Tamil Nadu

To record the daily events in one’s life

Flip through the pages of the Diary of Samuel Pepys, the Englishman who left a graphic picture of the plague and the great fire of London to posterity. Take a look at the voluminous The Diary of A Writer by Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian who confessed in it his ups and downs as a writer. Wonder at the multi-volume Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, in which the Dubash to Monsieur Dupleix has recorded his impressions of the 18th century Pondicherry. Every reader of these works i s amazed at the amount of patience that has gone into the making of these Diaries.

Not everybody can write. Writing is a boon. Only one in a thousand can wield a pen. It is not like brandishing a sword which can be done after acquiring a certain amount of skill. And even among writers only one in a thousand maintained a diary. “All those who want to write should necessarily own a typewriter and a bundle of Writing paper.

And then a mind to write”. That was Somerset Maugham, the well-known fictionist of Of Human Bondage fame, advising an aspiring writer. By that same logic, if one decides to maintain a diary, all that one has to do is to own a diary and a pen, plus a mind to write. The last in the list of equipments is the most essential one – the mind. How long we will have the mind to write a Diary is a poser that can never be answered, for who can understand the vagaries of the mind?

By the second or the third week of December diaries of different sizes and hues flood the market. Big publishing houses send their compliments in the form of diaries to their authors. Magazines that do not believe in hiring middlemen entice their readers by making them subscribers for 3 to 5 years, if not for life, and show their gesture of gratitude by presenting them with a beautiful diary, which at a later date may even pass for a collector’s item. Almost every business firm prides in distributing the best of diaries that they could afford to their customers. And the people who receive them as gifts very rarely find any use for them. Hence such gifts are usually gifted away. School children use them as rough notebooks.

Housewives use them to practise the art of drawing kolams and breadwinners use them as their account books. While writers like R.K.Narayan used diaries to write their fiction, a few use them as address books.

Not all flowers of the same plant reach the temple to deck the deity’s head or neck. Some get trampled and some lucky ones manage to enhance damsel’s hairdo. So too most of the diaries, however attractive they may be, get discarded by their owners only to be taken in bundles along with old newspapers and unwanted magazines to Sivakasi fireworks to be blown into shreds and then littered all through the streets till a duty conscious scavenger takes up the trouble of giving them their due. There can be only one reason to start a diary.

That is to record the daily events in one’s life. But there can be hundreds of reasons for stopping the diary. And the predominant among them is the one that is born with everyone of us – lethargy. Yet some overcome this lethargy by writing the diary…And that is only for a few days.

P.RAJA

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