Once ’round the sun

A year, now. A YEAR! It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long since we came out with our test post. Forty posts up, this is the forty-first [roughly a post every nine days]. Are we proud, or are we proud.
It was a boring Sunday evening near the fag end of our second semester when Tu and me were reading The Hindu’s supplement, which had an article on blogging. Just like that [like most other decisions I make], we decided to start scribbling online.
And here we are, with The NITK Numbskulls Page [couldn’t think of a more open-ended title] still scribbling away, never having stopped to think.
We aren’t doing anything new, or path breaking, or epoch-making. We don’t write ‘coz it is going to help us down the line in CAT or GRE. We don’t blog ‘coz it’s cool to do so, or ‘coz everyone else is doing it. We don’t write here just ‘coz we want to know what the world thinks of us. No, this blog isn’t a stairway to anything else; it exists just for our love of writing.
Now comes the big question asked on birthdays… have we improved, generally? I should think not, as far as I am concerned, for reasons elaborated in my previous post. But then, putting thoughts into writing has generally helped: I am more confident of being able to write, and think better of my thoughts now. I also objectively analyze others’ writing better now, and don’t just take them at face value anymore.
Otherwise… well, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that verbosity while just getting your ideas across isn’t necessarily bad, but verbosity that obscures what you’re trying to say, is. Broadly, I can say that it all depends on what you want the effect of your writing to be.
And I’ve also discovered that the best writing comes from deep within, and comes only when you are actually strongly feeling what you’re writing. Maybe that is coz it adds believability and hence, life to your words.
I haven’t made any rules for myself as yet [should I have?], but write guided by what I would like to read.
I don’t yet know about good and bad writing, other than that while reading good writing, you’re able to feel what the writer feels, or wants you to feel, whereas with bad writing, you get thoroughly irritated with everything about it and you actually pay less attention to what the writer is trying to say than to how he’s saying it.
And there’ve been some posts which never came off, stuff which I tried to write, unsuccessfully: There was one on Woodstock, and whether we could have another edition in this age of rampant consumerism, which I tried thrice to finish, but it always ended up as another version of the Woodstock entry in Wiki.
Then there was one about how Rang De Basanti was such a farce, and how Ayutha Ezhuthu deserves to be the one hogging all the plaudits, and be telecast on August 15.
Of all of those which I have published, my favourite has been this one. It wasn’t much-read, being written in the initial days of the blog.
As much as we’ve enjoyed writing here, we’ve also enjoyed reading other blogs and hopefully others have enjoyed reading this page. Thanks to our blogger brothers and sisters who read us and care to leave a comment… that’d be a whole bunch of people:
Starting with our batch mates Deepika and Nitin [or Speed and Finance Freak], dear friend Deepti Bhat who’s clear thoughts are a dee-light to read [don’t believe her when she calls herself Xtremely Insane], Anant Jain, who is among the first to read my posts [he's got RSS feeds, ;-)], venerable seniors Dhaval Giani and Gautham Shenoy, fellow NIT-ians Shashi, Jayanth, Tony, The Monk, and Karthik aka CB, Aravind and Abhilash, as also Karthik Ramakrishnan.
And how could I forget Mr./Ms. Anonymous? Of the twelve months we’ve been blogging, this person’s been reading us for eight [assuming, of course, that (s)he’s been the only anonymous person who’s stubbornly refused to use an alias]. We wonder who you are that you’re jobless enough to be trashing us for so long.
And, finally, to the guy who inspired me to start blogging- longtime friend and fellow Beatle-maniac Nakul Krishna, who’s Twelve-Bar Original was such a delight to read…Nakul, I thank you for having taught me new things, and new ways of thinking, and above all, being there as a constant source of inspiration, and a lasting influence in my life.