The soul is missing

One of my friends, who regularly reads this blog, told me recently that the quality of writing has gone down in the last 2-3 posts. Even though the last post had found mention on Desipundit, I thought she was right. On hindsight, I think the last post was mentioned partly because it talked about love and relationships, finding the perfect woman/man etc. But she was right: the post on free pizza and drinks was a sort of forced humour: something that could have been written more hilariously or perhaps with a dash of sarcasm. The next post on the human billboards was well, sort of ok. But I'd rate it to be a 3/5, but not a 4/5 or a 5/5 because umm... something was missing.

As I ponder over the phenomenon, I think this applies to a lot of things, not just writing blogs. When I used to go to debates or elocution contests when I was absolutely convinced of what I was going to say or speak, I used to come out with flying colours. When I wrote essays, or even answers in the language exams (be it Bengali or English), sometimes it would be just an exercise of scribbling the pen on the paper: writing meaningless lines and circumlocuting over and over again the same topic without adding anything useful. On some other days, a topic would just click instantly with me: a slew of ideas would come up, they'd get organised easily, efficiently and effortlessly and I'd know by the time I finished writing the essay that that was one hell of a good job. Why should I even go looking at an essay for citing examples? Some of my earlier handwritten letters used to bear the trademark, and sometimes my emails still do. Sometimes I used to be surprised at the final product myself: two and a half pages of clean, straight Bengali script without a single scribble, and one hell of a job at convincing the reader that what was written was written from the heart. But it is intriguing: what makes the difference? Be it an email, a blog post, an essay, whatever: it is just be a collection of words strung together to form a few sentences! But no, there is something deeper: somewhere hidden in itself there is a soul, a message coming straight from the heart.

Swami Vivekananda called it the power of concentration: that a cook who concentrates on the cooking will do a better job than one who does not, even if both of them used exactly the same ingredients. A cobbler who mends the shoes with concentration with make a much stronger shoe although the next man used the same thread and leather. Truer words were never said: when I concentrate on the job, somehow I am linked with the job at hand. That soul, that intrinsic connection lingers on with the final product, so that when it is presented to a person afresh, that power of conviction spreads subtlely from the product to the human. I don't need to use tough-sounding words, or complicated thoughtful quotations. Simplicity, lucidity --- that is the key and it comes naturally. To be pure in my mind, have a pure thought, and that thought is transferred somehow to the reader. It is not just a thought, then: it is the soul of the material product, something that carries my convictions. Sometimes, I know, the soul goes missing. And sometimes, like in this post, it just comes back...