I've been thinking about this a lot. Especially in the times, like today, that I can't write cos I am stuck at work...not doing much work, as you can see.

I can pinpoint it to my love of reading and how it has moulded my mind as I've grown up. I really picked up all the information, moral values and sense of justice, of right and wrong and of people, history, relationships and emotions from books. Yes, it was a people-starved childhood, I lived in my head. And thank goodness for books - I mean, they were a savior.

I would disappear for days on end into a book and it's world only to come up for air when the phone rang or there was someone yelling in my face. I stressed my eyes out to read in the semi-dark. I wrote in margins of my arabic books - funny little poems and odes to strange things, a one person skit about hitler's wife - all while pretending to study for my O levels. I was a rebel of the pen.

Writing was therefore a de-stressor and an outlet. And came effortlessly. I was correcting other students compositions to help out my teacher in the months before my O levels.

There's little else I've done with such passion or drive.

And then - then there is the adult hesitation. With the advent of adulthood and the loss of childhood - at about the time of leaving home to go to medical school - it all just took a back seat.

To the point that self consciousness and the fear of failing prevented me from writing. I would sit down to write and be acutely aware of the lack of profundity, the utter abscence of sophistication. And so would give up.

Stephen King should have written his book On Writing earlier. Might have saved me some sophomoric torture. When talking about writing classes and groups, he says, well they're good to learn technique, but do you really need permission from someone to tell you that you can write.

And believe it or not, I was shocked at that sentence. Cos it was news to me - that I did not need permission from anyone to write. I mean, it seems obvious now - but my psyche was hooked on how I had to get better, learn more, get to a certain point before I would be good enough to write.

Whereas really, all it takes is to start writing - randomly, with no set goal in mind. Set a challenge - determine what it is you want to write about, the general specifics as it were: a man, a train, a briefcase. And that can be enough to spawn three different stories. That same scenario gave me 1)a story about the liberation of bangladesh when a soldier was escaping from Karachi to Dhaka on the train 2)a love sick writer leaving zurich forever, and 3)an middle class indian commuter thinking about his wife's satellite TV watching ways.

I guess now I write for the freedom. The freedom to travel, re-visit the places I have been, delve deeper into situations and people that I have experienced. Or just to talk about an issue that I feel needs to be illustrated, or is begging to be brought forth by my psyche.

I'm not really sure what issue Hitler's Wife was bringing forth, but it was one of the most fun things I've done.