A journey begins...

My first attempt at penning down my thoughts happened some decades ago, when I was still young enough to be affected by the thought of putting things down on paper as a way of immortalizing myself - ah the wisdom of adolescence! That attempt did not last for long. If I recall correctly, my desire to put some permanence to my experiences by penning them down died soon after my second journal entry. I realised that after the first day of writing an extraordinarily long journal entry with vivid details, on subsequent days I was too tired or bored to write anything more insightful than, " Went to school and came back home again." As such, you can only imagine my hesitation to start doing that all over again despite the rapid (and sometimes rabid) fascination that people seemed to have developed for blogging. Almost everyone I knew, be it a friend, a distant colleague or my own baby brother was indulging in extravagant display of personal reverie (as i perceived it) on the world wide web.

I can admit quit candidly that I have resisted the urge to showcase my poor judgement about life and writing in general on the blogs, for many many years. The reasons ranging from the need for privacy, to the earlier failed attempts at being able to consistently write something down everyday or on frequent basis - the most basic idea behind blogs, or any other kind of journal entry, as I understand.

What changed? Why am I then doing the very thing I have abhored and avoided for years? a sudden face-to-face encounter with memories from the same adolescent years a few evenings ago. since then, three days to be precise, I have been ambivalent about blogging and thinking far too much about a subject that I admittedly did not care much for. I came across a book full of my poems - poems that I had composed when I was 15 or 18 or even 23 - poems that my mother d once threatened to send to some publisher as "anonymous" if I didn't pick the courage to send them myself. I was shocked, amused and frankly quite literally blown away by my own ability to compose poetry. For years now, being in a PhD program, I have struggled with my own lack of confidence as a writer. I realised now that it isn't a lack of ability or a talent (of which I do not boast at all - rather I cannot boast) but a fear of being incompetent. I believed, infact I am afraid I still might, that I had used up all my finesse, talent and writing ability all those years ago and now I am just a dried up academic. A few hours ago I finally decided to put that theory to test,. This blog is thus an experiment, for myself, to see if I really have no writing, other than articles for journals and assignments for students, left in me. I solemnly hope I am wrong, and I am going to try and prove to myself that I am, but as all experiments go, I am also open to the idea of realising my theory is fatally true after all!

So here goes nothing...!