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As the year draws to a close, a glance back at the highs and lows is in order. While this has been a very eventful year for me, what with starting work, running a house for the first time, writing more than I have ever done in past, I would still have to place the experience at L2 as the most significant one.

I came to L2 with mixed feelings. While L1 had been a blast with a lot of learning packed into 2 months, I had not broken any real barriers through the workshop. To add to it, the caveats that L2 would be a tormenting experience did nothing to ease the apprehensions.

As the workshop progressed, the studio turned into a very intimate space. It was a space for opening doors which had long been tightly shut, it was a space strung with high emotion, distress and the exercises were designed to constantly make us jump from one extreme emotion to another. It was also a space with a lot of energy and support. For a workshop this unnerving in nature, it was very important that it was a safe space, a space that while pushing you out of your comfort zone continues to feel like home.

I must commend Ratan on the two brilliant selections used in L2 as teaching devices. Nathan’s ‘A Bad Day’ and the excerpt from Stenbeck’s ‘Of mice and men’ had graphs in a matter of two pages that full length novels fail to have at times. I hated Bad Day to begin with, it seemed obscure and random, but the more one worked on it, the more the lines started opening up and acquiring new meanings, it was an experience in itself to watch what you otherwise perceived to be a dry, flat script suddenly come to life and make sense so much so that in the end the words didnt even matter.

A final word on Ratan as a teacher. While in L1 he was an instructor running a class of 35 odd people in exercises constantly high on energy, in L2 he was more like a guide, pushing you down stairways you were afraid to take and holding your hand and accompanying you when you needed him. The workshop was intimate and emotional, unnerving yet strangely therapeutic. Hands down, the highlight of my 2012.