Of my own accord, I hadn’t written anything of interest-evoking, eye-lens-focusing merit for months. I’d ceded the grey, furrowed, battlements of my cerebrum to the present-day opiate of the masses – the hallowed trio of television, internet, and coffee-shops. The conceit of being skilled with ink had never actually been more than proud self-deceit for a sleazy skill of idly dancing the pen through my fingers, but even this had been vaporizing to thin air above gurgling, rising bubbles of self-loathing. Falling into the intoxicating meadows of self-pity was just a shady escape. I could not truthfully say that Life, in an increasingly disillusioned and bored mood, rolled the lush leaves of my potential and smoked them, leaving the wafts of self-loathing rise to my upturned nose.

My dejected mind searched for a muse, even a generous speck of inspiration, to channel ink onto the shapely, dry riverbeds of my paper. Alas, none came. Left with neither a last, valiant riposte nor an undignified evasion, I surrendered myself to a destiny beyond my will. But lo and behold! Having bequeathed myself to the Nihilism, setting no mighty crown of literary recognition in store for me, its fair, decisive and ironic eyes turned to me. The Three Fates, spinning the thread of life into the garb of Discordia and mutating the fabric of space and time in the process, stitched up the black hole I was swathed in to give me an opening out. Redemption had arrived in my inbox.

And here I am now, an empowered metaphor on the edge of a cliff, separated from a limitless expanse by a chasm in between. Will my textual simulation be able to take the leap from the end of this self-important account, over the till-now fortuitous forces of randomness, and into the meadow where the sweet flowers of letters await my rusting Broca’s area to synthesise them into an elixir of lexemes? I may, fate may, or, either may not. But in whichever dimension the future’s pendulum swings, if I am to enjoy the fruits of my words, I’ll have to believe that it was me, who ripened and brought fruition to them. If not, sink back into the same self-destructive, reinforcing whirlpool of impotent atrophy I shall. Luck may have brought me to this reckoning, and may always be behind the write right turns I take. But in the end, I must fool myself into vainly ascribing to a volition of mine the vision that sees how far the chasm of luck extends; into accrediting to a personal inner light my accurate gauging and safe leap; into lauding myself for not having plunged into the unknown and fallen into a serendipitous abyss where only ill-scattered boughs of destiny can break my blind fall by the scruff of my neck.

In this unsettled, under-confident world ridden with magic and meaning, my fate is sealed – I, the writer, must be my muse.

I am thinking. The ‘black’. What could that be? What powers does it have to make the eyes moist? It is not allowed to make me weak. It could not control me. It is ‘black’. I am thinking. But it is something beyond thought, as well. What is it? It’s the beginning. It is the end. “Beginning is beautiful”, I’ve heard people say. It’s not Earth. It’s not water. It’s beyond all that. Hence, it is not beauty. It’s ‘black’. It’s present, everywhere. Only that, one needs to see it. Identify that which one can’t see.

It flies, I found. It’s movement is found by the blackness it leaves behind. What brings the smile in me is this. The black left behind, can never be seen. Can never be found. There are times when one feels like seeing that blackness just once more. Feeling guilty for not identifying the black when it was present in front of them. It’s chooses to remain a faded memory.
It flutters, the black, here, in front of me. I realize it. The moment I do, it’s all around. Revealing itself to me. Black. The moment before life. The pulse of life. The world inside the one who lives in the world outside. The self reflected through another’s. The moment of the pulse lost. Present, then gone. The vaccum. The Black Butterfly. Pulse. Life.

By,

Matangi Mawley

To us tapping away on our keyboards, even the pen and paper belong to the past, but there was a time, not just before Christ but for centuries afterward too, when people used the feather of a bird, usually the goose, to write with.

Imagine having to dip into a pot of ink after every few words. And would not the first word have been darker than the second, and the second word darker than the third and so on, till the words grew faint. And even in the same word, the letters must have got progressively thinner and lighter!

And after dipping the quill in the ink and before writing the first letter, would not the quill have had to travel across the paper in which time the writer had to see that no drop dripped and splashed on the paper? Out of the many trips the quill made to the ink pot, wouldn’t a splash or two of ink have been inevitable? Imagine writing the Magna Carta and splotching it while writing the last word!

And if you were in a tearing hurry, scratching away as fast as you could could wear out the quill, apart from running the risk of toppling the ink bottle. For it wasn’t one of these Made in China items of today. You had to choose only from one of the first five flight feathers of the bird. And you needed a feather from the left wing if you were right handed, it fit the hand better.

A good part of the time it took to write was spent on sharpening the quill. There were special knives for the purpose. The feather had to be very gently trimmed and sharpened, for if you were a little less careful, you had to go chasing a goose again.

God bless those who made the pen and pencil!

PREFACE

The human mind, though being endowed with the greatest faculty of thinking, has its own limitations when it tries to comprehend things that are beyond its reach; the realms of history are thus circumscribed by the mind’s capacity for inclusive concentration. Inclusive concentration is admirable indeed, as long we don’t get lost in the half-truths that we superstitiously cling to. The reader may wonder what I really mean when I allude to the whole being greater than the parts in the case of history which is supposed to be full of mere facts. The question naturally arises as to how history must be viewed. Before being subjected to strong dozes of spirituality in a field considered to be conspicuously materialistic, the reader, I assume, will appreciate if I start from the first principles.  The best way to start is to ask ourselves what kind of a study history is, what we can learn from it and why we tend to treat it as a study that is divorced from the social sciences or say, Reality, if I can broaden the field of inquiry to supraphysical domains.

Individuals create histories, events don’t. It is we who decide and shape the course of our evolution ultimately.  If not for human volition and aspiration, would we have become what we are today?  I have chosen to call the series ‘India eternal: A picture of India in her entirety’ and the very title would have given you an inkling as to what we will deal with; the focus is Indian history indeed but our study will concentrate specifically on the development of India from the 1800s.

People say times have changed; life now isn’t what it was a few decades back. It’s become increasingly complex and wonderfully technological– the one part of everyday existence that we most like because it makes things so easy for us. But if we really think about what has made development possible, we notice that time hasn’t changed but people have. Their attitudes and aspirations have probably multiplied a thousand fold. What has brought about this fundamental change in attitudes that has given people the power to accomplish though the society seems to be filled with deep levels of fragmentation?

Dear reader, I am as willing and open-minded as you to discover the truths that remain hidden in the vestiges of time. Let’s climb this ladder called history one step at a time and search for answers that man has been indifferent to, for ages. The wonder about questions is, the more you seek them, the more they guide you. With questions as our knowledge base, we will traverse through the adventurous pathway that I believe will take us to the land of surprises and fresh perspectives.

You get too busy chasing dreams you don’t realise what to do with what’s at hand. That’s what happened with I, the Writer when I carelessly let her (The idea that I the Writer–read the all-encompassing Shakti– has her unique personality appeals to me!) fade away. Lesson learnt: No action plan, no accomplishment. Period.

What started as a literary digital magazine is now an online magazine that offers a lot of scope and choice for the creative souls to carve what they want. The Magazine will now feature articles on any subject as long as they are sensible.

This is indeed a new beginning, a fresh possibility to explore the multi-dimensional realms of imagination, with your support and encouragement.

Thank you!