The Ghost That Walked

I have a lot of time and nothing important to do. I'm done with my work and am officially on vacation, starting now.
To celebrate the beginning of my holiday, I'm listening to fabulous music that I've downloaded from the Net, and have actually taken off my shoes and put my feet up on the desk. It's a wonderful feeling. Try it sometime.

I'm confused about my motivation for blogging. I've been blogging since January 2005, so that's proof I don't blog because everyone else does. Fact is, many others started blogging well after I did.

When I first started blogging, I wanted a place to publish my amateur poetry and publish occasional articles on. I wanted a place that gave some meaning to the stuff that I wrote from time to time and the things I wanted to write. I used to write these poems on the back pages of my notebooks during boring classes and it seemed like a waste to see them lost after the class ended. Were they no more than mere reliefs from tedium for me? I was not motivated by a need to share my thought process with the world. I simply thought it a waste of all the interesting things I did, said, wrote now and then if they were to be lost each time their immediate purpose had been achieved. There were several times when I thought of something and told myself it would make for an interesting anecdote in the novel I would never write. Sometimes interesting things happened. I got locked out of my room at 1 am in the night. I had my battles with technology and with IIT, and I usually ended on the losing side. These weren't without their funny side. And I could see the funny side of having to pound my hostel door for two hours to get into my room, or of being repeatedly cut off from the Internet in the middle of interesting chats with friends. Writing about the lighter aspects of certain otherwise painful experiences (it is NOT fun to have to break open your hostel door at night for example, and I've done it twice) was a way of getting the poison out of my system. Sometimes I felt strongly enough about certain issues to pontificate, such as my views on rhyme in poetry. I realize now and I knew then that my views were immature and vague, but I felt strongly all the same!

I blogged when I felt like blogging and about what I wanted. I experimented a bit and wrote posts on Raveena Tandon's rain dance and poems on suicide, on my future as I saw it and on life in IIT. My blog was a place I went to when I wanted to say something and didn't know who to say it too or even who would understand what I wanted to say. The comments were a bonus.

Lately, however, I have started feeling the weight of my blog. Instead of the blog waiting patiently for my wanting to write something, I find myself worrying sometimes that I haven't updated for a long time. I'm not afraid of losing audience. I'm not afraid of the comments drying up either although I often joke about that. Sure, new comments feel nice but comments are secondary to whether I feel happy about my blog or not.

Moreover, I find that increasingly I have nothing to write about on my blog. It's not like I don't say or think things anymore but a lot of what I think are things that I feel need not go on my blog. I no longer see the point of speaking my mind on many things on my blog. That reveals a lot about me and I don't want my blog to become a free peep-show to my emotional striptease. A lot of what I sometimes want desperately to say about love, life, friendships, the future, the past, the present, Life falls in the category marked “Personal”. Even if I don't have anyone to share gyan with I feel blogging about it would reveal more about myself to a careful or regular reader than I'm prepared to reveal. There are many things I don't want you to know about me, and a lot of what I earlier wrote would now qualify as no-go territory. My blog shouldn't be my best friend.

That is why I've taken to blogging about movies, books (I keep bunching books with movies, but do I ever blog about books? I think not.), casual experiences – neutral posts that are sometimes interesting but are not revelatory. These posts are harder to compose than ramblings on my life that I can write on autopilot but are just as much fun to write. I will continue to blog but the blog may follow its current course by continuing to be about movies I like and dislike (mostly dislike, they arouse greater passion), about books I read and books I have to abandon from time to time, about IIT, only occasionally straying into forbidden territory.
In other words, unlike this post.