IN BETWEEN FLAME AND DISCIPLINE: A WRITER REFLECTS ON MURAKAMI’S CREED

In Novelist as a vocation, Haruki Murakami lays out some important things about the writer’s attitude and routines. They are not similar but varied according to talents. If you are not Mozart, Van Gogh, or a Rimbaud you must have cultivated your talent with a lengthened patience, sound body, it needs to fuel your limited talent. He suggests—it is not just a calling, but a long—distance run.
It is an honest and humble creed, I respect it deeply. Because I too sit down to tranmutate something my inner to something to breathe on paper—not as a prophet , not as a genius but as a person, who is trying to transpire in the abstract. I write for an hour, then I reread, and revise. It is slow growing, sometimes painful. In that sense I belong to the tribe Murakami speaks to—the “non-genius” who carves a path with discipline and sheer will.
But yet I feel the rebel lying deep in me.
Because my writing is not only built on discipline, it takes on trance also. On descent. On those unscheduled plunges into the unknown—when a sentence comes like a vision, and a metaphor cracks open something in my being. I simply don’t construct stories—but I often invocate them. There are days when I write as if I am burning in bliss, and return from that fire emptied, even unwell. High blood pressure, heart strain, silence that aches aftermath.
I have published two poetry books, and am working on a literary fiction, and I don’t see myself a figure to concentrate on, but still I ask—where do I stand in Murakami’s map? I am not Mozart, nor I am a jogger—a novelist with green tea with a set routine. In my inner core I see a mystic with a calendar. A fragile flame learning how not to burn out..
A writer who enters the cave each day—but also watches for those moments when the cave sings back.
Murakami says, “If you’re not a genius, then toughen your will, and care for your body.” I say—yes, and also: if you are haunted, if you carry the weight of metaphors that come unbidden, then learn to carry that too. Gently. Learn how to return from trance with tenderness.
Because vocation is one thing. But invocation—when done wisely—is just as sacred.

THE LAMP AND THE CIRCUIT

I recently read that Taiwan has debuted an AI—GENERATED NURSE—a breakthrough achievement in technology. This AI nurses could monitor vitals, speak with programmed empathy and follow medical protocols without fatigue and distraction.
But a question quietly lingers in my mind.
Could even the greatest AI-generated nurse model ever be equal to the lady with the lamp.
Florence Nightingale walked dim corridors during the Crimean war, not only with badges, and ledgers but a lit lamp also. This lamp was not only a tool for visibility but it was lit with compassion; a symbol of presence, of a human spirit refusing to abandon suffering in silence.
I heard about AI two years ago. AI can do many things now—more efficiently than humans. But it does not choose to care. It doesn’t feel despair when a patient suffers, nor love when one survives. It cannot whisper prayers in its private mind or feel its pulse quicken in grief. It cannot redefine care as Nightingale did: not as function, but as moral witness.
Progress is real, and I do not diminish it. AI may reduce burden, save time, even prevent mistakes. But care—true care—is not a system. It is a trembling light held in the dark, by someone who can suffer, hope, and persevere.
The lamp cannot be programmed.

FROM THE CORRIDOR: SATIRE SPOTTED ON FACEBOOK

You think your life is hard?
Think about the doctor who has a crush on a nurse and still has to call her sister.