.
They even let the teachers at ACJ beguile them into feeling guilty about the kids dying in Uganda. Of course that didn’t stop these wretched idiots from complaining about the lack of luxuries during the deprivation trip in Vellore.
Dep·ri·va·tion: The act or an instance of loss; the condition of being deprived.
Lux·u·ries: Something inessential but conducive to pleasure and comfort.
Id-i-ot: A person of profound mental retardation and generally being unable to learn connected speech or guard against common dangers.
Being employed did nothing to stem the rot of language that ate through the hours of the clock each and every day. As a web writer for a particular newspaper, I was taught how to sell Priyanka Chopra’s cleavage by leveraging language; as a business writer for one of those god-awful interactive web marketing companies, I sold Wipro’s products by reducing English to jargonized crap and now, well now I wear a tie on Mondays and don’t have to write to earn a living anymore.
I really don’t like being told how to write. All these ‘Learn How To Be A Better Writer’ crap that defiles the sanctity of bookshelves means less to me than an aspirin would to a goat with gonorrhea.
However, there is one particular page of text that can actually teach you something about the English language. Click here, read it and try understanding the nuances; but don’t imagine yourself to be a better writer after doing so. You would have merely become another admirer of George Orwell.
