By Express News Service BENGALURU: When the lockdown was first announced, I saw it as a wonderful bat-given opportunity to complete my novel. What a wonderful time to be a writer, I told myself. Without the option of stepping out of the house, and with the essential provisions of the Internet and my laptop, there was no better time for me to finish it. I would use all the resources at my disposal, put my head down, and finally complete the novel that has been hanging as an albatross around my neck for over a year. Since childhood, writers were my heroes. While my friends wanted to become cricketers, I wanted to become a writer-cricketer. Someone who played cricket for India during the day and wrote novels in the night! When I used to read about writers of the past, I felt pangs of sympathy. They had to write with ink on paper all night, and then type out all the words on noisy typewriters. An error meant having to readjust the entire manuscript, and research meant spending hours at a library sifting through books. So that was my plan for the lockdown. To finish my novel in these months and send it to publishers. Hriday Ranjan The best about being a writer is telling people that you’re one. The worst part of being a writer is doing the actual writing. YouTube is the writer’s biggest enemy, and I promptly placed it on my browser’s Blocked List along with other unmentionable sites. But it would then slip in a notification on my tablet. If I put my tablet on silent mode, it would use my phone to send me a notification, or recommend a video from 2014, knowing well the weakness of my mind. Twitter – that massive feeder of one’s ego – would do its bit too, informing me of ‘mentions’ that people have made of me. Instagram would nudge me to let me know people were thinking of me. Facebook, a site I stopped visiting since my friends turned expert political commentators a few years ago, seemed intent on renewing our bonds of friendship. But it wasn’t just digital distraction I had to deal with. Notes from my M.Phil. days suddenly seemed rather interesting. Books I’d bought years ago and imprisoned in my book-rack began to implore me to liberate them. ‘You don’t need to read us, just sift cursorily through our pages. Just give us a chance’, they said. I suddenly felt an urge to read others’ books – which was a strange feeling. Like escaping to somebody else’s honeymoon on the day of my own wedding! My dumbbells and pull-up bar, that had been given step-fatherly treatment all year, suddenly seemed like nice people. I have come to realise that when you really want to write something from the bottom of your heart, the entire universe conspires to distract you from your goal. I now envy writers of the past. They had their note books, a pen, and a typewriter. Ernest Hemingway did not tag Mark Twain on Instagram. Stephen King did not share funny memes with Jeffrey Archer. George RR Martin could write the Game of Thrones because Neil Gaiman did not send him invitations to midnight games of Ludo. They could focus on their books. This week marks two months since the lockdown was announced. Which begs the question – how many words have I written so far? Let me answer it by putting across another question – what was Aryabhatta’s contribution to the world of mathematics?

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