Penning down emotions
N J Ravi Chander
Post-retirement from State Bank of India in January 2019, the creative juices in me have begun to flow again. A string of “Middles”, and travelogues penned by me has made it to the pages of many popular dailies. Observing my name in print is akin to hovering on cloud nine, and the accolades that follow are a bonus. The writing habit has enabled me to explore the road less travelled and bring back a kaleidoscope of memories from my childhood and youth.
My flirting with writing got a shot in the arm after I enrolled at the St.Joseph’s College in the late 70s to pursue a degree in Arts. The literary club formed by the students ran a monthly wall magazine which featured fascinating titbits of campus life and other engrossing lighter vein articles.
Some of the students were popular ‘middlers’ and held their own against established writers. Their writings rubbed off on me, and soon I became a regular on the letters page. I recall how my eyes shone with excitement when my first letter got published in the Deccan Herald on April 13, 1980. It was an innocuous piece meant to correct a wrong fact put forth by another letter writer in the same column. Since then, close to 10,000 letters have made it to the pages of scores of publications across the country.
My wife’s culinary skills, my mother’s efforts to raise five of us, the travails my elder son faced while getting admission in a convent school, the exchange of letters with my late father, M N Jayaraman, were some of the lesser-known topics I wrote on. As a hockey player, I had a fancy for writing letters on sports, and this continues to be one of my favorite topics.
I recollect plodding or wheeling down on my bicycle to the newspaper offices in the cantonment to drop off my letters at the reception. In the pre-internet era, we scribbled the material on a piece of paper pulled out of a notebook, and the work took around three to four days to see the light of day. My late father Sri M N Jayaraman was my ardent fan and critic and went to town advertising my feat every time my name appeared in print.
Circa 1990, I took the big plunge in writing features. An insignificant number got published in the weekly tabloid, ‘The City Tab’. But my interest in this form of writing waned when the tabloid ceased publication after a few years.
A younger sibling – number four -J Gokul Nath, had a yen for writing even at the tender age of eight. He bagged the top prize in the intra-school essay writing contest when in Class III and got felicitated in the morning assembly amidst cheers. An inter-school debating contest for high school students got featured in the tabloid, and Gokul’s prize-winning effort got a special mention.
Circa 1995, the Times of India, Bengaluru, began a popular column “Sporting Encounter” inviting original anecdotes from readers. One of my entry published on 03.06.1995 won the top prize – a buffet dinner for a family of four at the Central Park.
Soon after being ushered into the dining area and seeing the delightful spread, my two-year-old son J R Sunny was like a kid in a chocolate factory. No sooner than we began tucking into the food, the little brat darted across the room and had his finger on the tarts, cakes, chocolates and pies much to our chagrin. Unable to rein him in, we exited the buffet lunch in a hurry, leaving our unfinished meal behind!
(The writer is a former banker who has taken up writing as a pastime. His work has been published in the Deccan Herald, The New Indian Express, The Tribune, The Hitavada, The City Tab and The Hans India. He also writes for Kashmir Vision)
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