Tuesday, July 8, 2014

7 years. and counting.

Before I say anything else, the part 2 of Music and Kids will be published later this week. Sorry for not publishing earlier, I fell sick sometime last month, plus got very busy.

Now that that's out of the way.

It's exactly 7 years since I started this blog. 7 years. Seems like a long time. It is, when you realize that the iPhone had only been released a week before, Instagram was non-existent, the US had never had a non-white President until then, and the last Harry Potter book had not yet been published.

To some extent, I don't even remember what I used to be like when I started this blog- I know I started on a whim because I liked the date (you  know, for a sense of symmetry- 7/7/7). I remember typing from a Pentium 4 (our first desktop) and I intended the blog mostly for poetry (and feminism, but I never got around to writing much feminism). Clearly, things didn't happen as planned :D

I was mostly using what was then called SMS-language, something that I now think is a way of butchering English. (Talk about growing old, huh!) I used to mostly write on paper first (and later MS word), partly because I felt my thoughts would flow better on paper, but mostly because the internet was both slow and expensive- every minute was to be taken seriously.  My topics and style tended to be serious as well- I wanted to treat the blog as a medium of social change (something that never happened, and of course, an idea usurped by Twitter, which was barely a year old then, by the way).

Anyway, while I am still not as regular with posting, I have enjoyed every bit of it. To be honest, when I started I did not have much of an idea of what I was getting into. The blog was mostly a way for me to write in an eco-friendly manner. Given that I wanted to write more serious and socially-relevant material, I did not expect to have many readers. I did not know what SEO was, and social media was an infant (I did not even have an orkut account at the time, and orkut will be gone in a month!), so I wasn't trying to publicize actively. But slowly, I got more readers, mostly friends, but some from outside as well.

I have since realized that writing is not an individual process. Yes, the idea is created in the writer's head (especially with fiction), but the very act of writing involves a reader, if only an imaginary one. With each comment I have received, I have felt more motivated to write. And I like to believe my writing has become better in the process.
So, thank YOU.

Actually, let me repeat that for emphasis. Thank YOU.
For commenting, for liking these posts on facebook, for making me a better writer and a better person in so many ways. 

But mainly, for reading. 
Thank you for keeping that magical connection between a writer and a reader alive...

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