And lastly, I must mention this girl from India. I took a personal interest in her development as a writer of poems and stories. Later, we established personal contact over the phone. She lived in Uttar Pradesh. We exchanged many ideas, and she started a nice spiritual group on Facebook, where I also contributed. She was another person who wrote poems praying for my recovery, and despite being much younger, she encouraged me to write a column on Facebook. Her constant encouragement to make me write more and more is still fresh in my mind. Now, she is completely devoted to spirituality.

What kind of poems did I write? Mostly family-oriented, focused on self-development, a little philosophical, occasionally suspenseful, and never about love or romance. I think I had many women followers because I wrote extensively about extolling women. In fact, one of my poems, "My Walking Stick," was rated as the best poem of the month. This was a dedication to my wife, who has always been the one guiding me, both literally and figuratively, in my life.

There was once a contest to write a one-line poem, called a monostitch, on a fruit that no one else had selected. I got "grapes" and wrote, "Oh! grapes, seedless thou art a virgin," which won me an award.

I did make forays into Haiku but was a dismal failure—not that I was otherwise a great success! Haiku is typically a Japanese form: short, sweet, and pregnant with meaning—a telescopic view of one point.

I came across other interesting forms such as "laturine," "rectometer," various other meters like pentameter, and so on. Shakespearean meters, with so many stressed and unstressed syllables, were a no-no for me—not because I didn't like them, but simply because I couldn't do them. There were also Acrostic poems, Layered poems, limited-word story challenges, and many more.

Once, there was a challenge and competition to write a one-page story based on a pictorial depiction of a hut. My story imagined this hut to be the secret place where the President could activate a nuclear attack. The point of the story was that a nuclear war was sheer madness where there would be no victor, only the vanquished. It ended with the presidents of two enemy countries standing alone in their bunkers, not knowing what to do with the shattered world around them. One person bitterly criticized this and asked me if I knew how many control points existed before any president could activate a nuclear attack. Oh, man! How was I supposed to know that? I simply said, "Thanks. Noted."

He was surprised and said he had expected some reaction from me. But why fight with a barking dog, I thought. I didn't tell him that, though! People miss the point sometimes.

Again, modesty and humility desert me when I say that I climbed the ranks very fast, and within six months, I was in the top 10, thanks to my generous, good-willed, tolerant, and encouraging fans!

I left Fanstory on that note. I still get reminders every so often to come back and join, but I neither have the nerve nor the spirit to restart a forgotten journey.

My elder brother had all my poems—more than 250, I think—printed and bound. All these poems are on an external hard disk, which I have left with my son so he can upload them to Google Docs. If he does, then I will have easy access and maybe post a few here.

So that was the magical, dreamy, and pleasant parallel life I lived for a few months. I miss it, though.

To be continued... 24. Awful, Awesome, or Awestruck - Visually Speaking: Adventures in the Dark World.