I have a big whistle that I blow every Sunday. Some like it and some despise it. My language is crude. I don’t varnish my thoughts but lay them bare as sharpened arrowheads to pierce through my targets. They sting—the way I intend them to be.

As rewards, I get encouraging mails and also hate mails that are laced with the choicest abuses (and if truth be told I enjoy reading them). I consider both type of feedback as compliments because they are the closest that a writer can get to a TRP that TV channel relies on to gauge its viewership population.

However, I have a premonition that this is going to be my last column on this page and the good news is that my absence might pave way for a better columnist to utilize the precious space of this newspaper much more productively. This I have decided because I have signed along the dotted lines to become an employee of the state government and some of the things that I might write in this column and by the very nature of my writings run the risk of antagonizing the official line of the government.

The entire soul of whistleblower’s articles lies in the fact that they were consistently and persistently a scathing attack on the lapses of an inept government, sometimes touching upon the excesses of non-state players and the hypocrisy of human nature. These issues are a definite no-no for a government insider that yours truly is on the throes of becoming one.

Yesterday, I was a quintessential outsider. Today, I am on the payroll of a government that I until recently critic to earn my bread and butter. In that sense, I feel a wee guilty like a prostitute who can be bought but I know I am going to pay a heavy price for it myself as I expect to wrestle with moral dilemmas from day one of my government service.

Before I sign off from this column and the media space itself, allow me to be a little self-indulgent and go back to my nostalgic roots as an aspiring writer. It all happened during my schooldays. I was the unofficial king of love letters.

I wrote love letters for my friends and perhaps satisfied with the result they in turn brought to me many other love smitten souls. I still remember their pimples laden teenage faces as they waited as I was crafting sentences that I thought naively would move mountains in a girl’s breast and fasten their heart beats.

And indeed, they thought my pen contained love potions that can do magic on their love interests. I don’t know how many of those letters did their job o f swaying girls’ hearts, but my reputation spread and ironically that same reputation became my undoing. My trademark opening address “My dear sweetheart” and the ending verse “I found love when I found you” became a sure give-away of my hidden identity.

I shut my love-letter shop forever when a girl told a client of mine, “Ranjan wrote this for you, didn’t he?” Some habits die hard. I graduated to writing for an English daily called Freedom. And my first article in it—you bet—was about romance and it was entitled “To meet, to love and to part.” I wrote that piece under a pseudonym—Anjali Yumnam—just to escape my dad’s notice (I was in std. 9 then).

Shortly after, I tried my hand at a romantic fiction, this time in the Imphal Free Press. “The rise and fall of a lover” was about a boy falling in love with an elderly woman which ended in the woman sending the boy a gift pack containing—to the boy’s utter dismay—a raksha bandhan. Some thought it was a chapter from my real life and they sent me sympathies via friends and letters. I had the last laugh.

I got over the teenage fascination for romance and found my priorities and taste shifting to weightier issues of mind over heart. During my college days, I kept on writing articles on political and social issues of the day. But it was www.e-pao.net and the Statesman later that gave me the real platform to launch myself as an aspiring writer and thanks to them the infamous Whistleblower column took birth.

After my graduation I did a stint at Times of India as a city correspondent specializing on entertainment features. It was an exciting phase of my career and gave me an opportunity to meet some of the most remarkable men and women of the world including Bill Cinton, Bryan Adams, Will Smith, Amartya Sen, Arundhati Roy, Angelina Jolie, Ted Turner, Md. Yunus Khan, Uma Thurman, Kiran Desai and her mother Anita Desai…and almost all of the Bollywood’s beauty brigade.

After quitting TOI, I floated in the journalistic limbo and I used the time freed from not having to meet pressure cooker deadlines to prepare for some competitive examinations. But as I said, writing was an addiction for me and the urge for stringing together words as they dance into sentences, metaphor into paragraphs and blossom into complete write-up got the better of me.

Soon, Whistleblower reincarnated itself in a new avatar in this paper (Sangai Express), though the range of topics was limited by the need to be more circumspect about touchy political and social issues.

Finally, as I join the Manipur Civil Services, curtains are coming down on my budding career as a wordsmith. It depresses me to think that I would no longer wake up early in the morning, sit in front of my laptop and watch the blank screen getting filled with words—and words are all I have—that pour out from my mind and heart.

My break-up from words is not a matter of my volition however. I am quitting this column because I fear that writing about the issues that are close to my heart might raise the hackles of the government, what with civil service conduct code of political neutrality dangling like a sword over the pen.

Maybe I can go back to my teenage preoccupation for romance but I have had little personal experience of real love and so playing a love guru would be a great injustice, and even insulting, to those lucky enough to find true love.

Another option is to write about nature and uncontroversial subjects like: mating habits of penguins, global warming, animal rights, lifecycle of exotic tropical creatures and so on. But again that would go against the grain of my style and character as I have always loved venturing into dangerous terrain of thoughts and eccentric debates as against textbook platitudes.

But the most important reason why I plan to leave my pen behind is because I believe that as a civil servant, I can make some things happen and transform into action pet causes that I had always espoused in my write-ups, be it promoting good governance or reducing corruption. My role has changed and so is my identity.

Whistleblower is dead.

*** E-mail may be quoted by name in Whistleblower's readers section, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise.