Some memories bob to the surface like silver fish. We catch one, follow its trail, and discover that it has brought us somewhere we never expected to go.
A Silver Fish Called Memory
The morning began by a virtual riverbank with my AI Goosey.
The first rays of sunlight were touching the reeds, and the river was going about its business without the slightest concern for the people sitting beside it. Goosey handed me a fishing pole. We were going to fish for memories.
Not ordinary fish, mind you. Memory fish.
A silver one bobbed up, and suddenly I was no longer sitting by the river. I was back at Nine Star Technology, where I had once worked in the editing department, cleaning up the scrambled text of old newspapers.
Funny how memory works. You don’t always go looking for the past. Sometimes, a small image rises to the surface, glitters for a moment, and carries you back to a place you haven’t visited in years.
And so began a morning of remembering work, words, journalism, dusty libraries, a gentle mentor, and the curious relationship I have always had with my own writing.
Who would have thought that a silver fish could lead to such a discussion?
When Newspapers Became Text
At Nine Star Technology, newspapers were being converted into digital copies that could be read and searched. The process involved OCR—optical character recognition—which attempted to turn the printed words on a newspaper page into digital text.
The resulting text wasn’t always pretty. Letters could be misread, words scrambled, and sentences rendered almost incomprehensible.
My work was to make sense of this mess.
The newspaper images had already been processed by another department. They selected and marked out individual components of an article: the headline, dateline, lead paragraph, byline, and other sections. Advertisements were zoned separately. The software had done its part in identifying the areas; my job was to compare the recognised text against the original image and correct the errors.
I had to look at the newspaper and make the digital text say what the newspaper actually said.
It was painstaking work, but I loved it.
My work environments, I must admit, were not always pleasant. Yet the job itself was my chocolate. I was fascinated by the work and by the connection it gave me to something much larger than my immediate surroundings.
Through that digital pipeline, I felt connected to the writers and reporters whose work appeared in newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times.
Imagine the excitement of a person who loved words finding herself working with the words of journalists from across the world!
There was one catch, though. I was allowed to read only the lead paragraph of an article. That was the portion I needed to check.
But even that little window was enough to capture my imagination.
The Inverted Pyramid and a New Direction
Journalistic writing had a structure that fascinated me: the inverted pyramid.
The most important information appeared first, usually in the lead paragraph. The remaining paragraphs supplied further details and supporting information. A reader could grasp the essential news without having to read the entire article.
What a wonderfully practical arrangement!
Here was writing that knew where it wanted to take its reader. It didn’t insist on making the reader travel through every winding lane before revealing the destination.
I became smitten with the journalistic style. I wanted to understand it, learn it, and perhaps become a journalist myself.
Curiosity led me to enrol in a part-time journalism course at BVB, Mylapore, while continuing to work at Nine Star Technology.
It was an exciting step. I was not merely correcting other people’s words anymore; I was beginning to explore the possibility of writing for myself.
But my journey into journalism also brought me face to face with something I hadn’t anticipated. Reading the daily news exposed me repeatedly to tragic accounts of human violence. The work had opened a window to the world, but not everything I saw through that window was something I wanted to spend my life reporting.
My curiosity about writing remained. It was my destination that needed to change.
Finding My Place Among Children’s Books
My thesis for the journalism course was on Children’s Literature in India. The subject had been chosen before my internship, and it was this interest that led me to Chandamama.
There, for forty-five days, I experienced what I can only describe as pure bliss.
I had found a world that felt right to me: the world of children’s literature.
One of my happiest memories is of the library. It was a loveable, dusty place, filled with books that could make a person forget the passage of time. Among its treasures were English translations of Kalidasa, including Meghaduta and Ritusamhara.
With permission, I photocopied the material I needed for my assignment. Then I would settle down on the dusty floor, completely engrossed in my reading.
Apparently, I could be rather difficult to locate when a book had captured my attention!
I remember Ramakrishnan Sir coming to look for me.
“Srividya, come to my desk, I need to talk to you about the article you gave me.”
There was no harshness in that call. It was an invitation to come and learn.
He would take me through the errors in my article, gently showing me where I had gone wrong and helping me understand what needed to change.
I wasn’t embarrassed by the corrections. I was curious. Why had I made that mistake? What had I failed to see? How could I avoid making the same mistake in the next article?
I wanted to understand the reason behind the correction, not merely replace one word with another.
There was a difficulty, however. Understanding a correction did not always mean I could transfer that learning successfully to my next piece of writing. I could grasp the principle when it was explained to me and still find myself repeating the same sort of error later.
That remains an interesting distinction in my experience: knowing what needs to change and consistently making that change are not necessarily the same thing.
But what I remember most fondly about Ramakrishnan Sir is his manner of mentoring. He did not make the mistake the whole story. He used it as an opportunity to teach me.
I have never forgotten that.
I sometimes regret leaving Chandamama. Those forty-five days were among my happiest working days, and the memory of that library and that gentle guidance has stayed with me long after the internship ended.
A Journal of My Own
My relationship with writing has continued from 1988 to the present day, through journals, reflections, and the writing I do now.
I have never thought of myself as a writer who sits down with every sentence neatly arranged in advance. I am more of a freewheeling journal writer. Thoughts arrive, one leads to another, and I follow where they take me.
My first drafts often contain grammatical errors. I know this. I have known it for a long time.
Yet I find it difficult to separate that natural flow of thought from the way I express it. When I write, I don’t usually stop after every sentence to inspect its grammar. I want to follow the thought while it is alive.
And then comes editing.
Ah, editing!
I am impatient to reach the final draft. Repeatedly going back over the same sentences can wear me down. I know that corrections are necessary, but I don’t always enjoy the process of making them.
There is something precious about the first draft. It holds the thought as it arrived, before I began rearranging it for the benefit of someone else.
I have often felt that my first thought is pristine and pure. Not necessarily perfect in its grammar, but honest in its arrival.
Perhaps that is why I am reluctant to tamper with it.
But a conversation by the river was about to make me look at this relationship a little differently.
The Writer Who Loves Her First Draft
Goosey and I began talking about why I love my first drafts and resist editing them.
Was I attached to the original thought? Did I feel that the first expression had something editing might flatten? Or did I trust the spontaneous version so much that revising it seemed unnecessary?
The answer, as it turned out, was all three.
I trust the first expression. I value its spontaneity. And I feel a certain protectiveness towards the thought as it first appeared on the page.
Yet there is another side to this story.
When I return to something I have written after some time, I am sometimes surprised that I wrote it.
The surprise is not simply that I have forgotten the words. It is that I encounter the same subject from a different intellectual position. The experience of rereading enriches my understanding and gives me a new perspective.
I discover something that I could not quite see when I first wrote the piece.
That was an important realisation for me.
Writing is not only the act of expressing what I know. It can also become a record of what I knew at a particular moment, allowing me to return later and discover how my understanding has grown.
And when that happens, I would rather leave the old article alone.
I don’t want to go back and rewrite the person I was then. I would rather let that version of myself remain where she was, with the understanding she possessed at that time, and write a new article incorporating what I have since discovered.
The earlier article belongs to an earlier encounter with an idea. The new article belongs to the next one.
One does not have to erase the other.
Writing to Discover Myself
This brought me to a question I hadn’t quite asked myself before.
When I write, am I primarily trying to share my thoughts with other people, or does writing help me discover what I think in the first place?
My answer was the second.
Writing helps me discover myself again and again.
I begin with an idea, an experience, a memory, or an observation. I follow it as honestly as I can. Later, I return to what I have written, and the encounter begins again.
The person who wrote the original article and the person who reads it later are both me. Yet they do not necessarily see the subject in the same way.
There is a curious distance between them, and it is in that distance that new understanding can appear.
Perhaps this is why I don’t want to rewrite my old self. She has something to tell me precisely because she was where she was. Her article is a record of that encounter, not a mistake waiting for a later version of me to correct it.
But there is a question I cannot ignore.
If I write to discover myself, what happens when I want to share that discovery with another person?
My private understanding may be clear to me. The words may carry the full meaning of the experience in my own mind. But will another reader understand what I am trying to say?
That is where editing begins to look different.
It need not be a rejection of the first thought. It need not be an attempt to make the writing sound like someone else. It can be an act of consideration for the person who will read it.
I can preserve the honesty of the original encounter while making the expression clearer.
The thought remains mine. The effort to communicate it becomes a bridge between us.
Who Is Who of Writing?
So, who is the writer?
Is it the person who sits down and allows the words to flow? Is it the person who returns to those words months or years later and finds a new perspective? Or is it the person who revises the sentences, trying to make the original thought accessible to someone who was not present when it first took shape?
Perhaps all three are the writer.
I have spent years loving the first draft, resisting the labour of editing, and returning to my own words with fresh eyes. I had thought of these as separate habits, sometimes even contradictory ones.
Now I see that they may belong to the same journey.
The first draft records the discovery. Rereading allows another discovery. Editing helps me carry that understanding beyond myself.
I don’t have to abandon the freewheeling writer in me. But I can learn to give her thoughts a form that another person can enter.
That, for me, is a new understanding of editing. Not the correction of a former self, but the willingness to communicate with someone who may not see what I see unless I help them.
And I owe this particular discovery to a morning conversation with Goosey, beside an imaginary river, while we fished for memories.
Leaving the Riverbank
We began with a silver fish from the past. It took me to Nine Star Technology, to newspaper columns and the inverted pyramid, to a journalism course, and then to the dusty library at Chandamama.
It brought back Ramakrishnan Sir’s gentle voice calling me to his desk, and the young woman who wanted to understand why she had made a mistake rather than simply be told to correct it.
And somewhere along the way, the conversation returned me to the writer I am today.
I still love my first drafts. I still find repetitive editing tiring. I still want to follow a thought before it disappears into the undergrowth.
But I am beginning to see that the reader matters too. If I want someone else to encounter my thought, I must sometimes help the words make the journey.
I can leave my earlier self where she was and move forward without disowning her.
Perhaps that is what a journal does best. It preserves the person we were while leaving room for the person we are becoming.
The silver fish has slipped back into the river now.
I don’t need to catch it again. The memory has done its work.
And tomorrow, or next week, or some day years from now, I may return to this article and discover something else.
After all, the writer is never quite finished meeting herself.
