Going private

It is now more than three weeks since this blog went truly private.  I am now in this binary existence. There is this bit where I am like anyone else, a John citizen.  Like everyone else I have my quirks that most people can see.  I have my moods when I am quite dark, inaccessible and unkind.  And then there is the generous side where I wax eloquent about how it is important to make this world a better place in the short while that we all inhabit it.

And there is the other private side to me that for a while for the past four years I let people into, although in very small numbers.

But no longer so.  This will be the fourth post that I would not have broadcast to anyone else.  Apart from an intensely private one that I took down no longer than I had written it, all my other posts, other than these four, have been broadcasted to various people. 

I am now alone in this world of my posts.  Who was it that said that in the heights of joy and in the depths of sorrow Man is all alone?  Apart from Lakshmi, my wife, there is place for no one else in this world of mine now. 

May be some day when I am too old to matter to anyone and I am too old to do anything, my sons will discover these posts.  What will they think of their father when they read these posts, I wonder?  Will they think their father was a sorry wimp?  Will they think that I had been deceitful, not having revealed this side to my life?  Will they charge their mother of having been an accomplice to duplicity?  Will they tell their own wife and children about me?  What would they in turn think about me?  And about their husband once they know about their father in law?

Crazy thoughts I admit.  Thoughts that are of no consequence. 

Being private is very painful, as this week reminded me.  

After much hesitation I offered myself for interview admissions. I was reminded of the grief and torture that I experienced during the interviews last year as I braced myself for the separation that was round the corner. 

I was like a wraith in the interviews.  I felt wan and drained.  I felt that a huge boulder of several tonnes had been placed on my chest. I called home every evening.  I delayed getting back to my room at the hotel as long as I could.  And when I did have to, inevitably to retire, I left all the blinds and the lights open, scared of the darkness that was enveloping me in the physical and metaphorical sense.

But that made me a kinder interviewer.  Gone was the aggressive interviewer who got his mind to fire on all sixteen cylinders to do his bit to ensure that the school got the best of the kids into the programme.

I somehow began to see everyone in the world as a potential victim of the kind of grief I experienced, give or take a bit on either side.  Even when a candidate struggled to find an answer I would almost prompt him with hints.

My fellow panelist was intrigued, given the reputation I used to have.  He was quite curious to know about the transformation.  I merely told him that it was the effect of age and the transformational effect of parenthood.

Little did he know or little could I tell him that within me the flames of Hades, were consuming me, burning me into ashes, with grief that I would be advised a few days later was the price for an act of omission or commission from a past life.

It is a year now, almost, since those days.  And I can see the same specter dancing in front of me.  I dread everything about it – from the wait at the airport in Bangalore to the lonely moments before and after the interviews at IHC.  It feels almost like the ides of March in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar. 

Apart from pouring my heart out to Lakshmi all that I can do is to write more of these posts.  Through these posts I can tell myself the same sad story, remind myself how unfortunate I am on this count.  Ultimately I will have to live down this grief, if I want to be seen by the small world around me as a regular bloke with some common quirks.  Like most others.  And not to be asked to seek help.

Now that the post and, with it, my grief have both gone private, why the customary sign off?