Retrieved via the Wayback Machine. Originally posted by Dilip D’souza

I’m on the outside looking inside
What do I see
Much confusion, disillusion
All around me.

You don’t possess me
Don’t impress me

Just upset my mind
Can’t instruct me or conduct me
Just use up my time.

I talk to the wind
My words are all carried away
I talk to the wind
The wind does not hear
The wind cannot hear.

(King Crimson, I Talk to the Wind)

A thoroughly interesting experience at the KGAF yesterday, being on the other end of the stick. Meaning: on the inside, looking outside. It’s not that I’ve felt, all these days, the pessimism King Crimson seems to feel - no confusion or disillusion on display at sundry puppet shows and the like that I’ve attended.

But yesterday Feb 9, I was on a panel discussing non-fiction, trying my damndest to look out at the audience but mostly failing, because the People Who Organized This Event (the dreaded PWOTE) had these ghastly bright spots shining in our faces. And I don’t know, if you can’t see the people you’re speaking to or with, you do get the strangest feeling that your words are all carried away, the wind does not hear, the wind cannot hear.

At least until they begin speaking back.

I have a great deal of respect for the journalism of my fellow-panelists, Dionne Bunsha and Darryl D’Monte. They write from intimate and hard-working knowledge of their subject. I’ve travelled with Dionne, and watched her dogged insistence on answers, her quest for detail. Similarly, Darryl’s meticulous way with facts and figures are a lesson to any journalist, certainly to me. So I was honoured to be up there with them.

Yet as always with these things, the best part was not just that, not that I got to say my bit from a spotlighted lectern, not the mild ego kick of being on a stage, but that a lively audience kept us going with their questions and comments. And as Yaz’s spirited account of the evening shows, they were lively indeed. There’s something humbling, gratifying, about having a pretty large (must have been 70 or a 100 people) audience that’s listening and interested.

Plenty of questions about blogging, which for some reason I had to field. Plenty more about the media, about the mill lands, about the business of reportage. And if I could have asked, I would have liked to know from the 70 or 100, what is your interest in writing, what kind of writing do you do or want to do, can I take a look at what you write? Because that’s how you learn writing, by reading what others write.

There was, as well, one guy in a cap (if that was a cap I thought I saw through the dazzle of the lights) who asked a fair amount about blogging. I would have liked to say hi at the end, but he left before I could go over to him. So if that was you, please get in touch. Would love to hear from you.

And since I began this with King Crimson, let me end it with Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, which if I’m not mistaken was some kind of spin-off from King Crimson (my memories of these groups are starting to fade as I hit my 70s):

One day in the year of the fox
Came a time remembered well.
When the strong young man of the rising sun
Heard the tolling of a great black bell.

One day in the year of the fox

When the bell began to ring.
Meant the time had come for one to go
To the Temple of the King.

There in the middle of the circle he stands,
Searching, seeking.
With just one touch of his trembling hand,
The answer will be found.

Daylight waits while the old man sings,

Heaven help me!
And then like the rush of a thousand wings,
It shines upon the one.
And the day has just begun.

(Rainbow, Temple of the King)

Hmm. What the relevance is, I’m not sure. Hell, what it means, I’ve never been sure! Never mind.