Skip to main content

The Fun of Blogging


It’s been a pretty long liaison with blogging now.  I started it way back in 2001 when I bought my first desktop.  It was with Times of India’s blogging space that I began.  Soon I switched to Sulekha which offered many incentives.  Apart from the gift vouchers that came from Sulekha, there were quite a few committed bloggers there whom I really liked.  I got a fairly good share of readers too there.  But the love affair with Sulekha ended when a team of Right wing bloggers dominated the whole platform and started posting unsavoury comments with malicious intent.

Wordpress hosted my blogs after that for a few years.  Then something went wrong.  Apparently someone hacked or tried to hack my site.  It stopped working properly.  Then I migrated to Blogspot where I have remained for all these years.  But many of my fellow bloggers whom I read without fail stopped blogging for various reasons.  Some are in the family way, some immersed themselves totally in their careers, and some just gave up.  Maybe serious writers and thinkers lose interest in blogging because there are very few serious readers in that sphere.  My personal observation is that frivolous writing gets more readers in blogosphere.  I may be wrong, however.  Maybe I have not sought far and wide enough to discover serious bloggers.

Apart from those readers, I miss also the Happy Hours that IndiBlogger used to provide a few years ago.  Happy Hours brought a lot of gift vouchers with which I bought countless books from Flipkart. I wonder why that concept of Happy Hours died.  Maybe, some bloggers didn’t make use of it with sincerity and authenticity.  Maybe, the business concerns which provided the gift vouchers didn’t find it worth.  Maybe, there are other reasons.

Blogging, anyway, is personal writing to a large extent.  It is a personal gratification, at least.  It still remains that for me.  That’s the fun I have discovered in blogging.


PS. Written for IndiSpire Edition 188: #Blogging

Comments

  1. Good to know about your blogging journey.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It has hardly happened that I followed any other blogs seriously except yours. I don't remember how I ended up on your blog about a year ago, but ever since I am hooked and I read every article you post. They are so insightful and thought provoking, sometimes funny and sometimes melancholic!!
    I always wanted to start a blog and share my thoughts which are kind of inline to your thoughts and the way you see this world. I have just started my blog, a long way to go. You are such an inspiration... One day I wish to see blog grow like yours.
    Thank you so much :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm flattered. Never imagined me as an inspiring blogger. Thanks a ton.

      Delete
  3. "Blogging, anyway, is personal writing to a large extent. It is a personal gratification"- Perhaps this is the reason you have lasted for so long!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I thought the left and right wing thing hadn't come to bloggosphere the way they had in social media, till I read about your Sulekha experience.

    And yes, I liked the happy hours and contests in Indiblogger. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sulekha was run by some insane right wingers, I think. That's how it appeared.

      Let's hope indiblogger will revive the Happy Hours.

      Delete
  5. On certain occasions I have witnessed the rush of the bloggers to submit blog posts only to get goodies from that site. I hate being a part of that rush. Blogging for me has become more of a mood, a hobby which is strongly attached to the thoughts that linger in my mind for days. I hate being in the rush and write things just for the sake of vouchers .

    Having said that, I always wanted to know your blogging journey and glad to know now the starting point of that journey . you are really consistent with your passion. And I really find it worth praising.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If bloggers were authentic those happy hours would have done much good...

      These days I'm becoming lazy. But I must persist and go on....

      Delete
  6. You are right Sir. I find blogging to be therapeutic as it helps one to articulate the million thoughts churning inside the mind. And yes, frivolous posts get the maximum likes..maybe because it's all about who is more active and "out there". Thank you for sharing your blogging journey here.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Blogging has also become just another social media where likes matter more than the content.

      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

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...

A Government that Spies on Citizens

Illustration by Copilot Designer India has officially decided to keep an eagle eye on its citizens. Modi government has asked all smartphone manufacturers to preinstall a government app, Sanchar Saathi , on every phone in such a way that no citizen can ever uninstall it. The firms have been also ordered to install the app on existing phones too using software-update technology. The stated objective is to strengthen cybersecurity and protect users from fraud. The question is why any government should go out of its way to impose “security” on its citizens. For over a month now, I have been receiving a message every single day from the Government of India’s Telecom Department to install the app on my phone. I wanted to block the sender, but there is no such option. Even that message is an imposition. I don’t trust any government that imposes benefits on me. “ Beneficent beasts of prey ,” Robert Frost would call such governments. When Modi government imposes security on me, I ha...