K.S. Narendran - Life After MH370: Journeying Through a Void

Life After MH370

Journeying Through a Void

KS Narendran

First published in India 2017

2017 by KS Narendran

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Dedicated to all on board MH370, and the undying human spirit that lives on.

CONTENTS

T he short answer is that I like the act of writing. The process. I have found this a way to express myself. In my youth, I did nurse an aspiration to be a writer. I went only as far as to have the odd piece published in The Hindu and the The Indian Express during my teens. Much of the writing was merely the angsty outpouring of a teenager who struggled to sleep, and therefore, wrote into the notebook on the bedside whatever thoughts came between nightly wakefulness and fitful sleep. Besides, then, a writer was barely a profession that a salaried middle-class family recognised, much less valued. The unspoken desire to write, therefore, had what I thought was a socially acceptable form: journalist, a correspondent, a columnist or a commentator. I pursued none of them.

The creative arts sketching, painting, theatre, music were also options to express oneself. They yield an experience of simultaneity of thought-feeling-action, and therefore, of an experience of feeling intimately connected to the core of ones being. I learnt vocal music in my teens. But, to be accomplished, one needed to learn the craft and the grammar as well. Too much effort, I concluded, and gave up. Given my early inclinations towards sketching and art, I thought that being an artist was an option. I ran into trouble with colours. My friends wondered if I saw everything in black and white. It was true, metaphorically, for many years of my life. While my own development allows for the shades of grey in most affairs, the arts never since remained an option to be invested in.

What of the craft of writing? I can submit here that countless office memos, proposals, reports, edits of others writing, and show cause notice drafts have constituted the extended workshop in which this wordsmith has shaped himself. For many years, writing was a process of transferring thought on paper. It is more in recent years, that I discovered that writing can be the means to convey to the outside what is the state of the inside. Not as an act of imagination or creative fiction but as a mirror of inner reality that often lacks concreteness, but is nonetheless a continuing, ever-changing phenomenon.

Many a piece has been written in the head but never committed to paper. They have sprung up at odd times during walks, long waits at airports, while attempting to sleep, while driving, or when in the kitchen.

It is one thing to write a short piece that is topical, triggered by more immediate events and focused. Economy and precision, the things I value, come in handy here. It is quite another to write a book. It is a daunting endeavour. It allows freedom to be expansive something that I have seldom given myself. There has always been the nagging doubt: why should someone be remotely interested in me, or what I have to say? This question extends to life itself and I have, for the most part, tended to be reticent, preferring to observe than to disclose, respond to others than to actively seek out people.

My commitment to write this book is a culmination of suggestions and instigation from many in the last year or so.

Is it for the money? I can say with certainty that it is not. If anything, I would be utterly surprised if it were a commercial success. Is it then my immortality project, to borrow an idea that I came across first when reading Wilber? I dont think so. I have nothing in life to claim celebrity or notoriety, and writing about a slice of my life may raise my own assessment of it a notch at best. That is as far as I think it goes.

I am attempting this in part because many of my friends old and new, and colleagues have suggested it. The responses that I received from people who read some of my writing in the Press were encouraging. Some went as far as to say that they were touched, moved and even comforted by what I wrote. My colleagues have long held that I should be writing a book. Last year, they were clear what the book could be about: life after MH370. Their faith in my capacities has often exceeded mine. This time it has been suggested also because they believe it could be therapeutic. As one of them said: Writing, for you, is a way of emptying yourself. True, it feels that way sometimes. But this emptying is an ongoing thing... like breathing in and out, ingesting and expelling... never complete, never the last, till the ultimate end. Each time is never the same. Doesnt feel the same.

There are, I believe, close to a dozen books on MH370 already. So, it is easy to dismiss my attempt as God, not one more of these!. Very understandable. I suspect most books published so far are investigative to begin with and switch to being speculative. We are no wiser at the end of it regarding the most basic of questions: Why, Who, How and Where of MH370.

There are at least 239 stories waiting to be told at length those of the families of 239 passengers of MH370, how their lives took a turn on 8th March 2014 when MH370 disappeared. It is hard to encapsulate their saga of fortitude in press despatches and short video clips. Many may not wish the attention thrust upon them as they navigate through their lives, or have the time to tell their stories. While the specifics of my journey may not correspond to those of other families, I am confident that the process and the movement within oneself that I speak of will resonate. I experience peace with this thought.

There is a hazard inherent in this task. Turbulence during certain periods seems like ripples today. The significant moments across a swathe of time lose their pre-eminent place in life with each passing day, much like any Top Ten on the charts. They depend on a dynamic narrative which, in turn, depends on mood, audience, reflection, and revelations. It is hard to imagine offering a narrative, a personal one at that, that is even. Besides tracing the racy and the dull, the moving and the mundane in the months gone by, the writing may well reflect the ups and downs during the period of writing itself.