The pen on paper is a dead man walking

Finally, a protest. We live in the age of erasures, where the word winks out at a touch on the keyboard. Within seconds the sentence comes together like waters closing, and no memory of that lost word endures.

Indian Ink, on the other hand, doesn’t erase easily. Words struck out, still show on the page. The eye is distracted. It goes back to inspect the body of crime, for the pen on paper is a dead man walking.

Each word we write is a moiety of ourselves. Ink is just another vehicle for DNA and this makes the newspaper a dead giveaway. The words that inform also brand the mind with an image of the hand that wrote them. Long after the news is forgotten, the reader’s memory can recall the emotion behind the words: apathy or compassion, dread or derision, censure or ignorance.

When ‘9-year-old mentally challenged girl molested’ is repeated in the paragraph following that headline, I know the writer has felt no outrage. The requisite labels inform, but they elude the central atrocity: a child was raped. ‘9 year old mentally challenged girl’ does not convey what the word child would have—the writer’s pain.

About this week’s haul of smuggled diamonds at Sahar, ‘the accused hid the diamonds in their private parts,’ should be enough. But it isn’t. The next line continues: ‘Officials recovered four packets of rough diamonds from Dianguena’s rectum and three packets from Juana’s vagina. This can mean one of two things. Either the reporter has only just discovered which parts of the body are private and is eager to share his epiphany. Or, more likely, he’s a slimeball.

Would these reports have been different if they had been written by hand? Yes, if in typing them out, the writer was actually reading what appeared on his screen. No, if he proceeded directly to spellcheck. The smart thing to do then would be to quit writing.

What if we had to write on palm leaf or clay tablets? Our ancestors did. They had to be terse, there was so little space. They didn’t use the sms copout. Writing was moment in itself and could not be trivialized. A small space was enough if the words were right. That took thinking. That took time. It was not the act of writing that was laborious. The labour lay in arriving at a decision about what to say. The hard work was the thought.

That’s what Indian Ink is all about: the thought behind each word. Meaning informs, but it cannot illuminate. It works fine if all that’s needed is a nodding acquaintance with a word. But a thought is so much more than information, it is your take on information. It has your DNA on it. When it drops on the page, it is the body of your crime. It tracks you down, there’s no place to hide.

You wouldn’t have picked up a pen if you wanted to hide.  The timorous have swords and guns, missiles and bombs. You, braveheart, all you have to state your case, is Indian Ink.