The Thinking Corner

A Few Explanations

These causeries, for all their play of changing mood and personal idiosyncrasy, were not conceived merely as passing thoughts. Seriousness went to their making and they were intended to go a long way - yet with no burden of an abstract unbending mind. Depth of thinking was sought to be reached here by a vivid and many-sided though not imprecise and unmethodical movement: vision was to accompany logic.

But the yoking of the poetic intuition with the logical faculty might very well prove a worse hindrance for the common reader. The common reader had to be respected: I must not tie him up in colourful complexities and snatch him away from practical issues. So much, surely, I owed him. At the same time, my respect must avoid any pampering: it must not render me hesitant about asking him to crane his neck and catch what might normally pass over his head.

It is only by craning our neck towards the high and the far, while keeping our eyes open to what is below and around, that we evolve our brain and, by evolving it, raise the rest of our being and increase our general stature. One point, however, ought not to be forgotten by the writer who desires his reader to do neck-craning often: he should see to it that the reader, in being wanted to carry on that exercise, feels by virtue of an up-plucking power in the style as little strain as possible.

Honestly trying to fulfil this ideal I invite the public to my Thinking Corner. I am aware of various defects in the present volume; but I hope this honest trying, coupled with an attempt to give a manifold response to life as well as to literature with more than the surface of me, will somewhat excuse them with book-readers as it did with the readers of that popular literary magazine, The All-India Weekly, by whose kind permission these causeries have been collected.

K. D. SETHNA