on hold

all chapters and related materials have been put on hold due to a request from a close friend. apparently, she believes that she can get it published. that isn't the reason why it has been put on hold from being published on the blog. she has requested firmly not to publish anything from the book until she reads it and feels that there is no market for it and that it can not get published.

i guess it can wait a month or two.

I

author's note

“As long as my frustration is there, I can write. But what if tomorrow I lose it? What if I am no longer frustrated?” I asked my friend with a lot of concern.

She said…

I never thought of writing a book. I had no intentions of. I started writing at an early age, but it wasn't anything more than diary entries that talked more about my frustration towards my parents’ behavior than anything else. All I wrote about was how I was nothing more than an M.S.M. (Marks Spitting Machine). All I ever thought about was how my parents wanted me to score better. I was an average student who could never score above 77.7% aggregate. I used to maintain a copy in which I would write down chapters of my pain and frustration. Soon, it contained more than academics. My personal life also became a part of it. Diary writing was good. And then it stopped. School was over and I didn't have anything to write about.

I can not recall how it all started but it just did. With my new computer, angst filled rock and metal, came creative speakers and Microsoft word. What I couldn't talk about was now put into Doc format. Soon I got into a college which I hate till date. I hated my parents for manipulating, emotionally blackmailing and putting me into that college. Before that, I hated the college itself. With the horrible college, came a far worse than horrible relationship. I was already high on psychology since my last year at school. Rock and metal were adding to intellectual dementia. The relationship was the icing. I confess: without the relationship, there would have been no book. I wrote. I wrote whatever I could. From diary entries to detailed prose, everything was written down. With no punctuation to care about, I wrote like a stark raving mad boy. I was young, high, pissed and hurt. The more the relationship dragged on, the more I wrote. I was foolish enough to place my career at stake for it. I was placing my relationship over my priorities or I’d say that my relationship was my priority. I was in love for the first time.

When one would look back in life and recall all the mistakes committed, one would discard some as his own mistakes and some as others’. That’s normal, but I wasn't. My volatility and temperament enforced the idea that everything was my fault. I blamed myself for its failure and lived with the burden for more than half a decade. I was dying inside.

So, how did the book come into existence? I wrote endlessly about what I felt whenever I could. Soon I found readers I could privately share my material with. One of them was A.A. she encouraged me to write a book. And that is how it happened. All the material collected over the years along with some new material to introduce fiction, amalgamated to produce the book. The new material had to be written in order to make use of existing material. Sometimes the fusion looked deliberate and made me conscious of it, but A.A. constantly motivated me. It took me about 2-3 months to write the connectors, the fillers and the end (with cartons of cigarettes to facilitate the process).

I had a plan in my mind. I had already decided on the end. I just wrote the fillers. I knew how it would end. I just needed to write how it would reach there.

The book was originally titled – ripping the ellipses. I didn't think it was vague. I didn’t care about what people thought as long as I had even one admirer. It was a personal book and I never wanted to get it published. Actually, I never thought of getting it published. However, I changed the title to the current one after I finished the book or when I was half-way through. I understood well that it would take the readers a lot to comprehend the concept behind the original title (which also happens to be the title of my blog). Most people I know do not understand it yet while some don’t ask and the rest don’t bother. The new title wasn’t as obscure as the first one.

Before I was even finished with the book, I was in a dilemma. I had 2 endings to decide upon. I couldn’t decide which one to pick. Once again I approached A.A. and made her read one ending. Though she said that she liked it but expressed that it lacked the intensity that. That was it. I knew what I had to do. I used both the endings but with one as the penultimate chapter. Also, during the course of writing, when I was finished with the first half, I took her advice and thoughts on it. I was constantly writing and experimenting. I trusted her judgment. Once I got the reaction I wanted from her as a reader, I was certain of how I wanted to shape my ending. And that is how it came about.

When I was finished with the book, small tragedies occurred. My hard disk crashed (thankfully I maintained a back up online but I lost edited chapters). Later, M.J., a person close to me, stole my book from my hard drive and went around sending excerpts from the book to chicks he wanted to impress. I have always been surrounded by such types.

Time passed and I moved on with life away from messy relationships, exceptionally trustworthy friends and a lot of other things. As I said earlier, had it been not for my first love, this book would have never happened. I give absolute credit or a little less than that to P.S. Had she not fucked things up, this wouldn't have happened. On second thoughts, I would want to take the credit too and share it with a lot of people. So, had we, the people, not fucked each others’ lives, this wouldn't have happened.

4 years have passed since I finished the book. A lot has happened since then. I started writing another book because I had another shitty relationship as a motivating factor. I am not the best person you would ever come across, but the only thing I can be proud of is that I have always been honest about things – brutally honest. And if the relationships were screwed, it wasn't a solo act – I always led the show. Coming back to the book, I would like to say that it was and still is a very personal book. What I thought and felt at that time need not necessarily be the same now. When I read the book again for editing, I felt as if it were written in the 90s. Well, technically speaking, most of the material was written in the early 21^st century. The book was in no way written with the idea of getting published. It was never commercial. I never thought that it had the market (while everyone who read it thought otherwise). I never wanted everyone to read it. It was my possession and I didn't want it to be read by everyone. I didn’t want it to be criticized. Now, I am open to it. It’s been a while. it's fine to share it.

Everyone, I, hereby, invite you to – thirty seconds to decay.

“As long as my frustration is there, I can write. But what if tomorrow I lose it? What if I am no longer frustrated?” I asked my friend with a lot of concern.

She said, equally concerned, “If you are frustrated today, you will be frustrated over something else tomorrow. Frustration will not die. You will continue to write”.

And so I do..

P.S. - i must tell you the ending of the book - everyone dies :)

synopsis

The book is a direct take on my personal life and draws inspiration from two major phases of my life – my immediate post-teen years and mid-twenties. These phases have shaped my character and personality and form an integral part of the book. Though some events have been modified slightly to suit the fictitious element of a book, the underlying heartfelt emotions are obviously left raw for the readers to experience.

The story centres around two young people: the narrator, Argon (the mid-twenties) and his friend, Iris (the immediate post-teen years). Through their conversation, I have tried to portray their angst and how they cope with and reconcile to the mediocrity and hypocrisy they see around them.

Initially, Argon is a subdued and mild person. He has his own judgments and opinions but likes to keep them to himself, thus respecting other’s opinions and space. He likes to play safe by not openly defying others. In fact he is portrayed as a person who couldn’t care much for society. He is content and happy with the way things are.

Iris, on the contrary, is aggressive and unhappy with society. He has an idealistic vision clearly divided by rights and wrongs, moral and immoral, and black and white. He sees no reason to compromise or constrain. He refuses to be lured by the comfort that is offered by mediocrity or hypocrisy, he is a cynic to the core and vehemently argumentative and passionate about real causes. He, for example, is the type of person who cannot sleep peacefully at night knowing that there are millions of Africans starving, and there is corruption and ignorance rampant in the system. He is an iconoclast and questions every value that society holds dear.

The book is divided into two parts to highlight the changes that have taken place in the central characters through passage of time. Part A talks about Argon and his endeavours to write a raw and intense book on drug addicts free from social bias and stigma a unique perspective. Thus, he soon finds himself visiting psychiatry wards of hospitals in the elusive search of a worthy protagonist to base his work on. This does not prove easy. But when he does find the right person, he takes an immediate liking towards him. The supposed protagonist happens to be none other than Iris.

Part A of the book revolves around the growing friendship of Iris and Argon, and how they influence each other greatly. Though it concentrates more on the camaraderie between the two and the complexity of their relationship than anything else, it also portrays the angst of the youth to a large extent where everyone is questioning the symmetry of life. All the characters play a pivotal role; however it is Argon and Iris who direct the flow of the story and each other’s lives. Though other characters act as catalysts to the relationship between these two people in Part A, they cannot be ignored as they influence the central characters in their own ways.

Part B is set a couple of years after Part A and illuminates the reader with the seemingly easy going yet complex life of the narrator and the relationship he shares with his friends. There is a drastic change in the way Part B is written, a few characters are introduced and each contributes to the pace of the story in their own way, while some characters from the past are reintroduced and mysteries surrounding them are brought to light.

Part B also talks about how the narrator’s life is troubled with his past and the nightmares he has to deal with in some way or the other. He is constantly disturbed most of the times and his way of adapting is to dismiss such thoughts in less than a minute as a defence. This idea is pervasive throughout the second half of the book as every unpleasant occasion and the consequent emotions take more or less thirty seconds to decay. It also happens to be the title of the book.

written by ambarin afsar and me.

thirty seconds to decay

this blog has been created primarily for publishing my book that goes by the same name.

it is just the beginning and i don't know how long it will take for me to edit and post it here, but i hope it will make it here if nowhere.

until then..

warm denial.

I