“You are wasting your time on composing tweets.”
“They screenshot your quotes on Instagram and use it without credit.”
“What’s the point of being witty on LinkedIn?”
“Nobody cares about your blog unless you are a published author.”
These are some of the many, many criticism I’ve received from my well-wishers—more online than offline, of course—over the years. And I agree with each one of them. It goes without saying that I’ve had a tardy approach towards my body of work. My attempts at not melding in with the crowd didn’t really help my case, either.
I’ve been writing actively since 2007 and so far, there has been very little documentation. Forget solo social media expeditions, even the feature articles and interviews I did for mid-day between 2011 and 2014 aren’t archived properly. Doesn’t sound nice.
So, yes, the aforementioned criticism is very valid though. A tweet, once posted, is lost in history. And the fate is similar for all the funny content on IG, not to forget ‘insightful’ thoughts on LinkedIn. Or even this blog. Nobody cares about the amount of time invested in a sentence or a punchline or a paragraph. The fact of the matter is, we are a generation of freeloaders. Internet made us aware of our divine right to consume information without having to pay a penny. What we don’t pay for, we tend to take it for granted. Which is why Netflix’s recent decision to ban password-sharing sounds like an attack on our individuality.
Insofar, I am thinking of compiling my finest paragraphs. The reason is mathematical, nothing else. There are 52 weeks in a year and on average, I’ve written 2-3 blogposts per week for the past 15 years or so. Even if we take the last 10 years, this amounts to between 1200 and 1600 blogposts. Well, quite a lot of content to pore over.
OK, now, this is where you enter the picture.
Dear reader, I am requesting you to share your favourite paragraph/s written by me that you’ve read. This might help me nudge myself towards doing something about my content. Otherwise, they will lie dormant in the vast doormat of the internet. Maybe, just because, this compilation might turn into a book. I don’t know, but the idea sounds interesting. Interesting because you, my dear readers, will do all the hard work of poring through my content.
You can reach out to me on shakti03@gmail.com or drop me a DM on Instagram or Twitter, and, oh yes, even LinkedIn.
PS. Thank you attending my sed talk.
This is easy as I have been saving my favourite bits from your writings ever since I started reading your blog.
While agreeing to others that you should write a book, I respectfully disagree with the part where they tell you you are not being credited. I don't understand the concept of taking credits, like you once said what matters in our Vedic religious texts are the shloks and their meanings, not who wrote them. Knowledge must be passed irrespective of the source