Why does this blog even exist?

I started this blog after I joined Bangalore Mirror some time in 2007. I think it was around the time the first Barcamp was organized in Bangalore… or was it after that? I no longer remember. What I do remember were the people who spoke passionately about blogging, micro-blogging (remember that term?) and all the online platforms they used.

Till then I had mostly used Blogger to ‘publish’ online. Back in college I had created half a dozen blogs to post some design work I had done or to post some half-assed poems.  I deleted all of them within a fortnight of setting them up. None of them felt permanent. I’m not sure why this website survived.

Perhaps it was the name that eventually got carried over to Twitter, perhaps it was other bloggers that I had gotten used to reading. Perhaps it was because people had started identifying me by the name of my blog. I don’t know. Somehow, despite all the crap I have gone through in the last eight years, I never deleted this blog. It has always been here.

Back in 2007 a blog had to have a purpose. People wrote about a thing. The area of focus has become sharper among the people that continue to blog. The ‘general bloggers’ meanwhile write everywhere. Thoughts are dispersed across multiple websites and services; each with its own audience and purpose. No one outside Quora cares about your college life and no one outside of Instagram cares about your dinner. No one outside of Twitter cares about your political one-upmanship and no one outside of Facebook… oh never mind. Everyone’s on Facebook.

In 2015 this blog is just trying to rediscover its purpose, or may be it never had a purpose and wants to have a purpose now. It doesn’t have an audience. It doesn’t care about the audience. I can relate to this blog. My life feels like that now.

*

320 words. That’s the word count till now. 327 now. It feels like I have typed a 1,000 already.  I guess 140chrs a day keeps the prose away. 345 now. Yes, I’ll stop at 345.


What do you think? Leave a Reply