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Some time towards the end of 1999, I sat at my study table at home in Charbatia, trying to study. This was difficult because 8-month-old Golu was precariously perched at the edge of the table. He was trying desperately to call a certain bear from with my table clock, which he was convinced was a telephonic device of some sort (”hello baaloo! helo helo. baaloooo!”).

It became harder and harder to concentrate on the textbook (and trust me when I say I LACKED motivation) as Golu became more and more agitated. If you know anything about 8-month-olds then you know that they are like lumps of soft gooey stuff. And top-heavy at that. It is very difficult for a person that age to maintain the sitting (or standing) position for long without tipping this way or the other.

I shut the book and moved Golu to the centre of the table. After a while, I reached for my pocket diary which I lovingly called Little Brown Notebook and jotted down some lines about what 8-month-olds are like. I didn’t realise it then, but I was blogging.

Mind you, I am not the diary keeping type. I see little point in writing for yourself alone. And no point in writing if there is no one else reading you. In the back of my head, there is always an audience. I have a file full of science fiction and fantasy short stories (mostly crap) that I have been writing ever since I was in fifth standard. I don’t think I did any of it for just myself.

But thinking about the audience when writing doesn’t help. I can only hope that the reader would see something of him/herself in what I have written and like it. It is a gamble, yes. Also, I can’t write about things I don’t feel strongly about. That rules out a lot of popular topics. Luckily for me, there are a lot of people who are as bored of the conventional ‘popular’ as I am. There is hope for the likes of me yet!

I exercise something of a discipline when posting things on this blog. I have written pieces and deleted them because they got rambling and pointless. There are tens of posts saved as drafts in my wordpress admin field because they can be sharper still. Overall, I try and keep the posts readable, not because I am thinking about the reader but because the editor inside me is unforgiving.

This blog therefore often lapses into periods of nothingness. That will change shortly. I can’t write with my hands worth spit. And I need a keyboard to be able to think. A few days from now, I will have a keyboard (and the attached stuff) of my own. This blog will live again!

Posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 12:30 pm and filed under blogging.

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