From a youth in Saints, dealing with Mr Singh and Mr Stanley Fernandes who taught us English, I was drawn to the intricacies of words and the shades of meaning that one could extract merely from word choice. It was a disposition that came strongly into play in later years as I dove headlong into the song-writing craft in Canada and subsequently with the songs I started writing for Tradewinds.
It was frequently the case that I would find myself labouring over the choice of a particular word. I would reject, I would revise or reword, sometimes spending hours over a single sentence.
There were occasions when all my efforts would fail, and I would discard a line completely, sometimes even an entire verse, because the right word combination was not falling into place.
The trait remains. Just this week, as I tackle a song idea that came to me, I have been spending hours in that same pursuit of the precise words to convey the thought, to express the humour, to relay the suggestion. The clarity that comes from precision is always there; you just have to be persistent to find it.
It is a fundamental characteristic of who I am as a writer
