A letter

Dear Reader,

For the last two months, I have had the absolute pleasure of writing about thoughts or events and have them read by you. I have enjoyed your comments and they have made this a terrific experience. I've made great new friends and have even had the pleasure of catching up with one of them over lunch (you can read about that here). I'm a regular reader of almost close to 15-20 blogs and love leaving a note about what I thought about the post that I had just read, as you must have seen in your own blog.

I would advise everyone to take up the habit of blogging, it's a fantastic way of spending time and to know more about themselves. It hasn't always been an easy experience for me though, considering my background.

To be the son of an English Professor is a cross that I will bear all my living years. Don't get me wrong, Mom is an amazing person like all moms are (most of them anyway, I hear Brittney Spears is going to have twins *shudder*). Its just that she has forever been correcting they way I speak or the way I write that I have lost the ability do so myself. Hence , whenever I blog, I re-read the piece a dozen times, make a hundred corrections and still glance at it nervously for days wondering if by chance I've made a glaring error that has escaped my eye. To have mom edit my blog would be, well, not so good for a 31 year old. Majorly uncool, as we would say in college.

Most early posts felt like walk on the main road wearing nothing but a hat on, not a pretty sight I can tell you. If you are someone who knows me in real life and are framing a mental picture, you have just reached the lowest point of the month, cheer up, there is going to be nothing worse that could happen to you here on.

Assuming that you are still reading this piece after the mental trauma that you've just gone through, have you ever had to recheck if you've spelt certain words correctly all your life? My weak points are not tough words but simple ones like 'grammar' or 'coming', see I usually spell the way I pronounce and we South Indians pronounce grammar as gramMER and coming as com-MING, hence the issue. Thankfully, I have gone beyond taLLking (talking) and callage (college). I still haven't figured the advice/advise issue as yet, that one usually has me in knots for days.

If you still would like proof of my spelling skill just check out how the term 'opinionsunlimited' is spelt in my url.

Now you know.

(Thanks to my superior computer skills, I just found out that there was a spell check here too).

I envy anyone who can identify what an adverb or a pronoun when one passes by, I can't. It took me a decade to get comfortable with nouns and verbs as such. But the pleasure of putting up a post makes everything tolerable and fun.

Recently though, I grapple for issues or ideas to write about and end up painting myself in a corner. I feel that blogging is taking it's toll on me, as it occupies too much of mind space, hence I've decided to give this a cooling off period and just write a post on the occasional weekend, when my thoughts are fresh and more heartfelt or when there is something that is really worth writing about. At the request of a dear friend, I do plan to put up some pictures of Chennai sometime in the near future, just as soon as I take them.

Thanks for visiting my blog, I'd still be visiting yours, eager to read your next post. Please do keep writing. Do visit here occasionally, you never know what you might find :-)

Cheers,

R.