You folks must know by now that we had a meet yesterday, and by the unwritten conventions of the blogging world, we should all write about it, give our various perspectives and basically make you all jealous that we had so much fun.
I was meeting Dilip D’Souza and Amit Varma for the first time. I know the question on all your minds is, “what happens when four supporters of the free market face off against one left-of-centre guy? Why aren’t the capitalists writing about it? Do they have anything to hide?”
Let me assure you, nothing happened. Dilip turned out to be a rather softspoken guy, not the type who’d get into verbal arguments (I too fall into that category, incidentally)
Amit turned out to be exactly the kind of guy I had expected him to be, which was a big surprise. It has never happened before. He was smart, articulate, intelligent and interested in a lot of stuff. ( I hadn’t expected the long hair, however.) My only regret is that I didn’t pick his brains as much as I wanted to. Somehow he managed it so that he was the one asking questions and I and Yazad debating over them.
Incidentally, Amit links to a good piece on how the personality of a writer shows up differently in his writings and in person. Speaking strictly for myself, this is inevitable. I am a moody person. What you see when you read me is what I am when I am at my best. If you catch me in person when I am my sullen self, you’ll think that I am very different from my written self.
Secondly, everything that is written by me has gone through lots of edits. If there is any crispness you see in my writing, it is because of that. I am a slow (but deep 😉 ) thinker. So when I argue face to face, I tend to miss out points in the heat of the discussion.
give our various perspectives and basically make you all jealous that we had so much fun.
Ah, Jealous one is,
Hopes one, in future, to see
Ghosts become faces.
Hi,
It was through Amit Varma’s India Uncut (the one blog that I have followed regularly) that I came to know about the you guys (meeting)and your blogs. And I have been glad to add all your blogs as well to my favorites.
Reading about the meeting did make me jealous. It would have been great to be a part of it. Yazad has proposed a Bombay bloggers bash on the 30th of January and it is something i feel should be taken up seriously.
At the moment, except for Dileep, all of the others who were at the meeting blogged about it…and it was wonderful as a reader to get different perspectives on the people. It was like collecting bits and pieces from various sources (including the person’s own writing) and inking a picture of every person.
While I agree with you that usually a writer’s personality shows through his writing, I don’t think, that it is “inevitable.” It would depend upon the kind of writing, audience, and purpose of writing. I am into e-learning content and more often than not content developers have to “remove” themselves from the courses that they develop. Usually that means writing something that is “neutral,” that has no “accent” and primarily covers the objectives of the course and teaches them effectively.