This opens them up to parody and disdain. Rem Koolhaas’s work, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan is a great example to demonstrate this contradiction. The manifestos of the 60s had already begun reversing the futuristic confidence, the keyword here being ‘retroactive’. Manifesto, in its true sense if there ever was one, was already a thing of the past by then. A call for action has become a call for reflection and with these inconsistencies in its layers of meanings, we cannot proceed with a ‘manifesto’. At least not without doubts and discomfort in associating with the ‘classic’ idea of the manifesto.

Teresa Ebert in her piece ‘Manifesto as Theory and Theory as Material Force: Toward a Red Polemic’ 8 points out that a manifesto is a written piece of work. She calls it a genre of change-writing. It is a text for transformation where text is dragged within the public realm to challenge the status quo. 9 The ‘change’ is proposed and essentially thought to take place through the written word. Which brings me to the question of - Why write? Why do I write? Why do I believe writing to be a tool for change? The world is full of words anyway. Which of those matter? Which words or whose words get an audience? Isabel Allende on why she writes comes to my mind 10 - “I know that in a subtle way or in a hidden way, I want to have an impact on the reader’s heart and mind.” Allende describes herself as being very picky about words since they are the only material that writers have to work with. But, she emphasizes words are free and that one can use as many as they want! Isn’t that beautiful? It has so much power to subtly have an impact on the reader’s heart and mind! The reader is transported to the same moment that the writer was in, and the reader makes it their own. If one word doesn't do the job, just use ten instead! On this aspect though, Allende might differ with me since she would probably want to use fewer words!

I write because I like the distance, and therefore the time, that text as a medium creates between the producer of a text and the receiver of the text; the speaker and the listener, the writer and the reader. The process of writing is slower, and hence more deliberate than speaking. Which means that not only is the writer processing every word that is produced and is thoughtfully, consciously and with intent compiling them to make a sentence, a paragraph, an image and so on, but so is the reader; thoughtfully, consciously and slowly unpacking the contents and the meaning of every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every graphic at their own pace. Moving onto the next element of the text is in the hands of the reader. The pace of unpacking is also defined synchronously, by the reader and by the writer. Speech is the opposite where the pace is unilaterally defined by the speaker. I also like the ability to revisit the written exactly the way it was written, as if frozen in time, as opposed to memories failing the many inflections, expressions and tones that accompany speech. In my quest to be understood, and understood well, I seek refuge, shelter and comfort in the written word.