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

Lucifer and some reflections

Let me start with a disclaimer: this is not a review of the Malayalam movie, Lucifer . These are some thoughts that came to my mind as I watched the movie today. However, just to give an idea about the movie: it’s a good entertainer with an engaging plot, Bollywood style settings, superman type violence in which the hero decimates the villains with pomp and show, and a spicy dance that is neatly tucked into the terribly orgasmic climax of the plot. The theme is highly relevant and that is what engaged me more. The role of certain mafia gangs in political governance is a theme that deserves to be examined in a good movie. In the movie, the mafia-politician nexus is busted and, like in our great myths, virtue triumphs over vice. Such a triumph is an artistic requirement. Real life, however, follows the principle of entropy: chaos flourishes with vengeance. Lucifer is the real winner in real life. The title of the movie as well as a final dialogue from the eponymous hero sugg...

Abdullah’s Religion

O Abdulla Renowned Malayalam movie actor Mohanlal recently offered special prayers for Mammootty, another equally renowned actor of Kerala. The ritual was performed at Sabarimala temple, one of the supreme Hindu pilgrimage centres in Kerala. No one in Kerala found anything wrong in Mohanlal, a Hindu, praying for Mammootty, a Muslim, to a Hindu deity. Malayalis were concerned about Mammootty’s wellbeing and were relieved to know that the actor wasn’t suffering from anything as serious as it appeared. Except O Abdulla. Who is this Abdulla? I had never heard of him until he created an unsavoury controversy about a Hindu praying for a Muslim. This man’s Facebook profile describes him as: “Former Professor Islahiaya, Media Critic, Ex-Interpreter of Indian Ambassador, Founder Member MADHYAMAM.” He has 108K followers on FB. As I was reading Malayalam weekly this morning, I came to know that this Abdulla is a former member of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Kerala , a fundamentalist organisation. ...

Empuraan and Ramayana

Maggie and I will be watching the Malayalam movie Empuraan tomorrow. The tickets are booked. The movie has created a lot of controversy in Kerala and the director has decided to impose no less than 17 censors on it himself. I want to watch it before the jingoistic scissors find its way to the movie. It is surprising that the people of Kerala took such exception to this movie when the same people had no problem with the utterly malicious and mendacious movie The Kerala Story (2023). [My post on that movie, which I didn’t watch, is here .] Empuraan is based partly on the Gujarat riots of 2002. The riots were real and the BJP’s role in it (Mr Modi’s, in fact) is well-known. So, Empuraan isn’t giving the audience any falsehood as The Kerala Story did. Moreover, The Kerala Story maligned the people of Kerala while Empuraan is about something that happened in the faraway Gujarat quite long ago. Why are the people of Kerala then upset with Empuraan ? Because it tells the truth, M...

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...

Country where humour died

Humour died a thousand deaths in India after May 2014. The reason – let me put it as someone put it on X.  The stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra called a politician some names like ‘traitor’ which made his audience laugh because they misunderstood it as a joke. Kunal Kamra has to explain the joke now in a court of justice. I hope his judge won’t be caught with crores of rupees of black money in his store room . India itself is the biggest joke now. Our courts of justice are huge jokes. Our universities are. Our temples, our textbooks, even our markets. Let alone our Parliament. I’m studying the Ramayana these days in detail because I’ve joined an A-to-Z blog challenge and my theme is Ramayana, as I wrote already in an earlier post . In order to understand the culture behind Ramayana, I even took the trouble to brush up my little knowledge of Sanskrit by attending a brief course. For proof, here’s part of a lesson in my handwriting.  The last day taught me some subhashit...