The Cart Before The Horse

Dear Cheeniya Sir,
I just read your rambling on'putting the cart before the horse.Very interesting.On many occasions we start from the end .I think my snippet 'Do nothing,be in limelight' more or less matches with your writing, though I wrote it without reading your article.It is a sort of giving the answer before the question is asked,another way of putting the cart before the horse.Whenever you find time please read the above snippet of mine containing the ambition of an author stopping with the title.Of course I dealt with the subject in an altogether different angle.

Do Nothing;be In Limelight that was released today.
Jayasala 42

 

Dear Cheeniya Sir,

So the title "Cart before the horse" came into existence because you write the title before the content. Frankly, it is the title that makes most to read the content unless the writer has a preexisting reputation. Dr Wayne W. Dyer wrote a book, "The Power of Intention" and it is this title that attracted me to read many of his other books. Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now", Steven Covey's "The 7 habits of highly effective people" and Dr Bruce Lipton's "Biology of Belief" are great examples for the titles allowing the book to become best sellers.

It would be unfair to these authors if I finish without mentioning that the content of these books changed the life of many according to the reviews. At least I can speak for myself that these books changed how I looked at things differently after reading them. But if these authors were to give titles such as, "Intention matters", "Now or never", "How to form good habits?" and "How belief changes our thinking" respectively, these books would have at least had an initial trouble taking off in sales before the reviews were published by the magazines and newspapers.

Aren't we all pioneers in putting the cart before the horse? We do that in day to day life. I always ask my wife, "What is for dinner?" instead of asking, "What are we having for dinner?" and when my close friend tells me how he is suffering due to loss of job, I ask myself, "Is he going to ask me for monetary help?" In day to day life, I put myself before everyone else around me. When I am appreciated for a snippet or for a speech, I take a lot of pride and smile ear to ear accepting those appreciations and If I face criticism from someone I wonder, "Why is he/she targeting me?" The inclusive life is a distant concept for me in day to day life. If I do very well in life, it is always my hard work that brought me to this level and if I face a crisis in my life, I ask, "Why me? Does God exist?"

We are just a name or title without any substance when we are all born. How we make the subject interesting is entirely in our hands. Everyone is happy about the bundle of joy just by its presence but when the content in it shines to make the difference in the world, everyone is blissful in an inclusive and interdependent world.

Viswa

 

Dear Cheeniya Sir,

From 'Gun slinger Ganapathy' to 'six face Arumugam' you have the entire list of profiles of scores of unique personalities you have moved with, in real life, tucked away safely within your tiny grey cells. And here in IL there is no dearth of such personalities to revive or trigger your old memories. So what are you waiting for! With your enthusiastic hard core fans ready with their different points of view, never has IL been so lively and colourful! I am sure even PG Woodhouse, Agatha Christie and their likes couldn't have offered such a delightful entertainment. Expecting one like 'Aayiram Thalai vaangiya Aboorva sinthamani!!

Agatha83

 

Every time I logged in to write to you, I was distracted by the aromas and crunch from Shanvy's thread.

Forgive me for the late call in, but, hey, I wasn't tinkering with the horse or cart, or the order in which to weld for I jumped on my shanks' pony, the fastest and spirited way to reach here. Titles are doorways to literary works. You can pass by, knock at, or sometimes peep in, but to seduce someone to actually step in, the doorway should be the Siren of a literary harlot to trap your wanton curiosity. Take Henry Carey's nonsensical Chrononhotonthologos. Did he invent the title and the parody followed, or he crafted a mouthful of satirical title to suit the titular King. Quirky narratives are one thing where you can compose an equally quirky tale to go with preset title or supply a harmonious and deferred title later. But to retroactively preserve a random title pulled out of thin air is difficult. You don't know if you will end up writing a comedy or a tragedy. What if he starts off epistolary and ends up with sonnets. What if he rages in Achaean victory and breaks the nib with blight of tapeworms. How would he shoehorn the title into his completed work unless he manufactures a prodigious canon where anything goes.

Tell your friend, the safest provisional title for any work should begin with “Zen and …”. It does not matter what he cranks because he can always extrapolate such totemic homage into his personal narrative as “Zen and the art of cooking”, “Zen and khichdi”, “Zen and why I think the world economy is ruined”, “Zen and how to grow foxglove”. No one will inquire who or what is “Zen”. You see, the “Zen” meme is so catchy that everyone tacitly swears that such enterprise constituted something ineffable that writers prefer to clump this meditative challenge as Zenness in expression. Title or no title, horse or cart, the bigger challenge is what happens when your friend's incipient work is translated into other languages. Till date no one has been able to faithfully translate the French title Huis Clos, a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, to English. It is okay if your friend chooses to fix the cart before the horse but is that swapped horse a Mustang that transcends vernacular bigotry in literary landscape or a Shetland Pony that refuses to scale up. There is nothing more painful for a writer to find out that his earnest title has been butchered in translation woes. Blood lost, tempers flared, a limb sawed in such nitpicking battles!

 

There are two minor things that caught my attention in your blog.

I have only heard of this train. I have seen this Nilgiri toy train only in movies. Ironically, I learnt much of Indian heritage only after stepping outside India partly because of BBC's stockpile of colonial documentaries. Nilgiri Mountain Railway (NMR) featured in BBC's acclaimed documentary on mountain railway system of India. Until then I didn't know this coal-fired locomotive continued as a 5-hour vintage transport between Mettupalayam and Coonoor, enroute to Ooty, in a rack and pinion track. That's fascinating! I forgot all about it till you flashed this charming fact in your blog. How I wish I had known such things when I was in India. If I had known, I wouldn't claim that I would have journeyed to the hill station and swung by the natural beauty of the ravines and tunnels and warbled a song or two in rapture. That said, planning a trip to these locations now amidst tight schedules during holiday visits is impossible. This analogy is not trivial. On one hand, it acquaints a reader with a less-known rack and pinion guage in Indian railway, while on the other hand, on my own merit, I could never have linked the NMR to the horse and cart parable. Such technological marvel would have been swept under a mechanized discussion and not uplifted to a livelier analogy on how inverted order, at times, emboldens, rather than enfeebles, a tricky situation.

That's a comic masterpiece! My dad is a big fan of B & W comedy and pines for such wholesome comical acts. By rewinding those hilarious acts, he relives those laughter days. Unfortunately comedy had been corrupted with vulgarity and brassy slapstick in the 90s. Clean comedy is revived again now with conscientious filmmakers. Comedy is applauded in those bemused expressions and funny dialogues and not in obscenities. I think 90s was the dark ages of comedy. It was not even dark humour, more of pitch-black slimy and repulsive comedy. That writer sub-plot you mentioned is iconic!