India, Nov. 21 -- Once, I used to be a writer. Literally. I wrote with a fountain pen that often leaked, until people returning from the Gulf brought Hero pens as gifts. Many in my generation remember the delight of that ritual and, of course, the small frustrations that accompanied it. My earliest published stories were scribbled on wan, inexpensive paper so porous that the ink spread like an untamed mob. On those fragile pages flowed the ideas that became poems, stories, and my earliest features in print.
There was nothing dramatic about the way I wrote, nothing like the exaggerated portrayals in films. No paper balls flung to the floor in irritation, no drifting asleep at the desk mid-sentence, no tortured artistic frenzy. Just a young ...