ZEENAT'S  BOWL  OF  IMAGINATION

I have been into books almost as long as I've been on this Earth! Or should I say, as long as books have been into me! Looking at colorful pictures in magazines and kids' cartoon comics as a toddler, was what sparked off my relationship with the bookworm inside me. And to this day it is the bookworm that still keeps my imagination from running dry.

As a 9-year-old, writing was something I thought I could never even dream of doing. Now, wasn't that something that people like Enid Blyton and the Grimm Brothers did? But little unknown scribbles on the back pages of school notebooks? Yes, now that was me. Thinking up stories that read like terribly concocted mixtures of all the stories and books I'd ever read, was my first trip through imagination. Though how much of the imagination was my own and how much was borrowed, it's still pretty hard to say! But these trips carried thoughts of everything that 9-year-old me could possibly think up of in the little time spared between classes of sleep-inducing geography and math.

"So, that's what the Tundra is -- a land of snow," the teacher would say before bidding us goodbye. "Yes," I would think, "... filled with cute, little penguins, penguins like Penny...who goes out to fish...and falls into an icy water-hole...and ..."  And that's how my fancies would begin! Penny's adventures would twist and turn like a speeding roller coaster inside my thoughts. The Tundra would be forgotten and Penny the Penguin would be as real as the school bell that would ring out announcing a "very happy weekend!"

I was pretty much a quiet kid and now even after 14 years, my quiet nature is still my main characteristic. Sometimes I think I owe my knack of writing to this nature, but I don't really know. Not too much into chattering away nonstop with my friends, I would simply listen to what they said, nodding now and then and overnight became famous as the "nice, good, quiet girl." Not that I didn't like the new title: in fact, I rather enjoyed being known that way for it meant that I wasn't obliged to talk and make forced conversation. And, with that, I went deeper and deeper, exploring my self-created world of penguins like Penny.

It wasn't until I was 14 that I thought my life was a total disaster, that I was a no good thinker and that my ideas were absolutely feeble. It was the year my first ever poem to be put down on paper was rejected. I decided I would never write again...end of story...

My parents knew me better, they always have. They knew, they believed, I wouldn't stay in the non-writing mode for long. They were right, I didn't. Within a week, the ideas were brimming over so furiously, I had to brush them randomly on the first piece of paper I found.

Then again, it wasn't until I was 16 that I thought my life was a total success, that I was a pretty good story-thinker and that my ideas were absolutely smashing. You guessed...my first story got published in the local newspaper of my city. It was the talk of my class, if not the whole school. But that was enough to keep my imagination fired up.

It's been a pretty good journey since then with winning interclass and intercollegiate competitions in creative writing. And nearer to life now, the publishing of a couple of stories in newspapers back home in India in the past one year. And now I've got this too, my very own website where I can share my feelings and thoughts with probably more than half the world. I'm pretty much always in the writing mode now thanks to the people who believed in me the most -- my parents and my teachers and to the one true fan who ever so faithfully read all the crappy and not-so-crappy words that I wrote; my little sister.

This website is a word of thanx to everyone who helped me be what I am today.

Thanx Ma,

Thanx Pa

Thanx Guds

ZEENAT'S  BOWL  OF  IMAGINATION