Sharing My Thoughts

Writing a blog after ages. I have been writing blogs for a few months now. The site I used to write and post blogs in is named Sulekha. Sulekha is fairly popular among Indians especially expats all over the globe. Its weblogs section has been totally inaccessible for some days now. A few bloggers from that site have started a thread in which they have been giving links to their blogs. It is interesting how a small community of bloggers form and start relating to each other. One gets used to comments and feedback from certain persons. Even brickbats are welcome. It becomes like a family with all kinds of members - good, bad and ugly. No category is unwelcome. The picture would be incomplete without any one of them. Blogging can be narcissistic, though. I have often read and heard bloggers being accused of being extremely egoistic. "Who wants to read about what a girl in Delhi ate for breakfast?" says a friend sarcastically. "Do you remember that George Gamow had written in his book 1,2,3...Infinity that if an infinite number of monkeys were to be given a typewriter each then one of them would type out the complete works of Shakespeare? Well blogging seems to be very close to that situation!" I smile on hearing his outburst. I know he is trying to provoke me.

In the pre-internet era the closest that one could get to some of these narcissistic blogs were the letters one wrote to close friends. I can imagine someone writing a letter like: "Dear Sunita, A warm sunny day in December. I sit in the lawn sipping some wine, reading a book and enjoying the sunshine. It is a science fiction book in which I am reading an article about how easy it will become for people to communicate with each other. This letter from India will reach you in a week or two. But if this article is anywhere close to the truth, in a few years I will be able to write you a letter and 'post' it to you electronically and it will 'reach' you in a jiffy! Unbelievable, is it not? and without using any paper! I am sure that our environmentalists will be exremely pleased! But it also makes me slightly apprehensive. What is the use if a letter reaches almost instantaneously? The answer would also come back almost instantaneously. It would be as if you and I are next door to each to other and not separated by thousands of miles. Would take the joy away from separation. Ah, well I am sure that things will never be so easy. After all science fiction is fiction!......." Well, if someone ever wrote a letter like the one above then it is certain that he/she must have suffered a heartbreak when the internet arrived on the scene! I must add that barring one or two mentions nothing in science fiction ever came close to today's internet.

So here I am posting my first blog in a new site. Let me see what nuggets of wisdom come out of my head. Let me see how many bouquets and brickbats I get for my efforts. Let me see whether I write something worth reading or something which would qualify as 'timepass' (that quaint Mumbai description of anything which is done to pass time!). Only time will tell. But I do know that blogging is therapeutic for me and is much cheaper than going to a shrink! On that cheerful note I close this small narcissistic note.