365 Days- Book I

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September 19, 2018

"Advertisements are everywhere, aren't they? Write using the slogan or line from an ad."

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Dr Lal hated his 3 o'clock Wednesday's appointment. As a psychiatrist, he was supposed to be impartial ('detached, impervious, un-involved, nonchalant...) ... he closed his eyes willing his mind to shut off its forays into the thesaurus. It was this growing fascination with the thesaurus, and the dictionary, and the grammar guide, and the idioms and synonyms and homonyms and...

"Enough" he gritted through his teeth, it was all the fault of Mr Anand, a man who had no joy in his life. A man so troubled by his vice that even a simple task of reading a newspaper or going on a morning walk was trigger enough for his violent outbursts. Unfortunately, Dr Lal could understand that Mr Anands' outburst were driven by a passion for the language, a passion slowly turning into an obsession as he could not help but agree with Mr Anand's theories.

By all counts, Mr Anand was a normal man, though his love for the language had been both mellowed and overwrought by his profession; he was a teacher of the English language. And the consistent, gradual yet persistent degradation of the language, the induction of new meaningless words (in his opinion) and the rise of the 'texting' where shortcuts and single alphabets replaced quite a few words; were cold blooded murder.

A part of Mr Anand did agree that he had to change with the times, that his insistance of adhering to the age old grammar rules was dictatorial, yet it was not to be. Each time he decided to overlook an error, he found mistakes by the bucketful. The newspapers had punctution mistakes and the bill boards...Dr Lal shuddered to think about them. Mr Anand had once got around a hundred of them, each with mistakes that stopped being funny after sometime. He could sympathise with Mr Anand, those mistakes were not merely mutilation of the language, they were a brutal systematic murder.

Unfortunately, Dr Lal had no idea how to treat Mr Anand, except to lend a sympathetic ear, one which turned to be willing and one which now threatened to convert him. Just the other day, he had read a notice and it had been difficult to quell the desire to strangle the painter or advertiser who had apparently no qualms in warning " GO SLOW, Accident Porn Area" 

At that moment he understood the angst and agony of Mr Anand.

However, six months of the sessions had no discernible effect on Mr Anand, while Dr Lal appeared to be turning into a grammar Nazi; he had to find a solution and quickly. 

Desperate times call for desperate measures, courtesy his new found obsession with the language, but it did help Dr Lal arrive at a possible solution.One he stumbled upon as Mr Anand bemoaned the use of exclamation marks instead of a period; and the general scattering of the ellipses instead of the em dash. He listened politely and at the appropriate juncture, voiced his idea, couched as a mild suggestion.

"Why do you not write a book?"

He got the answer he expected (or rather anticipated or sort of hoped or presumed, assumed, contemplated...), admonishing his mind, he heard Mr Anand's reply, "Please there are too many grammar guide books and who reads them, anyway? Most of the stories and articles are written..."

"I agree but if you wrote it as a story, like personifying the punctuation marks, having them bemoan their sorry state, the language crying about the injustice done to them..."

He let the suggestion hang in midair, it had to be mild, (benign, faint, mellow, vague, tepid, warm...) but when he saw a spark (gleam, glint, glow, sparkle, flicker, enough!) in Mr Anand's eyes, he knew he had won the round. 

The next session saw Mr Anand discuss the bare outline, mainly the two protagonists, Dramatica and Grammatica, twin sisters, with their retinue of servants; the exclaima, the colona, the questiona and the comma. Dr Lal was pleased and relieved, a relief that increased with time as Mr Anand cut down his sessions; he no longer had time for his temper outbursts as he spent every moment writing his 'magnum opus.', imbuing the story with purple prose and sarcasm to draw attention to how the language was being butchered. 

Initially Dr Lal was upset (disturbed, bothered, disconcerted, hurt, disquieted...)not to be privy to the plot but later was quite grateful for his exclusion, especially when his mind did not conjure the synonyms for his gratitude.

One year later, Mr Anand had the book published with unexpected and unanticipated results. Though it was a success, it was not for reasons he wanted it to be and he never admitted to anyone that he was the author. It was an embarrassment he could never live down; it was a nightmare that both the name of book and the author (he did use a pseudonym but that did not change the fact that is was wrongly printed) were misspelled and he could not call attention to it.

His book however, was quite a hit; most presumed it to be a high level, philosophical novel, dealing with love and lust, written ambiguously only to preserve the true identities of all involved. That was the only explanation that could be given to the book published as 

    Bare with Me

(for the love of the word)  

By

La La Nand  

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Word count - 900 - So I though I would try humour, a spoof on my very own obsession with grammar. I would love to know your views.