To a question am asked often (Why do you write?), my answer is simple. I see people. Really see them. When I see a mind, a talent, an imagination at work, the world falls away. My own imperfections fall away. I connect with the energy at work and my own energy feeds on it and I begin to see the source of a person and his or her creativity. Why they create, what they bring to their work, what it brings to them and to us. Every person is a new story of discovery. A new insight into the mystery of creation.
It is a privilege to witness talent. To write about it with humility and pure admiration.
When my son asks why I write even though I don’t make much money from it, I recall moments when I felt writing as a state of transcendent clarity. And the moment when I met an architect for the first time in an office designed by him and asked him if the new wing of a hospital I had been to a few times, had been designed by him? And then saw him reacting with a startled, “But how did you know?” I don’t know how but I did because there is something about artists and actors and musicians and designers and creative spirits that reaches out and reveals itself to me.
I remember writing about painters and architects I have never met and then reading their interviews where they echoed key phrases from my tributes. And being asked by an artist, “You penned down my creative process..how?”
I have no answer. It is just my way of worshipping the divine. That power of harmony and balance and love we see in the processes of nature. The power that guides us to create in whatever little ways something that mirrors the bigger picture made up of sunsets, oceans, silently whirring planets and valleys and rivers.
We all have a bit of the creator in us and my job as a writer is to bow before that without ego and judgement and snobbery. To celebrate those who create with love and commitment and pure passion.
That is what makes writing so purposeful to me. There are personal reasons too that I have shared before (http://unboxedwriters.com/2012/02/on-reading-and-writing/). I have written before about the reasons why one must write( http://unboxedwriters.com/2012/02/claim-your-story/).But am essentially a mirror and my job is to reflect the beauty of this world and its people in whatever way I can. That is why even though this site is not monetised, I commit myself to it everyday because it is a platform for not just writers but those who should be written about and are not.
And most of all it is all about the celebration of the best in us and others. And the connections we make when we see each other for who we really are beneath our fears and imperfections. I write not for a living. But to live.
Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is a mother, an RJ , an artist. She runs Unboxed Writers from a rickety computer , edited Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, authored Perfect Eight and earns a lot of joy through her various roles and hopes that some day working for passion will pay in more ways than just one. And that one day she will finally be able to build a dream house, travel around the world and look back and say, “It was all worth it.”