There are people who, with utter madness, admire talented personalities. I am not saying I don’t admire laudable talents, but I am not excessively, fiercely dependent on them when leading my life. Good books satiate me, good music fills my heart and soul with joy and a beautiful piece of writing, magnificiently laced with evocative threads, never fail to uplift the person in me.
But these days, I find myself lend an attentive ear to memoirs – both written and spoken. Perhaps that bit of character has been an innate part of me for long, since I have always liked reading personal blogs more than anything. I am not overtly dependent on them, but yes, I do find happiness out of taking a stroll through the life of another person. I am yet to decipher the craziness that resides in the liking, or if I have company in the form of people who nurture similarity in that regard. Some are of the opinion that such people are diffident about their own lives. But then, what if the act inspires me to be more? In my case, there is a second reason too, to which I shall reach in a while.
People are different, I believe, and everyone has his/her favourite bait, which quite positively hooks them, feeds their souls and releases them for a better life.
Well, I have a few other such similar nourishing baits too on my list – like A.R. Rahman’s music, A Kazuo Ishiguro novel, an Alice Munroe short story, a Mohanlal movie, a chat with my best friend and so on. But the latest one to have conquered my heart, once I started working on my own manuscript, is reading the writing story of my favourite authors. Sometimes, I might not even have read their works, but their presence – their sheer authoritative presence and their diligently acquired accomplishments, out of the many other reasons, inspire me and I look forward to knowing more about their writing journey. I have been flipping through many such authors, a few of them blogger-turned authors, when my eyes fell upon the blog of the acclaimed author, Ruchita Misra – Blogging All The Way. I read and re-read most of her blog posts and they brought smiles to my face more often than not. There is something surreal about reading the amateur works of a person who have been a success ever since.
Is it because of she is famous and widely accepted now, that I find her earlier writing amusing?
I don’t have an answer. But I do know that I have a soft-spot for innocous memoirs and I can read and re-read personal blog posts for any number of time I want. Somehow, they take me closer to the writer and I feel I have been given a huge comforting bear hug by an invisible force.
I came to know that she too is an anxious person like me and although I never read the blog aiming to end up with a tutorial to alleviate my anxiety, my haphazard mind was pacified to realise that I am not alone when it came to matters such as that. She, in one of her posts’s, mentions about bringing down her anxiety by trying to solve the mathematics table in her mind. Every person has his own technique to deal with his problems, griefs or similar downsides. For me it has been work. But I cannot work round the clock and there are times when struck with a bout of anxiety ( for a reason ), I discern methods to escape from it. These days, it has been reading good blog posts for me. I blog-hop, find interesting blogs and devour the articles which strike a chord with me. They inevitable leave me at peace at least for a good one hour or two, when my mind returns back to the jovial self.
Even as a child, I used to listen to my dear ones sharing stories with one another – my mother about her work place to my father, my grand mother about our relatives to my mother, my mother about my brother and me to her friends, my brother about his eventful day to me . . the list is endless. No, I am not nosey, nor am I a gossip-monger. I simple love stories. Good stories. Happy stories. Intriguing stories. Undoubtedly, there is something soulful about listening to true stories. They are flawless and pristine. On the contrary, I hate movies made out of real stories. The tweaked version irks me and I would rather have someone narrate the story to me than watching it.
So much for my love for true stories. As I wrap this post up, I can’t help but leave you with one simple question. If ever you feel lonely and would like to have a friend listen to your story, you now know who to approach, don’t you?
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P.S: This post is tagged with ‘Mid Week Quests’, a sub section of this blog where I write on a Wednesday, about random nuggets from my life.
