Who changes for what purpose?

“Are these all your findings?”
The research supervisor asked the undergraduate.
“Yes they are all my findings.”
“How did you set about findings?”
“I read quite a number of books.”
“What else?”
“I browsed the Internet.”
“What else?”
“I read learned articles in learned periodicals.”
“What else?”
“I photocopied some pages from several books.”
“The technique of cut and paste?” The supervisor smiled.
“Yes, something like that.”
“What is your own contribution?”

The undergraduate had nothing much to say. His own contribution looks almost nil. But a compilation of a work has come to be in the shortest possible time. The committee has to decide on the degree. Perhaps the questions look impertinent, as there are all sorts of source material around him. Then there is access to technological methods of presenting someone else’s material as his own findings.

This trend goes on in a rapid manner. Quite recently a Japanese scholar told me that book research is the easiest. I could not get what he meant. On further inquiry, he tried his best to convince me on the basics of ‘book research’.

Book research

Bulky research emerge in the name of new findings. They are not one’s own findings mostly, but a whole compilation of findings lined up from various other sources. An ongoing topic is technology and findings that go into the making of books. Some critics blame the writers for the proliferation more than high speed in which the works come out. What one could sense is that books are either produced or created by particular writers depending on social circumstances.

The proliferation may bring out a derogatory sense and an insult to a writer. Nevertheless a writer may be prolific due to his own manner of seeing and commitment. The French writer of fame, who won the Nobel award for literature, Andre Gide, was one such prolific writer. He had time and energy to delve himself in the action of writing.

Marcel Proust was another prolific writer. They did not depend on technology, as denoted in the modern sense of the term. Our own great Piyadasa Sirisena was another high speed writer. He was the founder editor of ‘Sinhalaa Jatiya’ where he serialized some of his novels. They all wrote to fulfill a particular ideology, a kind of social consciousness.

This cause had no barriers and frontiers. Writing for a purpose looking more honest than anything else comparable. There are no shortcuts. The blame today look as if the most writers are compelled to write even if they don’t possess any inborn creativity.

This in itself is a factor to be taken seriously. Can a writer or generally a creator embark on a project of his skill devoid of any human experience. Imagine a person engaged in the creative act. He or she has something to project. Creative process, it is observed, takes different forms. It has changed over the years.

Diary entries

Some write notes and keep diaries not with the intention of printing them later. But with the sheer intention of a self expression. These diaries and notes take the shape of creative narratives, like Gide did. His narrative, ‘The Counterfeiters’, is a collection of diary entries kept over the years. But the contents and the structure had to be changed. Sartre, the Nobel laureate, according to his biographer Iris Murdoch, was one creator struggling with his own conscience. He had said once that ‘hate may take a small writer a long way, but charity must be the quality of a great one’. Murdoch says that the most salient factor about Sartre was his dedication to a human cause as a writer.

The writer, though unconcerned about the promotion of his own work, yet in an indirect manner has to find a reader or to use a broad term an audience. The stance of the reader too is changing. One librarian told me the other day that library science develops leaps ahead, while the recipient or the reader’s function is minimal or perhaps invisible. Most libraries stack books for no particular reason.

The aspects of the library too change. The phase of the age old reader who takes care of books is slowly diminishing. We need good users of our libraries.

“Where have they gone?”
“Perhaps they have their own mini libraries.”

It is said that we enter a world where the conventional form of book is challenged. The very reading habits have changed. Listening habits have changed. What about viewing habits? They too have changed. Why go to the cinema hall when you have a television at home. The availability of DVDs have paved the way for home entertainment. But we go to see paintings still exhibited in places that are suited for it.

This may also change. But question arises in my mind.

Should I change myself to their changes?