Thursday, July 09, 2009

Search

My search for you began someday when I was ten, when I realized that I was incomplete in this world without you. Your face has changed over these years but you have remained a source of hope always. From that first few lines that I wrote, this other self of mine has peeped in countless words that I have scribbled on lost pages. I never knew that the best words that I wrote were the ones I have lost. But still, from memory that remembers quite a lot of images and turns of phrases and scents and experiences, I retrace this verbal journey from nothing to everything and from everything to nothing again.

Most people clearly remember the day they started writing. For me, words came on a day, here in this city on an idle day, when I was standing on the terrace talking to myself watching the distant church tower and the clear blue sky. I thought of a few lines, then the lines kind of repeated itself and I tried to make it as parallel as possible. That's when I understood that this chanting aloud is of no use: I need to write it down. Finally I went downstairs and wrote my first lines though not in English:

You dream of a heaven as a garden,
With roses that stand fresh and fragrant
That are circled by hungry bees.



Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Distance


After many days, I hear the quiver in your voice as you recognise my voice. You did not expect me to call you say as a way of explanation. Do you know many days have gone since I last talked to you? Years. Months. Days. Hours. Minutes. Seconds. All messed up and long only because I thought talking with you is a pain because of our lost friendship. Why did you call me, you ask expecting a long answer. Just like that is never enough for you for as always you pretend that you can read my mind.

Sitting opposite a friend, the other day, I realised how much you and your friendship meant to me even with all its flaws. You could never be what I wanted you to be nor could I ever attain that perfection you wanted to see in me. Still, there's a joy in the old meaningless conversations that I share with no other. The same laughter and the same tears that gather in two friends who have known each other for long!

The days of longing and desperation are over. The sea of forgetfulness that swept over the land has swallowed with it the countless moments of anger and frustration. With both of us, broken and still happy, we can stay away at respectful distance without harming each other's feelings. For the mutual knowledge and understanding that we share surpass other bonds just because it was bound by trials and tribulations. On days I try to write, your words come as a reason for laughter and tears.

Friday, July 03, 2009

Laurence Sterne on Writing

There are two sorts of eloquence; the one indeed scarce deserves the name of it, which consists chiefly in laboured and polished periods, an over-curious and artificial arrangement of figures, tinselled over with a gaudy embellishment of words, . . . The other sort of eloquence is quite the reverse to this, and which may be said to be the true characteristic of the holy Scriptures; where the eloquence does not arise from a laboured and far-fetched elocution, but from a surprising mixture of simplicity and majesty.

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Ray Bradbury on Creativity

Creativity is a continual surprise.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Goodness

How can silence create so much of love? You must have asked yourself so many times. Is there anything wrong in silence? For those who learn each other with time, love to sit silent and idle by each other. In their togetherness, there are no words nor there are promises. That's something you with your thousand questions will never understand.

But at times, I want to tell how much you mean to me, how the absences of day-to-day life spurs love in me and how I love even when you dream of freedom and of long-forgotten memories. You mean everything to me, even when you are silent, even when you are absent or even when you stop thinking of me.

Sometimes I feel the aura of your grace coming to mind as a picture of all that is good, great and nice- a big heart I have seen except when you are sad and your heart chokes with pain. But with all the goodness that you scatter around minute by minute, you know how to hide your self within those walls of goodness.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Tips for Good E-mail Writing

A good deal of communication takes place in the form of emails that you write to friends, colleagues and clients. In personal or professional communication through emails, you need to carefully follow certain guidelines that will help you write good mails while maintaining the etiquette of email communication.
  • When sending a mail to a new email address, send a test mail first. Most of the time, errors in spelling can bounce the mail right back into your inbox.
  • State the subject of your mail rather than leaving it empty. This enables easy search and retrieval of mails from a rather crowded inbox. Gmail has launched a feature called Inbox Preview that allows you to glimpse the first line of your recently received mails.
  • Use the original mail thread while replying to a previous mail so that the receiver can also track the correspondence in case of any confusion.
  • Customise your email by addressing the person. If at all you need to send the same mail to several people use the correct form of address and send it using the Bcc (Blind Carbon Copy) option. But don’t use the Cc (carbon copy) option unless it is necessary.
  • Be precise and to the point. Use simple sentences to convey your message. A long mail is hard to read and remember especially for a person who receives quite a lot of mails a day.
  • Write about a single topic in a mail rather than bombarding a single mail with a lot of information thereby helping the receiver to answer the relevant topic correctly.
  • Delete the list of previous receivers while forwarding a mail so that you do not reveal a big list of addresses of people without their permission.
  • Always remember that the web is a not secure enough to hold all your private details. Think twice before sending that angry e-mail or before revealing that extremely private piece of information in an email.
  • Sound positive and energetic in your mails rather than depressed and drab.
  • Re-read and edit the mail you have written, carefully going over the written matter for mistakes in grammar, punctuation or spelling.
  • Using capital letters in mails is not advisable as such writing is considered as screaming in the internet lingo.
  • Use the formatting tools but remember that the receiver may not be able to view the formatting. Take care about sending rich text to people who can view the message only in the plain text format.
  • Don’t forward chain letters that are scary or superstitious.
  • Don’t reply to spams either.
  • Reply to important mails immediately possibly on the same day or the next rather than mulling over them for days together.


Sunday, June 21, 2009

That Summer Long Ago

A long summer of uncertainties, 
Blazed many unquenchable fires, 
Many that burnt and scorched, 
Swallowing words and feelings. 

A thousand dreams buried soon, 
The flow of nature bottled up, 
In thick maroon curtains of silence
That hung quite out of place. 

A mess of life that stopped there,
In that long summer somewhere, 
From where it has moved hardly, 
An inch to gain back its momentum. 

The words have become sacred, 
The spaces no longer accessible, 
But memory brings back dreams,
In words said, words left unsaid. 

A few lines of poetry can't reveal, 
A love that lies dormant in ashes.

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