A Writer's Responsibility

Every individual is born with responsibilities. The mere fact that each one of us is responsible for our own life proves the fact. As a writer, the greatest responsibility lies in how they mould their readers through their characters and the story they present. A writer can make a nation and also break a nation. Mein Kampf is one such example of destruction. Through the course of history we have witnessed the change in writing styles according to the socio-economic temperature of the nation. Such as the 70’s, that brought out many revolutionary poets and writers in Bengali literature and several others in different parts of the country who came together to form the Revolutionary Writers Association, in support of the Naxal Movement at the time. India is a growing nation and as we grow, a lot of the responsibility falls on our shoulder, which has to be borne by every citizen of the country. A nation is a reflection of its own citizens. If India is great then we have to be great as well. A writer has the power to make it a great country. A revolution can be brought with just one story or one article. Today, every Indian writer should feed the nation with literature of courage, vision, unity and above all empathy. In unison, every writer has to aim at making each reader into a better citizen and ultimately lead the country to become a great nation again. That, is the responsibility of a writer. It is said that a good story talks about the characters and a bad story talks about the writer. Let us not be the writer who is talked about but rather the characters that the writers want us to become. Writers like Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, to name a few, are striving towards it. They are the masters of the art. Even if one is not a master but just a student, an effort never goes to waste. A nation is waiting to be transformed and it can only be done with a pen and not with guns.