Classified 

My sister and fellow blogger, lightlight wrote a whole post on my return to blogging yesterday. It chronicles my movements over the past couple of years and heaps totally undeserved praise on my capabilities as a blogger. I'm not just fishing for compliments. I actually grimaced a little when I read "She always has thoughtful, if mildly intimidating, things to say."

In the span of my two days' return to blogging, I have deleted an entire post (which no one had commented on, justly) and edited most of the other posts I wrote. I kept the ones I wrote during my Masters untouched, as a testament to college juvenilia, but had a difficult time reading some of the out-of-India posts. I was a different person then - lovelorn, frustrated, deeply cynical and directionless. A lot of my posts exposed my insecurities more than I am now comfortable with, hence the editing.

After reading my sister's comments, however, I have to wonder whether it was right to change my posts. And by returning to blogging, am I committing myself to a cycle of erasing, editing and rewriting?

Musing upon this, I remembered Vikram Seth's Forward to 'Mappings' in The Collected Poems, an anthology of all of his poems to date. I had always enjoyed reading this Forward because of its remarkable candour and conversational style. This part, in particular, resonated with me:

"When Penguin India...asked me for permission to republish Mappings, I hesitated. ...I wondered about the poems...some of which now struck me as embarrassingly callow. I did not wish to make my readers cringe by offering them a second helping of my juvenilia. But a friend...told me that she much preferred my voice in Mappings to that of my later book of poems. Whether I agreed with that slightly alarming judgment or not, I felt I ought not to withdraw a book that had elicited it."

Some of the poems in Mappings are among my favourites of all time. Perhaps I will switch my internal editor off for a while.