Baba

Through every awful joke I've shared with baba and every mile that's separated us, there's been a force that's cocooned us together, loathe it or love it as we will. This force is definitely the dna we share, that great pre-programmed life-chalker, but I've learnt now that the dna's less than half the story.

Baba's always been a writer. I'd heard this earlier, and I see it now, as he's writing and publishing more often. I'd done some writing myself as a kid, but it was from within so many confines that I'll be the first to discount it. I was caged by my age, by my schooling and by the compulsion to write instead of being freed by actual moments of inspiration.

Baba's latest work, a novella, creates a pause when you're done reading. I've only heard an excerpt myself, but I'm told that the work is significant. In this excerpt, he'd drawn parallels between his days as a kid and mine. I suspect it's the interesting vs. the not-so-much :) but that there's this minor unification between our lives, dissimilar as they are, makes me sit up and take note. I'm stunned that two lives, separated in time, can share the noosphere while accounting for their wholly different settings. If these were two unconnected lives we were discussing, we 'd call it coincidence. When it's father and son, my vocabulary fails me.

And this biophysics was only a small aspect of the novella. The work, I hear, is balls-to-the-wall witty, and at the end, pregnantly poignant. Plus, that it's me plugging his work, despite the flak this will draw, distinguishes the effort.

I'm going to exploit this to the fullest. I've asked him to write, write till his keyboard crumbles, so that genetics and legacy combine and, using the same wormhole that governs the parallelism of our lives, infuse me with writing prowess beyond my blinkers.