In Pursuit of Originality

I've been off the blogging world for a while now. My regular readers ( I hope I have a few! ;) ) , might be wondering where I've been. To them my reply is, I was wandering in the pursuit of originality. I've been facing an acute shortage of ideas for my literary rampages. Ok.. that was not the only reason, I was feeling damn lazy too. But lets come back to the point.

Lack of novel ideas is one common problem faced by all writers. I wrote a few articles and then deleted them completely because I felt that they lacked creativity. Someone, somewhere would have already talked about it or talked about something similar. Now if I say the same thing, won't that be plagiarism? I wouldn't wanna do that, would I?? Definitely no!! So I've been stuck in this cult of originality seekers. 

Then it got me thinking. Well is plagiarism of ideas that big a crime? Shakespeare is supposed to have ripped off plots for his plays from Greek and Roman mythology. Our very own  Mahathma Gandhi has said that there is nothing new in his methodologies and that everything he has ever said is as old as the hills. If these great people can do it, why can't we? Is there anything new in this world? No idea or thought is new. Everything under the sun has already been spoken on written by someone or the other. Haven't you all faced a situation where you thought up some new, superb ideas and later found out that someone had already thought of it. What makes an idea or thought unique is our packaging. Our very own twist to the story. Ripping off an entire article and claiming it to be yours is definitely bad. But borrowing an idea from someone and then reconstructing it to suit our style is definitely not that bad.

Knowledge of the fact that its ok not being completely original all the time, has lifted a huge burden off my shoulder. I feel happy and all ready to kick start another string of my random thoughts. It feels great to be back here.. :)