Skip to main content

To blog or not to blog?


“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living,” said Flaubert. A meticulous writer whose novels became classics though he was, Flaubert died penniless.  Many great writers lived rather miserable lives because writing was not a very remunerative job in those days.  There were many artists too who lived in utter poverty though after their death their paintings were sold for sums which they could never have imagined in life. 

Is it because they never worked for money that their works had such profundity?  Does money contaminate everything it touches?

There is no money in blogging anyway.  At least, not anything significant.  Flaubert and Dostoevsky could accept the agony of pennilessness because they were in search of something much more meaningful than money.  It is their search for meaning that made their writing profound.  And that search, the search for meaning, is an endless search.

Why don’t we find such deep writing today?  The best writers of our times take shelter in the intrigues of history and/or the chiaroscuro of language.  V. S. Naipaul had even gone to the extent of proclaiming the death of the novel.  Contemporary society cannot inspire profound works.  The human species has become too shallow intellectually and emotionally.  Spiritually too, of course.  Godmen have taken the place of gods.  Mammon has taken the place of gods.  Money cannot stir the depths within.  But who wants depths anyway?

As a blogger I too would be happy to make some money out of the hobby if possible.  But there’s nothing in it.  And yet I continue to blog.  As Joan Didion said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear...”  I know that blogging for me is more than just an addiction.  That’s why I cannot but blog. 



Comments

  1. Our generation, which includes me, search for instant gratification. Who bothers, nowadays, to read a well writen literary piece when all they need is just the plot with sex, violence and glamour.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It seems some hardships are necessary for escaping the frivolousness of "sex, violence and glamour." Or, hardships are an inevitable part of probing the depths.

      Delete
  2. That's the way I go too. Being in the grip of addiction, I have nothing to do but blogging

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Some addictions like blogging are better than many others.

      Delete
  3. Blogging is a valve to vent many a pent up ire. I'm happy to belong to this world, though more of a rarely active member. I get to read a lot about things I don't much understand, so it's a continuing education. No complaints from me. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm not complaining, Rakesh ji :) Just wondering aloud why serious literature is becoming a rarity. By the way, your stories carry a lot of depth. I'm serious about that, ok?

      Delete
    2. Coming from you, it makes my efforts worthwhile, sir! :)

      Delete
  4. When you are away and not writing for some time for whatever reasons, you notice the void and realize that the very exercise of blogging means a lot...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Well said, exactly echoes my thoughts, except that I wouldn't have benn able to put it so well!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Yours is a soul-stirring story. You are doing what Henry David Thoreau rightly said 'Live Deliberately ! And by doing that you are leaving a rich legacy. Somebody in the succeeding generations definitely may dig out your talents and I am sure that your treasure would comes out and the world would derive benefit. Happy blogging :))))))

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, VSR. I'm living deliberately, yes. Creating meaning as I go along. There's no other way for people like me.

      Delete
  7. Writing has become a part of my life. It doesn't matter anymore how little it pays. It gives meaning to my life and that's enough for me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Writing has been a part of me for a long time. I'm not doing it for money either. But I am just wondering... There are all sorts of divine papas and ammas who preach simplicity and austerity to their devotees when they are living in grand opulence. Fraudsters get paid unimaginably while genuine services go unpaid. Funny world it is :)

      Delete
  8. Everybody is looking for their two minutes under the sun these days! How I wish Dostoevsky's tribe increases.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Since Murphy's Law is what works, the movement is always downward...

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...