Any excuse will do

I remember the poet Gulzar once saying that when his work was translated into English he felt he was reading something written by a stranger. Going through my archives I have a similar sense of dissociation from my work. Of course I'm not a poet and my maudlin posts are seldom vulnerable to the sensitivities of interpretation. Nor do I write in multiple languages - going by the tattered shape of this blog, I can barely manage just one. Nevertheless, I feel a sense of displacement from what I'd written before. The person reflected in those posts is different from the person reading them and a translation has been enacted between the two personalities, a change of currency from past to present and one self extracting out of another. It is interesting to note the changes, the private arcs of metamorphosis along which the transition took place, and, in a way, a small history is contained in these modest pages. When I started the blog, I never imagined it would be this way, that three years down the line enough material would accumulate for a person to actually emerge from that motley assembly of observations, an individual dressed in the banal and the quotidian, earnest, naive, riddled with mistake and energy and enjoying his own unmistakable voice. But he has stepped out, thew and sinew my ink-and-paper twin, and through him, the blog now enjoys the weight of a past and, what's worse, the dubious merits of character. I'm not sure what to make of this. I suppose I should be proud of this achievement, of having stuck around long enough to gestate an identity. But part of me also feels a little anxious, a little deprived by the loss of anonymous privilege. It's a petty little dilemma. Not amenable to any reasonable conclusion except to thrash around and write about. And so I have.