On completion of the 50th post

Day before yesterday, I finished my 50^th post in this blog… I started it on 25^th May 2006…so in absolute terms, it is not a very big achievement… 50 posts in more than 13 months… that is an average of less than 4 posts a month

I was initiated into blog writing by a friend and a colleague of mine, Rajesh Swami- quite a few friends of his are into serious blog writing. I liked the idea… it was a wonderful way of documenting whatever I wanted to share with anybody…

The exercise began as an attempt to merely publish all my poetries written during the Graduation days… and I had many of them, they weren’t necessarily anything great (as their quality will speak for themselves) and yet they were written with a great passion, partly because those were my formative years and I had started viewing things from a starkly new perspective and partly because I was exposed to a variety of experiences for the first time… first crush, first love, first heart break, first ditching, first bitching, first friends for life… first fight with friends… first loss, first achievement…I was moving away from the cocoon of my family to transform into something new…. Did I or didn’t I, is something I will leave on people who know me the best, to judge. In retrospect, I do not have anything to complain about, whatever I did and whatever I did not- I grew with all these commission and omissions. After a while, I stopped writing poetries- my emotions took a sharp turn… when I developed a very strong friendship and camaraderie with a very very good friend (with time our relationship grew and today we are man and wife)… and I started writing letters to her… some of them 25 pages of long A-3 size papers. It actually did a wonderful thing to me… I started pouring out my feelings in a very eloquent way… my letters to her- became my refuge, my homecoming, my bliss, my faith and everything. (As well as for her, she still keeps them with her and so do I, her letters- in fact at that point of time, I hadn’t ever imagined if we were going to marry each other and therefore our communication was very very transparent)

Anyway back to the original topic…while maintaining the blog, I reached a point when I had exhausted all my previously written poems and wondered as to what I should post next… and though I did write something on blogging as a phenomenon in my first write-ups… but then after a while, I was at loss of words. And then my wife suggested me to write something about the Lansdowne trip we did after our marriage. This was my first brush with writing travelogue; earlier while doing the Konkan trek, I did write her a 35 page long letter about my journey and my reflections about the same. I had always told her as to how I always want to travel and see new people, see new culture, write about them and she said… to become a travel writer, one needs to do two things… travel and write and I would never be able to write travelogue till I start writing them. In retrospect, she was right- with time I have started seeing a difference in my approach to writing a travelogue… my initial travel stories were more of trip reports… and now I have started punctuating them with my reflections about the entire experiences.

But then after a few days there came a lull, when I stopped writing the blog totally… from August 2006 to June 2007, I hardly wrote anything…and if I did…it was merely to conclude some continuing topics or to write for the heck of it…

And then 0n 30 June 2007, I decided enough is enough…either I will just delete my blog or will maintain it on a regular basis…I cannot keep on going cribbing about wanting to write and not being able to write and still somehow maintaining the façade of a writer and therefore an intellectual (or at least a thinking individual). Since then I have not looked back… I have posted 20 posts… on topics close to my heart….even moved beyond writing merely travelogues and have started writing some other stuff…thought closely related to traveling and seeing the world as a common heritage.

One sine-qua-non of writing a blog is that- it must be read… people use various techniques to get their blogs registered among people… they tend to form a caucus cross advertising a blog, become a voracious blog visitors and therefore leaving their marks to be followed… and give their links to their acquaintances… but essentially I have seen only those blog stand out, which have anything substantial… which are regularly updated…they spread by word of mouth, regularly visited…therefore I have avoided any of the above technique to advertise my blog....

For now traffic to my blog is dismally low… but I am sure if I keep on regularly updating my blog with quality stuff, then people will start visiting it on a regular basis.

Till then, as I always say…Keep the Faith