Word Power

Or how a homework assignment in fourth standard brought me here

I spent the first few hours of September 30 watching the first debate between the incumbent American President, Donald Trump, and his challenger, former American Vice President Joe Biden.

Over the last few years, I have started qualifying any reference to globally known American politicians with their entire introduction.

So instead of saying, “I watched Donald Trump debate Joe Biden”, I say it the way I said it above.

It’s my own small way of taking back the mindspace that American politics and politicians take up in the everyone’s head.

It is a small act of subversion. If the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson are introduced to us that way, then by rights, the American President should also be introduced to us the same way.

I can only imagine this getting irritating to the reader.

The Backstory

My earliest recollection of how much I enjoy writing was a sentence making homework we had to do in 4th Standard. We had to make a sentence with the word lush in it.

At that time, my parents were members of a newly opened social club — The G-Town Community Center, which we called GTCC. We were allowed to borrow up to five books at one time from the GTCC library.