People are strange

An old friend of mine called me this morning. I’m not really sure what he wanted to talk about. I think he mentioned that he had extra airtime on his phone and automatically a part of my mind went, “Hmmmmmmm?”

Anyway, he asked me about writing, wanting to know how I write ‘so much’. Frankly speaking the question puzzled me because I write nowhere nearly as much as some people I know in the media and even in academia. For this friend of mine, the problem stems from his profession and training: he’s a lawyer. So inevitably, he has to be careful with what he writes. However, writing is a form of self-expression and it is quite therapeutic too.

Coincidentally, I have a student who is also facing a load of problems with his writing. This student’s problem however stems from a different source and unfortunately I cannot reveal his circumstances. Suffice to say that he has limited access to computers and material.

Computers have been a boon to writers and also a bane: certainly it has made writing a much simpler process and it has also made it possible for us to write much better than we would ordinarily be able to thanks to spell-checkers and a multitude other writing tools and aids. Computers have also stripped the glamour from writing to a large extend.

There was a time when those who could read and write were important people who were sough after for their help in deciphering the mysteries of the written word. Not so long ago, and to a certain extent today still, there were people whose livelihood come from writing names and information in official forms. They sit at tiny tables outside government offices and wait for people to come to them to fill in the numerous forms that the bureaucracy force people to fill. These people are beginning to disappear, where their numbers were many, they are now few. As literacy grows among our people, the magic associated with writing disappears as it becomes a more mundane act. This is a good thing, excellent in fact, but it also means the passing of one world and the rise of a different one.

Today, there seems to be two kinds of writing: writing with electronics and writing on paper. The former seems to be so mundane that it goes almost unnoticed except when it is not on the flashy latest computer or gadget. Even then it is not the writing that people see but the gadget. For example, I used to have a pda. It was a fun gadget and it was useful too, in many ways. Writing on the pda was fun and you could do it practically everywhere. I soon realised that I could enter a cafe, a restaurant, an office, even a masjid, sit in a corner and write away on my machine without any one even so much as glance. I once entered a roadside restaurant and decided to make some notes of some things I had to do that day. The moment, I put my to the paper of my notebook, I saw the proprietor and his staff look in my direction suspiciously. He then came up to me to ask me what I was doing. I was making a ‘to do’ list at the cafeteria on campus when I was asked by several people, “tulis apa tu?”. Strangely, there were people sitting at the other tables typing away on their PDAs intently. It seems that typing on a machine is mundane and not worth noting but writing in a notebook that cost a fraction of the cost of the PDA.

So, I guess I need to ask my friend which kind of writing he was interested in.