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.