Owner of a blank mind

10 days from today, my blogging career will be 5 years old. And as the day nears, am going through my worst patch ever. As I scroll down the blog to check my last substantial entry(excluding all those travalogues and concert write ups), I see a date which came on the calender 40 days back. Though I wouldn't call this depressing, its certainly a bit alarming, considering how the words have deserted me. Not that I was churning out shakespearean classics out here in this space, but there was a certain flow and a certain confidence with which I used to sit down almost every alternate evening and type something down in notepad so that it could add to the information overload on blogs the next day. There were ofcourse passing phases which went on for a week or so and then I was back in my groove. And then came this, almost unprecedented in my life in blogs.

As I sit down and think of the various reasons, the first one I use to fool myself and all of you will be of course the world cup. Now, it started just 2 weeks back but I can always say that I was just conditioning my mind for this spectacle in the one month preceeding that. The conditioning included hunting down for the jersey(duplicate of course) of my team(Brazil) and making fun of the rival teams. This argument is of course as thin as Italy's defence line in yesterday's match. And yes, right now am stuck writing this post too. As I glance upwards I see someone trying too hard to fill space, someone trying hard to beat out big round chappathis from a very thin mix of dough. Those who are bored can stop here. Am just trying to take it out all from the system and make it flow again. You may ask, 'Why post it here, why don't you just type it out in a notepad and torture yourself?' Well, I need to because its this blog that inspires me to write and it should know when am so short of that.

Hitting a purple patch seems a distant dream. But then black patches also donot last for long. I used to give this advice to people who were having a writer's block- 'look around you. There are a million subjects to write on.' But right now when I look around, all am seeing is emptiness. A scene straight out of a sci-fi movie, with me in the middle and white space all around. In whichever direction I run, I don't see a spot. Its crystal clear. I can't even see myself, not even my hands. And no, dont make that assumption on my mental health now. I've a lot of things left to do before I take myself into an asylum. It doesn't help matters either when your head itself is an asylum. I could've taken myself to that asylum if I were the John Malkovich character in the Charlie Kauffman movie. For us lesser mortals, travelling into one's own head(or rather mind) remains an impossible affair. So, the real truth behind the blankness of my mind will remain a mystery of epic proportions. Now, let me run in search of the edge of that elusive purple patch...

your crusader Praveen