Welcome to My Blog (Notes on Genre, Perhaps)

Better late than never. Better Johnny-Come-Lately than Johnny-Come-Never. Etc. The challenge: to go beyond the cliché.

Therefore: consider the genre of the provisional. Think genre. Think genre as the enemy of cliché. Think genre as an adventurous and unavoidable negotiation between the discipline of form and the freedom of expression. What form? What expression? That is a matter of (some) choice. But no freedom without discipline, no expression without form. Nothing new without something already given.

Think blog as an exercise in life writing—even as a life in writing, through writing. Think blog as the intersection of the literary and the critical, the personal and the quoted, the reinvention of the personal essay, R. K. Narayan and Hazlitt in the twenty-first century (memories of undergraduate classrooms in postcolonial Madras). Think, as resistance to given forms of thinking, the form of other thinkings: yaadhum oore, yaavarum kelir (Everywhere is my home, everyone my kin). That might be the subject for an interesting blog. As might something as topical as the intolerance of censorship in India. Or notes on a childhood in Nigeria. Or the conflicted American-ness of Richard Wright. Or love, in translation. Think the shape of private thought in a public space—reflection as re-citation.

Think brevity, find spontaneity. Perhaps. Write in the perhaps—not always, but as often as possible.

DON’T think what has never been thought before—there is no such thing. Perhaps.

It’s time. It’s been time for quite some time. Welcome to my blog. (Better late than never. The challenge: to go beyond cliché.)