Why is it necessary for me to write?

I want to start writing again. It has been over a year since I tried to write anything. While I am clear in my mind that I want to write, I have no clue what to write. It is not that I have strong opinions about something that I can't wait to share my thoughts about. And to be honest, my skill in writing is quite limited to sharing personal stories. Of course, I wrote a lot of stories of personal nature in the last couple of years. But it got too personal. I started wondering why I would bear my personal life in the Internet. While it is true that only a handful of people know about this blog and only a few of those come to these pages, it is not exactly hidden from the Internet. So, I have taken down all the posts that were quite personal and I have decided to write about things that don't have to expose my personal life or the lives of my friends and family members. And there is the conundrum. I have decided not to write about the thing that I am good at, I am not good at writing about anything else and yet I want to write. I thought long and hard what to write about and I couldn't get an answer. I finally decided to write about the fact that I don't have a topic to write about and hope that somehow comes out interesting enough to read.

Having decided to write, not having a topic is not the only problem I have. I am quite a private person and I usually keep my thoughts to myself. Even on the issues that I feel strongly about, I find much easier to engage in a conversation with a friend than writing about it. I have always been good at expressing my thoughts better in writing, but thus far all my writing involved personal anecdotes. Instead of writing here, if I were to write a personal email to a friend about something we both are interested in, I can write pages and my friend, who would receive the email would find the entire content interesting, despite the length of the email. Considering that this blog is not a personal email, I still have no clarity about what to write.

I could write about why I took my personal posts down. But I already covered that concisely in the first paragraph above. I could, however, re-write that paragraph and go on for pages about why I took those down. But that would be a terrible idea. My own favorite parts of the pieces I wrote were the ones that were concise and simple. I actually don't like to say or write ten sentences when two will suffice. Like this paragraph. I have said what I wanted to say in 4 sentences. I am finding the paragraph too short, but I already covered everything I needed in this paragraph and hence I will let it be a short paragraph. Interestingly, the next paragraph is even shorter.

I travel a lot for work. I take a flight or two for work reasons at least once in a month. So, I could actually write about my travels. I could write about the interesting places that I visited or that I will visit when I travel next. But, I am a terrible tourist. I rarely spend my weekends in the places I travel to and even if I did, I usually stay at the hotel and hardly go anywhere. If I started writing a travel blog, it would only be about airports and hotels. 

It certainly looks like I have no reason to write except for my desire to write. It is partly true, but it is not the complete truth. About a year ago, one of my friends called me from a different country. He had tracked me down by using his old contacts, reached my brother and had gotten hold of my phone number. I was actually quite happy to receive a call from him. While we were talking, he told me that I (apparently) told him something that changed his life. Without going into details of what I actually said and how it changed his life, I would like to state that I completely forgot telling him what he quoted. The words, however, are certainly mine as I must have repeated those words many times in the last thirteen years. Hence, I must have said it definitely. Those very words were quoted by a colleague, who is a good friend of mine, this morning. He told me that he was inspired by those words and it enabled him to find ways to expand his horizons. It made me think that there is mutual benefit in positive communication. As much as I may have influenced a couple of people with my thoughts, I also benefited immensely from the thoughts of many of my mentors, colleagues and most importantly, my friends. If they didn't share their thoughts, I wouldn't even be half the man I am today. 

Recently, I have been keeping to myself a lot. I have stopped communicating and I have stopped sharing. While I have extremely good reasons to be a recluse, it isn't exactly fair to the people who care about me that I completely stop communicating. So, what I write here, while may not be exactly personal, but it will be a way for me to communicate with the people who care about me. This is my way of telling the people I love dearly that I am alright wherever I am and there is no need to worry about me. Well, I have a knack of turning any topic into a personal one, don't I?!

My Trip to Paris and My Interest in Photography

Paris is a beautiful city, but also very hectic. I was amazed to see the railway network in Paris. For four days, we didn't have to take anything other than a train. I visited Paris when I had been in Frankfurt for a short term assignment of 3 months.

Personally, it gave me chance to see the places, which I could have seen only in Movie songs in the past. I was absolutely consumed by the Louvre Museum, especially the painting section - I could have spent all four days in the Paintings section itself. Some of the photos that I have clicked in the paintings section are uploaded here.

There are quite a few photographs that I have taken from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Some of those photos of which the angles are little different and appealing are attached here.

The one attached in the right side is the one which is my desktop for the last one year.

This one I think is equally well constructed and I was at the peak of the tower to take this photo. The camera is a very good one - a Sony W30, which belongs to my friend and colleague who made the trip with me. The depth of the photos at full zoom was amazing. I think the Sony W30 has been my best experience with a non-SLR digital camera. However, I do regret not having the CANON EOS 400D, which I bought only two weeks after this trip. The depth of the photos could have been better. However, this Sony W30 had been amazing in that trip.

It has been a trip to savour - the one which I promised to do again with my family. Paris is also the city where I had first seen the Disney Land - However, I went till the gates and backed out saying that I wouldn't want to visit Disney Land without my son (My daughter wasn't born then).

I did visit Disney Land of Los Angeles, last year (2008), with my family and fulfilled one of the promises that I had made during the Paris trip.

Photography:

My interest on photography dates back to 1993. It had everything to do with the way my first ever Photograph shaped up in the Vandalur Zoo near Chennai. We had seen a deer and I happened to be the one with the camera in hand. Everyone shouted "shoot" and I clicked what I saw. It was a fantastic first picture as the deer was moving and I managed to get the deer's picture right in the middle of the frame and with utmost precision. Encouraged by that first picture (which, I didn't realise then, happened by mere luck than skill), I clicked a couple of more important pictures on another day - very important ones for my friends who were supposed to be there in those pictures. The result of those pictures (I had accidentally covered the flash with my hands) left my friends disappointed and exhasperated and myself very focussed on learning where I went wrong. I did handle many point and shoots during the next 10 years - from Minolta to Yaschica. During the period 1993-2002, I found myself in-front of the camera for around a dozen times, as opposed to the dozen hundred times that I was behind the camera, though my engagement and subsequent wedding in 2002 changed a small part of that statistic. I had a very little brush with a SLR camera as one of my room mates had a Nikon FM10, before finally getting a Sony P8 Digital Point and shoot camera in 2003 for myself. I shot some of my best pictures with the Sony P8. I had my eye on the Digital SLR cameras since 2004 and finally got a chance to lay my hands on my first Digital SLR - a Canon E0S400D - in 2007. I added a telephoto zoom lens to the camera by end of 2008 and happily shooting ever. Most of what I shot with my Canon EOS400D is personal and hence we won't be seeing the pictures from the camera, in this blog, anytime soon.

My interest (and perceived skills) in photography gave me two of the unforgettable moments in my life.

1. My cousin was giving her Debut Classical Dance performance and as usual (as the news spread out within the family circles that I was both a willing and able photographer - "willing" was more appropriate than being "able") I was given the photography responsibilities. Enthusiastically, I bought a couple of film rolls and loaded the first one into the camera. My another cousin, who was interested in "my kind" of photography (no idea whatever that means), stuck with me. However I was a little late getting into the theatre and the first song was almost finished when I started shooting. I did manage to get 3 or 4 good snaps of the first song though. During the break, I gave the camera to my wide-eyed cousin and was drinking coffee. As my luck would have it, my cousin clicked the rewind button in the camera and the film went into its shell and the camera was pointing to '0'. I had two choices - either I leave the film roll as it is and it will have only 4 good photos or I re-load the film thereby loosing the first 4 photos. I decided to do the latter as I had missed most of the first song anyway. I reloaded the film and started shooting again happily. I promptly handed over the exposed rolls to my cousin. I almost forgot this little fiasco till the prints of the photos came out. Unbelievably when printed, the first 4 photos looked like trick shots. My cousing was performing one step on the left side of the photo and one another on the right (because of double exposure). Another one had her in a pose in the top half of the photo and another in the bottom half. My cousin was ecstatic (She called me "PC Sriram!!!") with the photos that she repeatedly asked me how did I do it. I wouldn't tell her, would I?

2. One of my friends invited me to take photos in his sister's engagement and I happily obliged. I started loading a film to my point and shoot camera and started shooting as I deemed fit. When I had completed taking one roll, I carefully removed the film roll and handed over to my friend (whose sister's engagement it was). I was busy loading the other fresh film roll in to the camera that I didn't even notice what my friend was doing. After I had loaded the film, I looked at my friend to say "I am ready". But before I could say anything, what I saw in front my eyes left me speechless. My friend who had the film roll with exposed photos, was taking the film roll out in the open sun. I cried "What are you doing?" with disbelief. He replied cooly "I am just looking at the photos that you have taken". Years after, my brother still rolls in laughter when he thinks of the gobsmacked expression I showed after hearing what my friend had to say.

Why did I start blogging?

Why did I start blogging? It is not that I am a very creative person and can't wait to let the world know of my flowing thoughts. And also it is not that I have a great vocabulary. I don't have a great sense of humour either. One of my cousins noted thus "He is pretty intense even while having fun - pretty serious about everything including enjoyment" - guess, it kind of sums me up. With such a boring personality, why did I ever try my hand in blogging?

This is a question I have asked myself many a times before I write anything. Though I may not be a creative person, I have my opinion on many things, around me, around my work place, around my home, around my city, around my country and around my world. I dwell on my little opinions a little too much, that I sometimes I do come up with well-rounded thoughts that could be put in writing. I haven't put many of those thoughts in pen and paper and hence I wouldn't be able to remember it two days later - only the feeling of "Oh I had a fantastic thought, pity that I don't remember all of it!" remains. To kill that feeling, I have started blogging. A majority of those thoughts may seem pretty useless after a couple of days, hence I decided I will publish the blogs only a week after I write it, which would give me enough time to think, re-write, re-word or completely trash the blog. My thoughts may not worth a penny to anyone else, but I would need to treasure those thoughts and hence this blog. Because, if even I don't treasure my own thoughts myself, there is little or no chance that anyone else will.

However, I don't have much experience in writing. There are a few of 4 page hand-written letters that I wrote to my friends, which I treasure the most. There were a couple of personal, emotion-ridden emails, which I thought had been constructed very well.

Oh, well, I did write something about "Optimism" in a notebook, intended to be my personal autograph notebook during my college farewell, which I had lost even before the farewell party - not that it matters, because the write-up didn't make even my best of friends understand what I was trying to say. I basically ended up making a long and torturous lecture which could be summed up in one sentence - "If you are optimistic, you can get a positive out of the person you hate the most, which is the first step towards not hating that person". Well, I still believe in that - just that I don't have the intention to torture people again with that long lecture.

Apart from the above few brushes with writing, I haven't done anything much in terms of writing and hence I may not publish all what I write.

Oh, one last thing - If the blog name "Crazy Thoughts" made anyone think that this would be a comedy blog, I would like to clarify that it is not a comedy - my thoughts are crazy alright, but the fact that I have thoughts, in itself, is a tragedy.