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The pen is always mightier for Ruskin Bond who has used it all his life and finds a typewriter tedious.
In this age of laptops and tablets, the compulsive writer still prefers the pen and paper.
“I’ve used it all my life. I used to write with a typewriter once, but now that’s tedious. I enjoy writing by hand,” he told PTI in an interview.
For the versatile writer that 78-year-old Sahitya Akademi Award winner is, writing over the years has been almost a compulsion.
“More like something I had to do. Regardless of whether I was getting published or not, I would still be writing. I’ve been writing regularly over the past 60 years, so it’s just a part of who I am,” he says.
Very often, he incorporates real life incidents and characters in his stories.
“Some stories are almost true, while others have been based on real people or incidents and fictionalised to a certain extent. A mixture you might say.”
The Mussoorie resident, who has just come out with his new book of poems “Hip-Hop Nature Boy and Other Poems”, is now working on a novel called “Maharani“.
He may have written novels and short stories for adults but Bond says “I’m better known as a kids’ writer.”
And on writing poems, he says, “I don’t write them regularly, but every once in a while I get into a poetic frame of mind and write a few verses or a poem.”
His books have been adapted into several films in Bollywood but Bond does not have any plan to write a script for a movie.
“I don’t have any plans to write a script. At least not in the near future. Even the stories that have been made into films were stories that I wrote without cinema in mind,” he says.
Beautiful, poignant and funny, “Hip-Hop Nature Boy and Other Poems” deals with nature, love, friends, school and books. This is also for the first time that his poems for children, old and new, come together in an illustrated volume.
“If a tortoise could run,/ And losses be won/ And bullies be buttered on toast;/ If a song brought a shower,/ And a gun grew a flower,/ This world would be nicer than most!” reads one of the poems.
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