‘ What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories. ’ W.S. Maugham   Middle of sixth decade is not even the beginning of old age; Today, old age is believed to commence at sixty-six. By this logic sixth decade is the old age of the youth. Memories of past now overwhelm the dreams of future. When future shrinks both in size and the scope of its possibilities, past appears more intriguing.     Mummy     Mummy was the pivot of my life when I was young. As I grew, she got relegated to periphery. I do not know how or when this process set in. I woke up to it only when her failing health forced me to pay her more attention.   Now I often wonder about it. … Mummy cooked the best food in the world. This was as obvious as the fact that day followed the night. Mummy was beautiful. My idea of beauty grew from her. That she was short and fat did not matter. This was...

My Troubles with English   I studied English for twelve years in school; And learned only recently – nearly four decades after I had finished school – that in my entire life I haven’t had a single lesson in the language. Epiphany dawned only when I picked up pen to write down a few recurrent ideas that hovered incessantly in my head and wouldn’t let me in peace. I should consign these to a notebook and then will be rid of them. This seemed an easy solution. But I was soon confronted with a paralysing disability that froze the pen in my hand and the flow of thoughts in my mind. I was aghast. I had been reading seriously – people said obsessively – and honestly enjoying books of varied genres in English for decades. Of late, I had even begun to appreciate the prose style of the author. I liked the book not only for its content but also for its language. I would read, again and again, the paragraph, the sentence, the phrase, that appealed to my taste. I would close the book an...

I read George Orwell’s  Nineteen Eighty-Four,  published in 1949, many years ago. Orwell painted a chilling picture of a dystopian superstate, Oceania, in the book. I could not imagine then, that I will return to the book in a few years, to better understand the prevailing socio-political milieu in my country. Some days back Central Board of Secondary Education removed excerpts of two poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz – one of the most talented poets of twentieth century who wrote in Urdu – from the curriculum of 10 th  and 12 th  classes. I read this news with horror as I recognised the similarity between Oceania of Orwell’s  Nineteen Eighty-Four  and our present. Rulers of Oceania have designed a completely new language, the Newspeak, and want to erase the old language, the Oldspeak, from people’s memory. ‘All real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. … (it) will exist only in Newspeak versions, no...

Urge to peep behind the stage to witness how your favourite author wrote the books you have adored to distraction must be common among obsessive readers. But books are produced not merely in the process of writing them out. A writer’s workshop is much larger than his study, the chair he sits upon, and the table on which he writes. Life is his workshop. Every experience is grist to the mill that produces his work. The Summing Up is W. Somerset Maugham’s expression of his thoughts on the art he practiced all his life. He wrote the book when he was sixty. In it he indulges the peeping Tom among his readers; but only those who are curious about his writing. He believed it was 'dangerous to let public behind the scenes'. If, in this book, he loosens the guard a little, it is because at sixty he feels that for him ‘the race now is nearly run and it would ill become' him to conceal the truth. ‘This is not autobiography nor it is a book of recollections. In one way and another...