Writeous Brothers

One thing that having to go to office does is make you a regular blog-reader, and, if you have the enthusiasm, a regular blogger too. So many of the young professionals, whose blogs that I have been to over the last few days, started blogging, or at least returned to blogging after a brief fling in their college-days, because they had substantial periods of no work at their jobs.

And I am not sure this happens with new recruits only. The way things are at the trading floor I am working at right now, everyone in the desk, right from the MD through the VP, associate, analyst to the worthless intern (that would be me), sits around the same table. And even the VPs, especially the ones not involved in day-to-day trading, get ample time to read and talk about a range of things not connected remotely to credit derivatives, including, but not limited to, the TV series Heroes, the media event of the year - the Abhiwarya marriage, the World Cup matches (along with baffling scrutiny of past records), and other things that I try to listen into but am not able to. They probably don't blog, though even if they did I wouldn't know, because, based on their handling of Powerpoint, it's too complicated for them.

Anyway, I was talking about these blogs that I have been visiting. Irrespective of whether the blogger is involved with coding, or consulting, or banking, the general dissatisfaction that arises out of having nothing to do at work is eerily similar and extremely frightening. But as I said earlier in a post, it probably comes with the territory and one just has to get used to it. I realised while talking to a friend a few days back that the reason I dread the periods when I have no work is because I feel guilty of not working enough for the money these guys are spending on me. I think I am digressing again by making this post about me.

So coming back, again, to these blogs that I have been reading, I was fairly amazed at how well many of these people write. I knew some of these people personally at college, and I had never realised they had such amazing writers hidden somewhere inside. I mean writing decently is one of the, very few, things I think I can do without too much effort. People have been more or less complimentary of my writing skills all through my life. And, again as I wrote to a friend in a letter just yesterday, I am almost narcissistic, and slightly protective, about my writing. I reread several times almost everything that I write - even letters. It's probably because I am so infatuated with what I write that I use ten words to say something that could be done using two. When I was younger, whenever I came across something written very well, I would try to find out the age of the person who wrote it and feel satisfied if it turned out that the person was older than me, which in most cases he/she would be, because I knew that I had time to improve and reach the high standards of that particular piece. That's why I was very unhappy when I read a story written by someone close to my age in an issue of Target - it was about some WWII thing where a retired soldier is visited by someone from the past - as part of a story-writing competition. It was a mind-blowing story, and though I have always been too laidback to get envious of anyone, I envied the writer of that story his writing skills.

And now, when I see so many people writing so well, how do you think I feel?