Raiya Hashmi

Raiya Masroor Hashmi

It was a very ordinary day in my very ordinary school life. I was bored stiff on a Thursday and just flipping through a children’s magazine when my evil scheming mind came up with an equally evil idea. I opened up my Urdu textbook, selected a poem, translated it into English and posted it to a children`s magazine.

After a few weeks on another boring Thursday as I sat flipping through the same magazine, my eyes stopped on a name. There it was: “Raiya Masroor” printed in bold black letters and my poem shining below it. Maybe because I lived in a country where no one spoke Urdu or the editors’ did not expect such a thing from a twelve year old. Whatever it was, surprisingly, I never got caught!

After that I started to feel guilty and the little angel that remains hidden somewhere inside of me (and surfaces from time to time) decided to write something and try getting it published. So this time I wrote a piece all by myself and after a couple of rejections and refusals my very first piece (yes this time it was totally mine) finally got published and to my horror I discovered that along the way fell I had fallen in love with the scholarly thing called “writing”.



Hmmm...I often wonder: Why do I write?

Is it for fame?

(Considering the country I live in has more CD shops than bookstores I dont think I can ever compete with Aishwariya …Nooo)

Is it for money?

(The cheques I take to my banker and she looks pityingly at the meager amount??…Naah I guess that rules it out too)

or is it something else?

I guess my desire to write is best summed up in these two quotes:

“Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words – the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.”
J. Michael Straczynski

“The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism."
James Jones


Or maybe who knows it just could be because of the fact that there is nothing cool on TV these days and I have nothing better to do…:P

Well whatever, I guess as long as I have free time and ideas, I will keep writing and hopefully (really hopefully) people will keep reading what I write.

P.S. I never plagiarized after that!…just in case you are wondering...:)

add to my favorite writers