Envious

Envy is termed as an evil word, but then again when it is one of the seven deadly sins you can’t help but associate it with evil, but I think being envious enables us to beat our competition. As is sloth, giving us the much needed rest after a day’s tiring work or greed which helps us achieve our over ambitious dreams and pushes the extent human understanding a little further and lust which keeps almost each and every species on Earth from becoming extinct. The Merriam Webster’s Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary defines envy as” the feeling of wanting to have what someone else has”. I don’t see that as something immoral, much less a sin. In the world of copyright infringement and intellectual property theft, imitation may not be the sincerest form of flattery, and it’s much needed replacement is envy.

Envy in the minds of an inhabitant is not a very complex idea. We want to have some that someone else has, maybe even without working as hard as he did because the some things you desire can be yours only by just pure sheer unadulterated luck. I have been reading the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling (to keep the 21 year old baby happy) and I can’t help but wonder at the amount of excruciating details that her creativity holds, how could she come up with ”accio” as a summoning charm, or “thestrals” which only the ones who have witnessed someone’s death infront of them can see and how in the world could she think of making the most powerful dark wizard and then dividing his soul into 7 horcruxes to make him immortal. I can’t help but slow-clap at this entertaining piece of literature which takes us into morality and shows us that we choose who we become. As the part of the fringe of the writing community, I can’t help but feel a tinge of jealousy for her who writes oh, so beautifully.

Then everytime, I pick up an Orhan Pamuk book, he makes me feel that everything I write is actually an affliction to the society, but then they say “Old habits die hard” and so I continue to inflict my so called opinion into this world which then stares down to the abyss of nothingness. In one of his books there is this quote which is quite close to my heart, “We honour the ideal, but savour the ordinary” which makes me realise me that even though we have literature from the likes of Salman Rushdie or VS Naipaul, we still like to indulge in a bit of Chetan Bhagat or Stephanie Meyer every now and then. The legend of David and Goliath still rings as an inspiration to the underdogs in the whole world even now, and with them the supporters carve a new underdog waiting to beat the heavy favourites every now and then. Even Chetan Bhagat has this wonderful trait of building his character through the dialogues they deliver even when writing a single dialogue for me is tougher than a problem of integral calculus (True Story). 

Now that I am watching less TV series and reading more novels, it feels like I have miles to go before I become a half decent writer. In a world where a book series keeps the whole world on a stand still, I am ofcourse talking about The Song of Fire and Ice whose writer George RR Martin has given us a TV and book series that will have a cult following even years after. So how could I not be in complete admiration of the minds which have procured such procured such tales with such diminutive details and be in complete awe and feel a tiny bit of envy which has produced such masterpieces?

People often say that our imagination is capable of having worlds inside our heads, but I feel the things we really imagine, is delivered by reality with a nonchalant shrug almost as if it was mockery. In this beautiful planet Earth that we live in, and the fantastic creation of Facebook has shown me how you can weave stories with substance out of thin air by just being sensitive to the world around you. I envy that kind of observational skills and there is a certain knack in almost every writer friend of mine that I envy and I wish I had them, like someone’s ease with words, or their rich vocabulary or how their writings actually speak out to you and you can relate to it. I envy all those, who are writing and have the zeal to write until the day I feel I have produced something of worth, you are welcome to shower down with comments and criticism because I have heard that it builds character, and I hope that the envy in me keeps burning brightly as a flame in an atmosphere with good oxygen content because there are miles to go before I sleep and being a master procrastinator that I am I would for once would like to feel fulfilled before I sleep.