I woke up early on the 4th February.
I had to catch an early morning train to Churchgate from the suburbs, before
the rush hour started in the morning.
I reach Churchgate by 9 30 am. My workshop was
to start at 11 am. So I decided to explore the street book stalls in
Churchgate. Most of these stalls have a good collection of latest fiction and
non fiction books. You can even pay half the price sometimes, if you return the
book after reading it. I spent an hour and a half looking through the
collection at these stalls after which I headed for Kala goda for the workshop.
The first workshop I planned to attend was a
writing workshop by the then editor of the paper Hindustan Times. His name was
Saumya Bhattacharya.
He started the session by reading a few passages
from a memoir on cricket he had recently written. He followed that with some
advice on the art of memoir writing for the participants. He explained why
reading was such an important skill to write good memoirs. He mentioned that
reading a dozen memoirs would teach the participant a lot more than just
listening to a talk.
He shared a list of his favorite memoirs with us
that included the books by Julian Barnes’, titled ‘Nothing to be frightened
off’ and by Nick Hornby, titled ‘Fever Pitch’.
He spoke about a memoir he had written on
cricket. He described how cricket was a parallel universe. For the viewer
disappointments were not taken personally, but wins were theirs to keep. And he
added that writing a memoir was not an easy task and every time he finished a
book, he felt he had a little less of himself.
Friends at the Festival
Before the workshop I made two new friends, Mrs
Patricia who had a writers club in Mumbai and a student from a local college by
the name of Anish. The student had a love for language and literature. He told
me how fortunate he was to understand three regional languages Marathi,
Gujarati and Hindi as he could read the great works of literature in their
native language through this skill.
The workshop was very informative and there was quite a lot to learn from Mr Soumya's extensive journalism experience.
The second workshop I planned to attend that
day, was a cultural journalism workshop by the writer Jerry Pinto. He started
the workshop with a quote from Mark Twain stating, ‘Journalism is literature in
a hurry.’ As a cultural journalist we had to answer the questions of What? Who?
When? Where? How? He spoke about how he took up an interesting cultural
journalism exercise of watching over 5000 foreign language films. He also
described his personal writing experiences and the stories behind the books he
had written. He had won a National Award for best book on cinema at the 54th
National Film Awards.
He told us why it was so important to have rich
and wide sources or means of inspiration. The richer the sources the richer the
output or production.He ended the workshop with an interesting
exercise. He told us to pick a partner from the audience, to interview the
partner and then to write a one page description about the person.
When you find a Kindred Spirit
I told the girl who was interviewing me, about
my gap year and educational experiment of the past year. After describing my
story, she shares with me her story. Surprisingly she too was a homeschooler.
She had studied at the Rishi Valley School in Coimbatore till the tenth grade
and after a year in a normal school decided to finish her 12th grade
through the national open schooling method. She had taken some time off to
travel and get some new experiences. She shared with me her experiences at Rishi
Valley, a TEDx Conference she organized and some of her travel experiences
around India. It was such an extra-ordinary coincidence that I had met her. I
was thinking about contacting someone from the Rishi Valley School the week
before, and that day I got to meet her. We exchanged contact details, hoping to
stay in touch and share more adventures and stories from our self-education
journeys.
Let us Learn Together
Tweet @AbhishekShetty_
Sat- chit - ananda
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