At times I wonder if, over time, a writer truly evolves - writing is an eternal spiral, whose centre is the life of the writer and arms form his imagination - and successful writing boils down to maintaining it as a circle. It is all about keeping it as far from the centre as possible while keeping the radius low enough for it to touch readers' hearts.
I initially prided myself with being able to put myself in imaginary situations and write the woes of someone in that position pretty accurately, and thereby considered myself a vicarious writer. Now I find that when unaware, the distance between my heart and that of my imaginary self diminishes to naught, turning every stroke of my pen into a diary entry that I'd sometimes cringe to read.
My mind, it seems, tricks my pen into writing my own story, my own feelings instead of an imaginary one. If I let my pen wander, and the flow set in, the heart bleeds itself, into the ink that flows from my pen*.
And with writing taking more and more room in my mental space, I find myself suffocating in my attempt to run away from the emotions that my soul secretes, and feel imprisoned within the non existent claustrophobic walls of my mind, formed by my imagined limitations.
Funnily, more often than not, my pages are wetted and hence permanently coloured by at least a few drops of the feelings that my soul spits and soaks itself in.
With each writeup is attached an emotion, if not many, a memory, a feeling that I can relate to.
I do not remember words that I spill when in one state, yes, but I remember the feelings that I bury with them - they come back to me when I re-read my work, like a long forgotten dream, turning into spades that dig deeper into the soul of my web pages, finding tiny, peculiar yet familiar rocks of emotions that've hitherto touched the roots of the vegetation which has sprouted over the months I'd left them buried.
Has my blog turned into some encrypted diary? One that makes sense in one plane to my readers, why, even to myself - and on another to a select few, and perhaps on a third one to just me?
Those who claim to know me or who wish to try to decipher this bundle that they call Raam might perhaps add a few more layers to these already multilayered 'sandwich' writeups.
Two dimensional writing on a screen does seem to have gone beyond the paper, perhaps finding more nameless dark levels within the souls of my readers to whom I am ever grateful. Without you my work wouldn't even be ink on paper, it would merely be a little magnetic data stored alongside zillions of bytes, forgotten long before it was written, receiving attention from Google's dead computers but heeded not by a single, living, breathing soul. Whether there is life to my writing or not, the fact that you read it honours the words that my spirit generated. And if it does have life, know that a portion of your soul rests in each word I have written, alongside the portion of mine that I sealed with it, when putting it down in writing.
*At times there is the lack of a muse which stimulates a muse hunt, but to be honest, there is no dearth of muses in my life, considering the number of films I watch or the number of times I step outside my room.
