Your response was unexpected, and hence, a pleasant surprise.
Writing to one another through blogs has been done before – I had written about one such encounter last year – and while it forms a charming little alternative to the usual blog-post, I think it is a difficult model to sustain over a longer period: keeping it interesting enough for other readers wouldn’t be an easy task. What would be worth considering, though, is the idea of taking forward Samuel Pepys’s diary-blog into the plane of letters: to publish an intense correspondence between two individuals as separate blogs, with each letter as a post, thus serializing the correspondence into instalments spread over a few years. There are many candidates for such an undertaking, and a few readily come to mind: the correspondence between Katherine Mansfield and her husband, which offers an intimate view of the person behind all those brilliant short stories you must surely have read; the letters exchanged between writer Nayantara Sahgal and E.N.Mangat Rai, whom she eventually married.
I wouldn’t be surprised if something like this has already been attempted in the blog world. But what I am experimenting with in this space is of a different nature. My attempt to bring the “you” into a post has its roots in the difficulty I faced trying to write a diary entry addressing no one in particular. And once the “you” came in, idea to address a particular “you” occurred, which I found exciting enough to pursue immediately. The mention of specific events, I reasoned, would probably make readers wonder if there really is someone I’m writing to, and in some cases that particular “you” might – just as you did – take up the thread and continue it further, leading to unforeseen possibilities.
I’ve addressed two people so far, and intend to intermittently address many more (not necessarily in response to emails), while at times addressing no one in particular. I do not know where it will lead to, but on this occasion I’m thrilled it was taken a step further – thank you, for writing in a similar vein.
Back to earthly matters. I’ve just returned from a weekend trip to Switzerland, and shall soon write about it. The pictures of our hike reminded me of others I’d seen in the past: your Himalayan trek, the Zion trek of our friend in Chicago, and photos of Ladakh from yet another common friend. It was the difference in landscape between these locales that struck me – take a look at the snap below, and you’ll understand.
Parmanu 