Why do you blog?

More personally, why do I blog? Why did i start blogging? What keeps me involved in blogging? Why should I spend precious minutes of the day trying to key down mildly coherent text?

Expand the whole thing. Its a WEB LOG dammit, if some of you morons have been too slow to realize the fact.

What follows from now on is nothing but "A portrait of the blogger as a small child" (intentional infringement, but I don't plan to write 'Ulysses' anytime soon) . Since the dawn of Btime (blogger times i.e.) , countless individuals across the world have keyed in still countless characters of text into the world wide web. The web is very resilient, thankfully, and its informative part still easily exceeds the 'blogged' part of it.

It started, quite simply, with the word 'log'. Its a place where you maintain records in chronological order. Its on a network, so you call it a weblog. it contains information about you and your personality, so it becomes a personal web log. Which is all very good.

I don't go through a lot of random blogs but when I do so, I come across topic titles like:

• Eve teasing in India
• How google took Youtube
• detailed character sketches of soap opera stars
• Why Pluto deserves to be a planet.

Each of these is a topic, which is 'supposed' to reflect something/anything about the writer. A blog portrays YOU to the rest of the world. Write about the breed of dog you like. Write about what you ate for lunch. Write about your adventurous trip to Burkina Faso last month. Write about your kids doing well at school. Thats a 'personal web log'.

This doesn't seem to be the way it works.

Some people have their breakfast, and write about how many calories it contained. There are others who eat the same breakfast, but when it comes to writing, they prudently write an epic on why airborne toasts land jelly side down.

Hard to understand, I'll say. A blog is a place for personal traits which reflect to the outside world. The individualism in its content can never be over emphasized. One 'should' blog as a one-way means communication to the outside world. Its your own Pioneer Plaque to people known and unknown. But bloggers like the ones in the cases above do not seem to mind. They write and they write, as if their blog is their own uncensored database of facts.

Is this freedom of speech? Yes, if the entire blog is a literary experiment and its readers are similar literary experimenters, posting similar narrative/expository material on their own blogs.

My question now narrows down to these literary experimentalists:
Why do you blog then? Do you write all that happened in your life today? You wouldn't, because there are plenty of things about you which you wouldn't like the world knowing. Do you write for enjoyment? in that case you don't need online publishing because you enjoy writing as such.
Do you blog to gather attention? Probably yes.

And there you have it. Elaborate posts/comments/discussions about unrelated exotic tidbits in the world. Views of intellectual Utopia, assertions of stone and rebuttals of steel. Neutral perspectives, pros, cons. All this, without a word about the human behind it all. Ever increasing libraries of pointless digital rhetoric.

The creative genius clashes, and more blogs like the 4 above are written. The redundancy increases. Each blogger chips in, trying at each step to prove how infinitely mistaken his/her fellows are.

And to crown it all, this disease is contagious, because it leads me to write what I just wrote, something totally unrelated to my existence, and makes me out to be a literary experimentalist like all those already out there. In an attempt at exposing the irony of irrelevant blogging, I have just committed the crime myself.



and no place for the pretty face feature, but it will return.....

A change of seasons

Well, even though this post is a continuation to the last one, I can hardly identify with my state of mind when I wrote that last post. Coming as what may seem a reversal of views, I can, at this point of time say only the following:

"Twenty20 cricket lives, and its here to stay in India."

my reasons for the drastic deviation from my previous opinion are too overwhelming to neglect:

http://www.cricketnext.com/news/india-are-twenty20-world-champions/27119-5.html

Only one problem however:
The Indian team gets Rs. 8,00,00,000 (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
I never stop wondering where this money could have gone.


The following is a new feature. It's called the 'Pretty face of the day':



Ashley Force---- American Drag racer [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Force]

Raging twenties

This is only the 2nd time in my life that I am commenting on Cricket. The last time was in a district level essay competition. At times I am amazed to notice my lack of interest in the game, even when it happens to be the only game in India which is capable of driving people mad.

A week ago (it was the the 20-20 world cup started) I heard about this new phenomenon called 20-20 cricket.

What's worse, there was a frown on every face, when I said..."Yeh 20-20 kya hai?"

As if the irony of the above statement was not enough to establish my ignorance of the game, people seemed to enjoy what a moron I was, asking the stupid question. So, Test cricket was the 5 course meal. ODIs were the fast food. What's this....the candy, or the pick up lunch?
I must say that the whole idea of Twenty20 cricket evades me. Its like creating a form of the game, which as far removed from the game as possible. See it simply, without the embellishments- a volley is thrown at you, you swing your willow, people cheer.

That is actually all that there is to cricket, but only if you're seeing cricket for the first time in your life. We Indians know better, I am sure. Many of us grew up hearing this stuff from people 2 generations above us. We have witnessed matches and seen history being made. The indian peoples with so much of the sport imbibed in them need not be told how the game's to be played.

More about the Twenty20 phenomenon. They started it in England, a place where football has done to cricket what cricket has done to hockey in India. The cricketing administration found itself heading towards bankruptcy, as it became apparent that the teams they were spending loads of money on, were no longer the people's pets. The only way to reverse this alienation was to go the football way.
That sure makes sense, but does India need to follow the same philosophy?
To be continued