Skip to main content

With love and gratitude to Blogchatter


I wrote a lot more in Feb 2025 than in the past many months. The Blogchatter has been responsible for that with their #WriteAPageADay challenge. My association with this blogging community is rather short: just a little over four years. I’m concluding the Write-a-page-a-day challenge with this retrospective post.

With their various ‘challenges’ such as Write-a-page-a-day and A-to-Z, Blogchatter gave me a lot of impetus to write regularly. Writing sustains me as a person more than anything else because there’s no other place where I can express my views and feelings so freely. Even AI [Artificial Intelligence] has accused me, albeit subtly, of being opinionated. Read, if you wish, what ChatGPT said about my blog the other day on my request: here.

I took interest in writing long ago when I was a school student. I wrote in Malayalam in those days because I did my entire schooling in a rustic Malayalam medium government-aided school where English was taught by teachers of chemistry or some such subject. Teaching was more like policing in those days and creativity of any sort was stifled right in its womb by teachers first and then parents. Toeing the lines drawn by the various social systems was all a child could do. So, my efforts to write something beyond what the Malayalam teachers wanted me to was frowned upon, if not punished.

College was entirely different, however. One of the Malayalam teachers in my college went out of his way to cultivate my writing skills. I won quite a few prizes in various writing competitions too with his blessings. After I completed college and took up a teaching job in a school in Shillong, I dared to send a short story of mine to a periodical edited by eminent Malayalam poet, N V Krishna Warrier. My joy knew no bounds when I received a handwritten response from Warrier that my story would be published in the periodical. 

Receiving a prize from Justice Subramaniam Potti for an essay competition (early 1980s)

Hardly a week after the story was published, the folksy literary critic of Kerala, M Krishnan Nair, shot me with his metaphorical AK-47. Malayalis of my generation won’t ever forget Krishnan Nair. His weekly column in a popular magazine was widely read by Malayalis of those days. He had a lot of fans too. I too read him avidly because he introduced to us a lot of classical literature from different countries. Kazantzakis and Jose Saramago and a lot of other marvellous writers from Europe became familiar to Malayali readers because of Krishnan Nair.

Nair aimed his gun at me because he judged my short story as “a case of pneumonia” which he hoped would go away soon enough as all maladies usually do. Krishnan Nair had a sound sense of judgement, no doubt. My story wasn’t anything great, I realised later. In fact, it took me quite a while to realise that much of my writing wasn’t anything great. Krishnan Nair was like my Malayalam teachers at school as far as his impact on my budding literary ambitions was concerned. I gave up writing in Malayalam and took to writing in English.

My writings in English weren’t looked kindly upon either, especially by the Catholic missionary priests in Shillong who took out their AK-47 when I refused to toe the lines drawn by them. They had sound reasons too to do that just like Krishnan Nair.

Then came blogging to save me. I started blogging in 2001 on a platform provided by the Times of India. Eventually I switched quite a few platforms for various reasons until I earned a little worthwhile reputation here on Blogger. The Blogchatter has been a constant support too in the last few years. I must add that this community, Blogchatter, has also given me some gifts occasionally. I was quite delighted to find that the monetary gifts alone amount to over Rs10,000 so far – in four years. Not bad, right? What’s best, however, is that the Blogchatter never wields any machine gun. On the contrary, they are extremely friendly and supportive. My only regret is that I have never made it to any of their offline meets so far.

One good thing about blogging is that there are no Krishnan Nairs or Christian missionaries to cock their guns here. Those who want to read, do; others ignore. As simple as that. And I am happy to get fairly large number of readers. 

51,000 views a month is a record for me

Thanks to all the readers who have been with me for their own reasons. Thanks for enduring me in spite of my opinonatedness. Thanks to Blogchatter for the constant support. With this post, I’m concluding this year’s Write-A-Page challenge. 

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    Applause and kudos my friend! I for one appreciate you not hedging your bets or hiding your lamp! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yikes. Why would a prominent author take aim at someone just starting out? I think he was perhaps threatened by how good you were. He was seeking to extinguish your flame so you wouldn't be competiton for him. Shame on him. No reason to take aim at up and coming writers.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh no, he had his greatness undoubtedly. It's just that he was rather heartless in his criticism. Looking back, I know that my writings had their own problems with my kind of insensitivity. I mellowed a lot as years went by.

      Delete
  3. In the past I took part in blogger challenges. I have to say. One can meet some great people blogging. To bad it not as big it once was.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Congratulations!

    ReplyDelete

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

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...