Writing as an Economic Activity

Economics define the motives of man, those prime motives are the prime movers that push a man to work to earn a living. These activities fetch money and a man is supposed to be employed or involved in all such activities that yield money for his subsistence or survival. They are called economic activities and all such activities as bring money to him fall under this category. Writing is also an economic activity if a writer is entrusted to or hired to use his mind and skill and produce a kind of writing material. It may be book, a manual, a research paper, a thesis or a text book wherein a writer is assigned to use the existing material and produce stuff as per the demands. Any such book ceases to be literary as anything of literary merit or worth cannot be produced though any mechanical process.

A book, commercially produced belongs to the person who pays for the book and not to the author. If an author claims to be the sole author of any such book he is a foster father and not the real one. Such things are not created but generated and generation of anything is but a mechanical process and is far from being literature by any standards.

Literature is born out of spontaneity of mind which comes in some cases as outbursts and in majority in the form of trickles. It is through literature things are moved, thinking gets into the mode of self evolution. Otherwise, in all works of art, they are just amalgam of colours and hues. The real painting comes in the form of ideas spread over a piece of canvass.

All such things which come into being as product of socio-economic processes should fall under public domain and be shared by one all. It is very essential if you want your ideas to gather social energy and be the right thing of the time. Just as culture belongs to a community, a social group and the primery objective of culture is to protect civilization and the socio-economic group literature must play its role positively and the authors, if they really want to take care of the ills of the society must allow their writings to work actively for the transformation of the society. The more they are shared the better they be counted.