BLOG
This word was small, seemingly strong, and had a great new-age rolling effect in my mouth… but its meaning confused me. I asked people around me what a blog really was but all I got was everything between a few stuttered exclamations and deliberately averted eyes. Nobody was sure but a lot of them knew this word existed. This was in 1997 when we had just bought our hideously expensive Compaq Presario with a mind-boggling storage capacity of 3.2 GB.
‘3.2 GB? What will you do with so much hard disk space?’
I could have made some incomprehensible noise and avoided this question, but decided to say, ‘I’ll be writing my blogs.’
‘Ah! Then it is fine.’
So blogging became the reason for my extravagance in technology… and, as a corollary, it was my extravagance in technology that pushed me towards blogging. But this wasn’t my inspiration for blogging.
Even then I had quite a few diaries, notebooks, loose sheets, napkins, envelopes, scratch-books, torn pieces of paper full of rhyming couplets, poems, and ideas. I remember once sitting down to count all the poems I had written until then and the tally came to more than a thousand. A few of these poems had been published in journals in UK and in India, including the Poetry Anthology brought out by the Poetry Society of India… but almost all were waiting for a better future. And blogging suddenly seemed to me to be reasonable enough to put all my creative outpourings in a digitised format.
Specky had already been working hard typing out my poems in Corel WordPerfect (Yes, we did not like that other word processor that they called Word) and she found the idea of shifting everything ‘on the internet’ rather good. She said, ‘But will these poems be safe wherever they are on the internet?’
We weren’t very comfortable with words like servers and other terms for online existence that are commonplace now. But we had always been the forerunners when it came to adopting anything new… and blogging was rather new then. So my research led me to create my own website on Tripod and we decided to call it ‘PoetrySplash’… and began shifting my poetry collection ‘on the internet’. We, of-course retained my type-written and hand-written copies (and they’re all still with me). It was here that I uploaded my articles, essays, and short-stories too and even began sending out an ezine… yes! That ezine had a global subscription of more than 1800 and I’ll soon be uploading them all on the blog that I now have. Well, I did attempt being there on Blogspot and Blogger but couldn’t adopt them completely… until my son decided to gift me my current blog. Pushkin is the brain behind www.passey.info and he is the one who decides on what it looks like. But you’re probably waiting for me to tell you what it was that inspired me to be a blogger. The answer is: The wish to reach out.
REACH OUT
Yes, to be able to reach out was what propelled me towards blogging. The reach of ‘poetrysplash’ actually astounded me. I remember coming home one evening to find the phone ringing.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hi, I’m calling from Madras,’ spoke an unknown voice, ‘Just called you up to say you have a great website and I love reading your poems. Thank you.’
I was silent and I didn’t know how to respond. When I told Specky about this, she said, ‘You’ve just made your first contact with a fan! Congrats!’
So yes, this inspired me to take this business of writing and uploading ‘on the internet’ more seriously… and the real inspiration, therefore, to be a blogger, would be my wish to let my creativity get an audience.
Now that computer penetration is a lot higher and internet access has become so much easier and has reached different demographic sections, the reach of my blogged words has become better. I am happier. Even blogging is so well known and there are thousands getting recruited by the day… so is the competition for ‘reach’ getting stiffer? Or murkier? Or does it need reinventing expressions? Well, all these are correct… and it is getting vital to keep injecting a fresh way of looking things and then communicating them. You really need to keeping boxing old ideas and keep popping out of new boxes every now and then.
REINVENT
Yes, the magic of reinventing myself is what keeps me glued to blogging. My world is still full of questions that only I can get up and answer.
Should I use poetry when writing about this… or is it essential to add pictures… or graphics… or drawings… or a video…?Do I use apps to create never-seen-before artworks to include in my blog posts?
Why shouldn’t I learn how to create a comic-book page for my post?
Why not have audio inputs with this post?
Will the post be more attractive if I add hand-drawn drawings now?
As a blogger I keep discovering new roles for myself… and I know I have to roll well in these new roles to make them seem an intrinsic part of my post. And all this excitement never lets me think about anything else…
Edition 09… Indispire. #BlogInspiration
Arvind Passey
19 April 2014
2 comments
Sangita Passey says:
Apr 20, 2014
Good one! It was fun typing your poems on Corel Word Perfect and thus learning a new skill of computing!
Arvind Passey says:
Apr 20, 2014
Yes, those were the day… when we stayed up half the night sitting in Univ of York computer labs and understanding computer applications by ‘doing’. I think blogging just followed naturally.