I believe I can do justice to your needs. I have recently retired after an illustrous careet spanning 38 years in corporate communications. I have versatile writing skills and excellent editing and proofreading abilities. I now have the time to put these skills to use for a variety of clients.
A sample of my writing is pasted below:
Bartlesville Revisited
At the age of seventeen, I spent a year in Bartlesville, deep in the heart of Oklahoma – kind courtesy the American Field Service exchange student program. The scholarship entailed a year’s study-stay with an American family, with the all-too-improbable name of Bill W. Jones! In comparison, Pilloo Pardiwalla sounded like an exotic raga.
It was mutual love-at-first-sight, as I bounced out of the Greyhound. I was promptly rechristened the Crazy Indian and returned the compliment by dubbing B.W.J., Big Daddy – and proceeding to wrap him around my little finger (not to mention in my green silk sari, on one occasion!).
The year passed in a whirl – football games and girl-scout camps; root beer and Lotta burgers; the prom; being chosen Miss Spirit ’68; teepee-ing the school lawn; my first experience with snow (“you should know the stuff was slippery, dummy”); watching my host sister Jan being crowned Miss Bartlesville 1968.
And, of course, the innumerable speaking assignments, when one tried to reshape a mildly (?) distorted mental image of things Indian – “Do you dream in English?”; “Are there elephants on the road?”; “Is that a hole in your head?”; “You mean people get married there without having dated even once?”
The summer of 1985. Seventeen years have passed. I’m in Amsterdam attending a world congress on P.R. I decide to stretch my ticket (a wee bit!) and visit the Bill W. Joneses. My flight into New York is three hours’ late. I pay a cabbie $ 10 to take me to the terminal for the Oklahoma connection – which turns out to be all of 50 yards away!
Bartlesville, at last. The familiar silhouette of the Phillips Petroleum Company offices, still the mainstay of the town’s economy despite two recent take-over bids.
I hug Big Daddy again – only he’s not quite so big after his heart Attack. The cigar has gone, but the fondness remains. It comes through palpably when he proudly presents me to his Rotary colleagues at their weekly lunch as his “crazy Indian daughter who thinks the shortest route from Amsterdam to Bombay is via Bartlesville!”
“Don’t wait another seventeen years to revisit us”, he said when he dropped me off at the Tulsa airport. “I won’t!” I promised. And I kept my word. Seven years later I am back in Bartlesville – only this time I join the rest of my host family in interring Big Daddy’s ashes.
n Pilloo Mullan