Over the last decade, I created, maintained and discarded many blogs. Each time I promised myself that this would be my 'the' blog to which I would regularly contribute for the rest of my life. Invariably I lapsed on my resolution and started blogs after blogs. A while later I opened an account on Facebook and became a regular user. Facebook was an instant hit because it lets me connect with friends and share my thoughts with them instantly and more consistently than a blog would. Maintaining a separate, personal blog was useless because firstly, nobody else read it and secondly, it was a task unto itself to find topics to blog about while it was easier to type away in Facebook-like social media.
Around five years back I closed my social media accounts and decided to concentrate better on my academics, the career I had chosen for myself. My exiting the social media helped me enormously since it took away a major source of distraction and I found time to focus on my academic readings. Although I am a research student in Modern Indian History my first love is philosophy. If somebody asks why didn't I pursue philosophy at the university level I don't have an answer. It just didn't happen because I found my intellectual passion late and decided to stick with what I was already doing. I don't mean any disrespect to history and historians. I enjoy my work as a young scholar; I love it. Often a historical perspective challenges your deeply held convictions even if they are logically cohesive and philosophically defensible. Yet my love for abstract speculations and logical paradoxes are undying and often get the better of me even during my historical research. Anyway, a deeper engagement with academics, both history, and philosophy, would have been impossible, or at least very hard, if I hadn't cut off distractions such as social media to focus on my career. I am still at a precarious place in my career and more than ever suffer from persistent doubts about my choices. The next few months are crucial because the decisions I have to make will decide whether I will become a career academic or something else in life. Be that as it may, I have glad memories about the time I spent in academia. I have had intense debates with my friends and teachers about every conceivable topic and it exposed to me a world of which I hadn't heard of and more importantly, it exposed me to worldviews that I didn't even imagine was possible for people to believe.
For the last three months or so I have been thinking about blogging again. Why you may ask. Simply because I wanted to write about something. I wasn't sure about what; I just knew that I had to write about something. One of the 'writing' vices I acquired in the last two years is the reluctance to write about anything that's not research-related since I thought I could use that time towards my research. One of the drawbacks of this kind of thinking, at least for me, was that I am left with an intense urge to speak for myself, about my life in general, but felt silenced by circumstances. Sometimes I felt an intense dislike of academia because I thought it was what stopped me from doing everything else I might have done (A more accurate view would be that my lack of previous experience in research and a general disorganized attitude towards research pushed the process longer than was necessary). Also, at a certain point, I realized that my brain simply refused to write about something for which I couldn't produce any reference or quotation. An absurd style of thinking, indeed. It became a major problem in my research writing itself when I found it increasingly hard to write about my original ideas since I was unsure of their validity and coherence. My decision to re-start blogging is influenced by both my wanting to write something freely and write something about my life-its ups and downs, my convictions and insecurities, etc. Why not start Facebook again? That way your lifelog will become a conversation with your friends and family again. That's exactly what I want to avoid. I want to write about things I find urged to write about not because I want them to be read but because I simply want to write about them. One may interject and ask why not write a diary instead. A diary is a log, like a blog, but it's very private. The joy of seeing your opinions 'published' somewhere is real even if it is at the corner of an indifferent digital world. Blogs, or individual weblogs, are private in the sense that you log your life and opinions and are visited, if at all, by a random surfer or a friend. It's public in the sense that it's open, technically, to such visitations by others. However, one of the things that always drew me to blogging was quiet I find around them. In a world connected by instant messaging and informed by data-revolution blogs are relics of a past that our world swiftly outgrew. There are millions or even billions of blogs we will find online. A majority of them without even a single post and the rest updated at least a decade ago. Random browsing of these blogs is nostalgic because you find people who live on the other side of the planet whom you'll never meet in your life. You feel happy about the good things in their life and feel sad about their bad experiences. You may even notice that these blogs haven't been updated in a long time and that people that you just read about are completely different individuals now (if at all they are still alive). Blogs are a throwback into a past- that past has left records but the people who left them have moved on. It's haunting and nostalgic. It's painful and romantic. My new blog is an addition to this ruins of the early web. I know that I will, like others, will log and move on. In the future, this blog too will become a haunting and nostalgic reminder of who I was once. And, it would be a 'walk down the memory lane for me when, in the future, I revisit these pages.
Towards future pasts.
Around five years back I closed my social media accounts and decided to concentrate better on my academics, the career I had chosen for myself. My exiting the social media helped me enormously since it took away a major source of distraction and I found time to focus on my academic readings. Although I am a research student in Modern Indian History my first love is philosophy. If somebody asks why didn't I pursue philosophy at the university level I don't have an answer. It just didn't happen because I found my intellectual passion late and decided to stick with what I was already doing. I don't mean any disrespect to history and historians. I enjoy my work as a young scholar; I love it. Often a historical perspective challenges your deeply held convictions even if they are logically cohesive and philosophically defensible. Yet my love for abstract speculations and logical paradoxes are undying and often get the better of me even during my historical research. Anyway, a deeper engagement with academics, both history, and philosophy, would have been impossible, or at least very hard, if I hadn't cut off distractions such as social media to focus on my career. I am still at a precarious place in my career and more than ever suffer from persistent doubts about my choices. The next few months are crucial because the decisions I have to make will decide whether I will become a career academic or something else in life. Be that as it may, I have glad memories about the time I spent in academia. I have had intense debates with my friends and teachers about every conceivable topic and it exposed to me a world of which I hadn't heard of and more importantly, it exposed me to worldviews that I didn't even imagine was possible for people to believe.
For the last three months or so I have been thinking about blogging again. Why you may ask. Simply because I wanted to write about something. I wasn't sure about what; I just knew that I had to write about something. One of the 'writing' vices I acquired in the last two years is the reluctance to write about anything that's not research-related since I thought I could use that time towards my research. One of the drawbacks of this kind of thinking, at least for me, was that I am left with an intense urge to speak for myself, about my life in general, but felt silenced by circumstances. Sometimes I felt an intense dislike of academia because I thought it was what stopped me from doing everything else I might have done (A more accurate view would be that my lack of previous experience in research and a general disorganized attitude towards research pushed the process longer than was necessary). Also, at a certain point, I realized that my brain simply refused to write about something for which I couldn't produce any reference or quotation. An absurd style of thinking, indeed. It became a major problem in my research writing itself when I found it increasingly hard to write about my original ideas since I was unsure of their validity and coherence. My decision to re-start blogging is influenced by both my wanting to write something freely and write something about my life-its ups and downs, my convictions and insecurities, etc. Why not start Facebook again? That way your lifelog will become a conversation with your friends and family again. That's exactly what I want to avoid. I want to write about things I find urged to write about not because I want them to be read but because I simply want to write about them. One may interject and ask why not write a diary instead. A diary is a log, like a blog, but it's very private. The joy of seeing your opinions 'published' somewhere is real even if it is at the corner of an indifferent digital world. Blogs, or individual weblogs, are private in the sense that you log your life and opinions and are visited, if at all, by a random surfer or a friend. It's public in the sense that it's open, technically, to such visitations by others. However, one of the things that always drew me to blogging was quiet I find around them. In a world connected by instant messaging and informed by data-revolution blogs are relics of a past that our world swiftly outgrew. There are millions or even billions of blogs we will find online. A majority of them without even a single post and the rest updated at least a decade ago. Random browsing of these blogs is nostalgic because you find people who live on the other side of the planet whom you'll never meet in your life. You feel happy about the good things in their life and feel sad about their bad experiences. You may even notice that these blogs haven't been updated in a long time and that people that you just read about are completely different individuals now (if at all they are still alive). Blogs are a throwback into a past- that past has left records but the people who left them have moved on. It's haunting and nostalgic. It's painful and romantic. My new blog is an addition to this ruins of the early web. I know that I will, like others, will log and move on. In the future, this blog too will become a haunting and nostalgic reminder of who I was once. And, it would be a 'walk down the memory lane for me when, in the future, I revisit these pages.
Towards future pasts.
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