The Twenty First Birth.

"Sometimes the hard times won't leave me alone...."

Reality checks are painful for me. If they weren't, I would've checked how long ago it was that I stopped writing.My hazy memory places it to around two years back.I could probably tell you why. A faulty internet connection, leading on to loss of habit, unwillingness to make an effort and finally and painfully, a loss of motivation. Along the way I was even convinced I'd run out of topics to write on. And for sometime, I had. Then after a log period of guilt-laced hibernation, random observations would come to me, observations that would normally have a found coherent form at the end of the day in another blog-post. But now nothing. I'd forgotten to write, as far as such things can be forgotten.

I could tell you a million things about these two years. About how it feels to be sucked in a quagmire of frustrated ambitions, hopelessness and eventually, a shattering loss of self-worth.A loss that was not so much of self-worth, as the perception of it . I could also tell you about looking into the future, only to be able to see, more clearly than ever, a future of ruins even more desolate than the present I've been living in.

A couple of years, spent so ruthlessly driven by cruel circumstances that, harking back to the song I quoted at the beginning of this post,

' Now the face that I see in my mirror
More and more is a stranger to me
More and more I can see there's a danger
In becoming what I never thought I'd be '

You cannot be wholly responsible for what you are, and I've been tossed and turned ruthlessly till I can scarcely compare myself to the Child I once was. Brishti'r bhejar bhoy hoi na, by becoming evil you no longer suffer evil, and by becoming insensitive you no longer feel the sharp pains that once threatened to bleed you out. But even then, there cannot be a loss of the awareness of the past, and the loss felt, though camouflaged, is deep.

But then, somewhere in the course of writing my now almost forgotten blog I learnt, from an infinitely more talented person, that whining never helps, and true to my thirst of bettering myself, I kept it to a minimum there as I hope to do here.

You see I'm merely building up to the renewal of my writing phase, a prologue of sorts trying to fill in a gaping hole in what I initially meant to be my chronicle more than anything else. I feel compelled to start anew, afresh, continuing my chronicle in another  private domain, my readers( if any ;) ) chosen by me. And hence, The Twenty First Birth.

I send up a prayer, hoping that this is more lasting effort than the last, a chronicle that continues, as I reach the end of the first of the innumerable efforts I must make, building a sense of worth.

(Lyrics courtsey John Denver.)

Forever Young.

Today I subjected myself to a reality check. My last post had been on May 9.I have been putting off writing posts for so long I had now begun gliding over all thoughts of blogs - mine or otherwise. Not an unusual phenomenon when something piles up. But back breaking work now finally at a respite I must dive back into the multi-dimensional life that is more usual.

And I was in for a surprise- seems like it wasn't only me who had been putting off stuff. Most of the regular blogs I read( which aren't very many by the way) have litteler than usual posts. And always because of extra workload. And though it feels nice to be included, that is not the point of  my post.

The point of my post is the one advantage of Windows over DOS that was revolutionary : Multitasking.
Many a summer ago I moved from laziness to work. Then came the transition from mere work to hard-work. Then from hard-work to the point where no more work was possible. At this point dawned the realisation that efficiency must be stepped up. Now comes multi tasking.

So in a sense, there are really no reasons for the gaping holes in my blog calendar. Only excuses which seem to sound more and more like cribbing each time you go over it.

Inspiration does not die : Ever. It only gets clouded over by fogs of our own making. And till the time you have the strength to keep clearing those fogs, till then, you remain young and un-disillusioned.


P.S: Out of practice, I took the liberty of coining a couple of words- I am no poet, so forgive me. :)

Writing.

Just through a blessed Easter weekend, it hit me.I've hardly taken out  an hour over the past two months for something that had transformed into a love: blogging. With my PC out of order, I had a ready excuse, but then again, I could have used the one at the library. It 's been a mad, mad time, but I haven't complained even one of the very, very, many days I've woken up with a throbbing pain in my body. "A body as young as mine can adapt"- I told myself every such morning, but there must be something wrong with work that consumes you so that it has started weaning you away from what you love.

It's heartbreaking that I no longer find an inspiration to write, and the few vague thoughts that cry for expression don't find willing hands. I've always believed that fatigue at the end of the day is awesome. It gives you sleep that is therapeutic.I'm not too sure anymore.

I'm not particularly gifted. My posts often come out garbled at the end of the day, but its a release. But glancing behind I  realised  something else too- my posts form a pattern: A pattern of growth.
Its amazing how starkly obvious this pattern was. In the one and a half year of journey this blog  has seen me through, it has amazingly chronicled personal growth.

And with that realisation, came another: You take a large credit for it.
For all my strong belief that I write for myself and my knowledge that I would continue writing even if  there was no one who read it, as indeed I did for almost the first eight months of my blogging, I know that you reading pushes me on to put an effort to make my words readable. And I know that you reading compels me to draw from a reservoir I didn't even know existed, in times such as these.

Someday, I'll find the courage to write as if no one is reading. To strip to an ugliness that's me. But before that I must continue writing what I write, in the process sketching out my imperfections.

And before that someday comes, I'll keep returning, to this lost corner of the cyberspace,drawing comfort even in its imperfections.

Of Careless Decisions.

This day, a year back, I became a blogger.

It was a carelessly made decision, and it showed. I didn't care, there was no one to read it and I definitely intended to keep it that way. Then I realised that other blogs existed in the blogosphere too and I started to read. Reading made me comment and somewhere down the line my blog started being read too. The initial comments made me wonder. Comments were commented on the readable. So I tried my hand at better expression, and to another wonder, I was not as inarticulate as I considered myself to be.

This blog has seen me through a terrible year, and after a brief high of April-June, the slide has seemingly begun again. So it is only fitting that I remember its first Birthday. (Ah! the selfish alter-ego intervenes: you need it to see you through another long time.)

Happy Birthday, dear blog, and may you live for evermore.

"Through language we explore experience, emotions, the very essence of our existence. Unless all that we think and feel can find expression in natural, coherent words, we have not come of age."

All the growing up that is left, I'll do it with you.

A Quest.

I want to be able to write. Beautifully. I want my words to move you, inspire you and make you want to lift up a pen too. But I'm no good at it. Thoughts rush into my mind every time I sit at this page, a whirlwind after the other, and I can never grasp them and fit them into my chubby fists, just like I could never quite catch the colourful bubbles at the entrance of New Market, then with chubbier fists. I do not cherish a dream of being published. Yet I feel like an author every time I hit the publish button. I want to mould my words into perfectly ordered paragraphs but again I fail.

I fail repeatedly and yet I persist. Even at the cost of scorn and laughter I carry on. Because, someday I'll want to be able to produce words effortlessly. I'll want like what I've written. Now I don't. I think that whatever I write is either too mushy, or too drab. Sometimes I feel, they are too contrived and sometimes , too spontaneous.I'll want to read that something in perfect balance, perfect harmony, written by me.


But for all my quest of perfection, I think my half-baked efforts are worth chronicling. And worth displaying. Because failure is beautiful. Its beautiful in its inherent humanity. Its beautiful in its ordinariness that shows me as an unremarkable human. It is the last, ultimate proof of my mediocrity. And that is why, much as I want to, I do not take off so many of my trashy posts, mostly written in my earlier days of blogging. And I continue to write more of it.It is, for me, a harsh lesson in reality.

And that is why so many unfinished drafts still lie, littering my dashboard. I deem them too ugly to show them light.

This blog was always meant to be personal, never private. But now I find lines blurring. And I realise that I need to pull in my reins once again. Perhaps I'm afraid that the more I enter into the private,the more deplorable its content shall be. Putting something into black and white makes it a final, irreversible reality. And then I wouldn't be able to shut my eyes and ignore things, believing that if I ignore them for long enough they shall go away.

Would it be possible for me to write about the deformed and ugly that is me without cringing while re-reading it?

Till the day I can't, I must continue heeding the lines I drew a long time back and watch my life chronicled through detached eyes.


(words did find their way through my fingertips, and I re-wrote this post on 7.06.09 ; 11.55 pm)