Right now, frankly, I have no idea what is the theme of the book and what exactly the author wants to say (I just finished reading page 99). All I can make out is, there are events in your life that can be called "The Black Swans", and they just happen, randomly, and normally their occurrence or non-occurrence is not in your hand. The Black Swans have the ability to change your perception, your life and sometimes they change the world. He uses the discovery of the black swan in Australia as an analogy. Until the black swans were discovered, swans were always thought to be white. Hence, he says we shouldn’t base our knowledge upon the facts we know.

Of course then you start thinking whether the sun is going to come up in the morning or not. The previous history of the world says that it should, but then, who knows?

The author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, calls himself an empiricist who believes on focusing on how things cannot be done rather than how they can be done. It rather sounds like a negative attitude, but this is the perception perhaps that he wants to change. He says we live in a world defined by our experiences and the events that we remember, and this stifles our ability to see things as they are. I find myself agreeing to this philosophy, as I myself have experienced personal biases due to congealed memories of real and imagined events.

By the end of today’s reading, there’s a portion that explains how, throughout our lives sometimes, we deprive ourselves of multiple smaller happinesses in search of some bigger, elusive (The Black Swan) happiness that happens once in a lifetime. Is it worth it? It depends on how you perceive happiness. May be that bigger, once-in-a-lifetime happiness means more to you than the smaller, everyday happinesses. The problem is, that bigger happiness may or may not happen.

He explains this by terming successes of novels, books, movies, an artist or a scientific discovery as Black Swans. They may change the world, but you’re never sure of their occurrence. Their successes are unexplained. Thousands of better books never see the light of the day. Exceptionally brilliant scientists commit suicides because they are way ahead of their time. Movies that should have been super hits flop. Why? I’m still to read that portion.

This book makes you sleepy unless you’re hell bent upon stretching your reading abilities, or may be I have been simply too tired because I start reading it after I’ve already slogged for 6-7 hours. Lots of abstract philosophy and logic, lots of references to mathematicians and philosophers, their experiments and their observations. The humor sounds clichéd and hence off-putting sometimes, like repeatedly making fun of the French, the bankers and the financial forecasters. Nonetheless, I have found some worthy nuggets of wisdom and I plan to finish it in the coming days.

Here is a blog post discussing 10 ugly truth about modern journalism, and I totally agree with its content. The thought that caught my attention is the sad reality that people find a shootout more exciting than the news of a new library being opened. Of course not everybody is crazy about books and to be honest, people shooting and getting killed obviously deserve greater attention. Although I started this post to commiserate about the general attitude, now that I’m writing about it, I realize why a shooting spree gets news coverage and not a new library (it should).

A shootout is not some kids having some healthy fun in the neighborhood park. People are getting killed and maimed. Many times you must have said, "Oh, I was there just 10 minutes ago!" or "I was just going to go there." Such incidents either knock our sense of security out of kilter or they make us feel more secure because we don’t have to be at such "dangerous" places.

It’s not about libraries and shootouts (libraries are anyway growing irrelevant with everything going digital and all major libraries being put online), it’s about the attitude of indifference towards intellectual growth. New knowledge fascinates us rarely, unless it can kill us or cause us financial loss.

Please note: I wrote this a long time back, many years ago, when I used to live alone with my mother.

Insects and I have shared a long lasting association with each other. This I have come to recognize more after regularly watching documentaries on insects, on various wildlife TV channels. Despite my mother’s strident objections (we watch TV together while having dinner), if they are featuring insects, I have to watch that program.

Although I have not gone to the extent of chewing live beetles and juggling around tarantulas just to needlessly harass the scandalized creatures and make people cringe at my antics as some demented looking hosts and anchors are wont to do, I have begun to acknowledge and accept the presence of these six-legged and eight-legged terrors. I refer to them as terrors because, see an ant under a magnifying glass and it’ll look like the most hideous monster you can ever imagine. A mere touch of a cockroach’s belly can give you the creeps for months.

I have accepted them as an inexorable destiny. They have been before me, and they are going to be after me, on this living planet.

But I’m not the only unscientific person who gets fascinated by these creatures of the pre-historic transcendence (if I’m not mistaken, the geological period when insects evolved, is called the Silurian Period of the Paleozoic Era). The narrator in Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground” wants to turn into an insect at a particular stage of his pathetic life; and who can forget Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” in which the protagonist wakes up as a giant insect? In most of the horror movies, I often witness hundreds of insects entering and exiting writhing humans, turning them into funnily spasmodic zombies. In ancient Egypt, they worshipped the dung-rolling beetles as they supposedly roll the Sun across the sky with their hind legs. Known to be rich in proteins, ants and caterpillars are being recommended as a staple diet by the starving entomologists all over the world.

There was a time when I used to be very scared of cockroaches. So scared that their presence used to make me stiff with fear. The fear was not exaggerated of course. If there was a cockroach in my room, then it had to lunge upon me in a spate of ground and aerial attacks. It had to enter the most unseemly crevices of my clothes that I happened to be wearing at that time, from where it could not be extricated without copious bodily contacts. By the time it was out, it had performed its acts of exploration and probing, and there remained no use of dancing around in panic and hurling unmentionable obscenities at it. It used to happen sans exception. The fear has ebbed by now, though the creepy feeling still lingers and changes into fear whenever I think of those demonic infiltrations. Fortunately when we changed our residence, we left those tales of sordid encounters behind, for, I have not seen a cockroach in our house ever since we have been in this new house – for the past three years.

But mosquitoes and ants are still here to fill the gap. They don’t scare me. They torment my tranquil moments, especially when I’m engrossed in reading and writing. They allot themselves the lower and the upper regions of my body in a hegemonic accord. The mosquitoes attack my hands, my neck and other facial paraphernalia and the ants attack my feet. I don’t know if you can, but I can differentiate between a mosquito incited pain and an ant incited pain. Of course the ants have talons and the mosquitoes have those biological straws (proboscis? I don’t know what it’s called). That incidentally brings to my mind, mosquitoes don’t bite – theoretically they sting – so I wonder why everybody says, “mosquito bites.”

Ants I respect, mosquitoes I repel. Me respecting ants does not imply I offer my body to them at their lunch hour; it’s just that, I have never, knowingly killed an ant. Accidentally, yes (sometimes they refuse to let go off the skin so they break). I’ve been trying to predict earthquakes by observing the behavior of ants and successfully predicted one last to last month when they came out, holding their eggs. They stuck to the bathroom wall and the adjacent floor as if they were dead. It’s winter, and ants don’t come out in winters, so I told my skeptical friend over the phone, “We’re going to have an earthquake very soon.” There was one, very mild, the next afternoon.

I remember being plagued by giant moths and locusts during my college days. I have mentioned them in one of my suspense stories. In the old house (the one infested with cockroaches), my study table was adjacent to a window that I always kept open during the study-ridden months of February, March and April – in college we had annual exams in May. By the end of February, only the tail of winter is left, and the night air is full of reposeful warmth and the smells of spring, and hence the unclosed window. Keeping the window open meant bearing the onslaught of moths that got attracted to the glow of my table-lamp. Believe me, they hailed from all the corners of the world, for I have never witnessed such a variety of moths, not even on the National Geographic channel. For weeks I kept a dead moth that looked like a rhinoceros with me and scared the neighborhood kids with it.

Then, during my second year of college, Delhi got hit by a plague of locusts. A locust looks like a big, fat and elongated cricket, light gray or black in color. They were as big as sparrows, and they were everywhere. You couldn’t put a foot forward without hearing a crunching sound beneath it. For a couple of days we had to cover our faces while venturing out. I had to keep my windows shut. They ate all our plants and then they disappeared as magically as they had appeared. They say a locust attack is always invoked by a curse. Who knows? I believe in the paranormal manifestations.

The only insects I have knowingly killed are the ticks that stuck to my dog, Suzy (she’s no more). I just couldn’t tolerate them troubling her, so I used to kill them with a vengeance. In the fits of nostalgia, I still crush a solitary tick passing my path.

I’m happy I was able to finish Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore” during the weekend – 90% of it – the remaining I read on Monday and Tuesday, after doing my work. Reading books is quite challenging for me because I cannot do reading as a side activity. It has to be full-throttle, without interference; I even tend to switch my phone off when I’m reading. I don’t like baroque spells of reading.

This is the reason why I’ve read so little in the past few years. In fact it’s been more than 10 years. Not that I read 100s of books before that, it’s just that, whenever I read, I could just go on reading without interruption. In the past 10 years I must have hardly read 20 books.

I did most of my reading in the late 80s and the early 90s when I was always busy minding my own business. I had a small study table by the bedroom window, and the comers and goers were perpetually greeted by my back, as I was always reading, sitting on that table, with my back to the door. I won’t claim those were the best days of my life (in fact during a later binge-reading period I was about to kill myself) but yes, vis-a-vis book reading, those were. I got introduced to Garcia, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco and Dostoyevski during that period.

I’m not complaining about why I don’t read much now. In fact I can easily say this is the happiest – although strained sometimes due to constantly periods of illness – period of my life. But if I can incorporate reading too, nothing like it. My problem is that I cannot read while I’m doing something else. Reading demands total devotion, I respect the book I’m reading and it cannot be something I’m “also doing”. I mean, I cannot read for 30 minutes or 40 minutes a day and complete a book in a week. I’ve never read a book just before going to bed, or while I’m waiting to do something else.

Book reading, I just re-realized, is essential for me if I want to do some serious writing. Recently Alka and I were going through some of my very old documents and she was genuinely amazed to see how I used to write. Ever since we met she’s seen me doing professional content writing or technical writing; she’s read a few of my literary works, but it was for the first time I showed her one of the novels I was working on before I stopped writing fiction. While going through the first few pages, I realized, once again, that the only thing that truly makes me happy is writing fiction, and reading helps me segue into that mode. I once read Vikram Seth’s interview in which he said he doesn’t read books because it affects the way he writes (incidentally, I’ve never read him), and I would like to read precisely for this reason. All the writers I avidly read are or were voracious readers and I feel if you want to write, you need to be able to read too, and this applies to every art and science.

So hopefully I’ll be spending the coming weekends reading some great books. Next weekend I plan to read Ulysses. I’ve been trying to read it for a long time, but somehow, couldn’t go beyond a few pages due to its size, and language. But after reading “Kafka on the Shore” I’m feeling quite encouraged. I’ll be writing more about my reading and writing experience. In the coming days I’ll also be posting a few of my older writings.

I have been planning to read Shakespeare for many years but whenever I take up the task it seems so daunting.  Call it lack of time or lack of desire for the required effort; I have never been able to go beyond even the first scenes of the first acts.  I wish I had graduated in English literature because then I would have had to read and understand these great works.  The only classical writers I have read so far comprehensively are Dostoyevsky, to an extent Kafka, and of course Charles Dickens.  I have read Hardy too but somehow I don’t consider him a classical writer. There are so many great writers I haven’t even heard of.  I think the more I read the more I’ll know about them.  I firmly believe that good reading helps you become a better writer.  If nothing else reading gives you lots of thoughts to think about.

In order to make my Shakespeare reading easier I am first reading the notes prepared by various teachers, professors and even students.  I can find lots of them easily on the Internet.

The first play that I’m reading is "Antony and Cleopatra".  There was no specific reason behind it, I chose it randomly.  For a long time I used to believe that Ptolemy was Cleopatra’s immediate brother whereas in reality he was an ancestor who was a general in Alexander’s army.  A few centuries before Cleopatra, Ptolemy had come in possession of Egypt when Alexander died. So this way Cleopatra was a Greek and not an Egyptian.

Mark Antony was a mighty general in Caesar’s army.  The romance between Mark Antony and Cleopatra "blossomed" after Julius Caesar’s death; Cleopatra was going around with him before he died.  After Julius Caesar’s death Octavius Caesar started ruling Rome with the help of Mark Antony and another character I am yet to come across.

Till now I’ve reached the part where, upon hearing about his wife’s death Mark Antony leaves the conniving Cleopatra to help Caesar fight Rome’s enemies and Caesar is bitching about Antony’s debaucheries in Egypt.

My initial thoughts: if I am looking for something deeper in this literature I haven’t found it yet because most of the time I’m struggling with the language.  I have a strong grasp over the contemporary language but there are many expressions in Shakespearean literature (in fact, in all older texts) I have never come across.  Everything ends with a "eth" or an "er" it seems and it being a play there are lots of simple things expressed intricately.  That said, reading extra notes prior to reading the actual text has definitely helped and I am already in the scene 4 of the act 1. It hasn’t become enjoyable but I can feel it that soon it will.

As I mentioned above I have wanted to read classical literature for a long time.  Aside from this reason I also wanted to stretch my mind; indulge in something I find inconvenient. So I have decided to not only read the classical texts but also write about them in various blog posts here.  And anyway when I had started this blog I had thought of sharing my literary progress here (that’s why the name Writing Cave) but then the vicissitudes of life took me to other directions and I ended up writing about almost everything under the sun.  I will still be writing about everything under the sun but hopefully I will be discussing more literature from now onwards.

Book lovers say that they have an emotional bonding with their books and they don’t prefer digital book readers. I love books; I don’t read them much but I do love them and I am possessive about them. I don’t like people taking away my books and try to get them back if I can. Still, if all the books are taken away from me and instead I am given an e-book reader in which I can digitally store all the books that I have and all the books that I can possibly read or refer to I won’t hesitate even for a single second.

I agree that books have an old world charm and nothing can compare to sitting in a cozy corner reading a beautifully written book. But books waste lots of paper. millions of trees are chopped off everyday to publish books and newspapers and paper, of course. I wouldn’t like so many trees being cut just because you “love” the feel of a real book in your hands.

As far as I know digital e-book readers are not only very easy to use they are also eco-friendly. Right now they are quite costly but I hope very soon their prices will come down. They are constantly working on developing technology that will produce near paper-thin screens so that you will feel like as if you are holding a paper and not a digital appliance. They won’t strain your eyes and you will be able to roll them and put them in your pocket.

So all those great libraries should be emptied of the priceless books they contain? I would say yes. The books begin to rot after a certain period. If they are digitally saved they will be preserved for countless future generations unless an unforeseen catastrophe destroys them. I’m not saying that we should destroy the libraries; they can still be used for reading and researching which is not possible anywhere else.

In “The Last Mughal” William Dalrymple has very beautifully described the anguish Bahadurshah Zafar goes through when he is sent to exile. Although I’m not a landless soul my ambitions keep me away from getting too attached to the soil I dwell upon. I constantly tell myself that the place is not important, what you do, how you do, is. But still, the old smells, the bygone textures and the eddies of chimerical memories still come a visiting and make me want to dive into the valleys of yore. These are momentary reveries and I generally am more interested in things that are happening or about to happen, not that have happened. So my place is where I and my family reside for the moment.

Mai sent me Taslima Nasreen’s story (it’s published in Outlook but to read it there you need to log in first — so I’ve linked to another page with the entire story), and it really breaks your heart to know how attached she is to Bengal, and how betrayed she feels. The entire feeling is summed up here:

This is my beloved India , where I have been living
and writing on secular humanism, human rights and
emancipation of women. This is also the land where I
have had to suffer and pay the price for my most
deeply held and fundamental convictions, where not a
single political party of any persuasion has spoken
out in my favor, where no non-governmental
organization, women’s rights or human rights group has
stood by me or condemned the vicious attacks launched
upon me. This is an India I have never before known.

A person cannot live where she wants to live simply because she writes and expresses herself, and some people cannot digest what she expresses. As a state we have totally failed, as a mass ideology we have totally failed because what the foreign rulers did to us we are doing it to others. I personally don’t know how it feels to be uprooted because I have never felt rooted. First of all she never wanted to leave Bangladesh — her land — and finally when she found the same smell and texture of her ancestral soil in West Bengal she was again packed off to an alien environment. For what? Disagreeing? It’s really embarrassing for a country that such a treatment is meted out to a writer due to political and extremist reactions.

[tags]taslima nasreen[/tags]

Just watched Arundhati Roy’s interview in the Devil’s Advocate and she makes Karan Thapar look like a clueless teenager. It’s amazing to see the man giving silly arguments in defense of Buddhadeb for orchestrating the ouster of the Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen from Kolkata. How does he sustain his job? Karan’s point of view is that the poor chief minister had no choice left, that in order to prevent many people from losing their lives he had to send her away and withdraw the security given to her.

Arundhati rightly says that it doesn’t require rocket science to understand that the West Bengal government raked up the entire Taslima Nasreen issue just to divert attention from the Nandigram atrocities; the controversial book for which the alleged protests happened has been in the bestsellers list for the past four years in Kolkata and there have been no large-scale protests in the state. Then why all of a sudden there is so much chest beating against the book or whatever she has been writing?

I think it is a matter of shame for the State government to send a writer away just because it cannot control the rioting mobs. Don’t they feel embarrassed that they had to cite this reason in order to send her away? Precisely for this reason, no matter how much praise Narender Modi gets from the right wing writers and intellectuals, I strongly dislike him: that dude is a walking failure; instead of feeling proud of his “achievements” he should be totally depressed and he should be a liability for the BJP instead of an asset, no matter how many elections he can win for the party. If you cannot control riots then you have no business calling yourself the Chief Minister of the state. If you cannot control the law and order situation then why do you have the law and order machinery in your hand — give the control to someone who has the guts to control the mobs. The more excuses you give the sillier you sound. So it is highly moronic of the CPI(M) to say that they had to send Taslima away in order to contain the deteriorating law and order situation in the state. A capable government would both provide unbreakable security to the threatened person and contain the elements trying to incite violence.

As usual when Karan Thapar talked about all the artists and writers whose freedom of expression has been curtailed by the protesting mobs he only mentioned those artists and writers who have been targeted by the so-called “Hindu fundamentalists”; there was, intentionally of course, no mention of writers and artists who have been threatened by Muslim fundamentalists.

It doesn’t actually matter who is threatened and by whom but freedom of expression should be a fundamental right and it should be protected by the state by all means because when people are afraid to express themselves just because there could be retaliatory actions the society ceases to grow intellectually. If you don’t like something written or painted, well too bad, you can’t just go and bash up the person and destroy his or her creations and if you do you should get the maximum punishment available in the country. If you have a problem with the creation you can either create something contrary or take some legal action.

Sadly and tragically our successive governments always give in to the pressure of the mob whether it is the Gujarat riots, or the 1984 riots, or the banning of “The Satanic Verses” or the exile of M. F. Hussein or the violent protests in Vadodara. Our lazy governments, whether at the Centre or in the States, are always either going for the easier option or doing something that satisfies their political agendas.

I like what Arundhati says somewhere in the interview when Karan Thapar asks her whether it was right that Taslima removed the “objectionable” parts from what she had written, “What choice does she have? She is under the protection of the mafia, the mob.” By the mafia, the mob, she meant the government.

[tags]taslima nasreen, west bengal, arundhati roy, nandigram[/tags]

For a few minutes today I saw the modern version of “Great Expectations” in the form of a movie that they were showing on TV.  They had probably changed the names of the characters because Miss Havisham had some other name in the movie. but the names of Estella and Pip hadn’t been changed.  When the character of Miss Havisham  sees that Pip is attracted towards Estella she remarks something like, “You already love her and she will cause you great pain.”

That set me thinking, is love all about pain?  There was a time when I used to think like that.  I thought there was no true love without excruciating pain, without anguish, and without longing. Maybe these notions of love were a result of all the literature I was reading at that time.  Whether it was Dostoyevsky, or Thomas Hardy, or Garcia, or Salman Rushdie;  they all seemed to be obsessed with characters that burnt in the inferno of love; the more vehemently the fires burnt, the greater heights their loves attained. It almost sounded like the glory of martyrdom when you die for your country with a smile on your lips.

Some people believe that love should be about eternal happiness and joy: “you are at the top of the world when you are in love”, This may be true in the rarest of the rare cases, but I think that kind of love, the love that brings you eternal joy is of the spiritual kind — without physical attraction and the cutting desire to be close to the loved one.

Sure, the cosmic joy manifests during the budding times of love.  You feel like dying of happiness when the sparkles of reciprocation spread all over the firmament of your love.  But after the initial thrust things slow down and the law of diminishing returns gets operational and eventually every kind of great love boils down to juggling with the quotidian matters of life like earning money, cooking food, taking care of the children and paying the bills.  After all Romeo and Juliet couldn’t have spent their lives rebelling against their feuding families and making love.  If they hadn’t died and if they had gotten married they would have had children and all the associated problems with them; other problems take precedence over love and romance as you settle down and start a family.  But I think am talking about the bookish love.

A few months ago Alka and I saw a documentary on the National Geographic Channel in which they showed a couple who has spent more than 35 years studying elephant behavior in various African geographical locations.  They have grown old now but they are always working alone in the limitless world of humanlessness. Had there not been prodigal love between them they wouldn’t have managed so many years with each other without meeting other human beings.  Of course their common passion must have acted as a binding force but still you need something more than passion to stay together for such a long time and accomplish so much, together. How many moments of love and hardship they must have shared together.  Now here we can say that it is a love of eternal joy and happiness (at least it looked like that ). One of my cousins told me last year that she was thinking of getting a job because both she and her husband were getting fed up of seeing each other in the same room; they needed to get away from each other for at least some time (they both work from home I think).  Theirs was a love marriage.  Has the love withered, or the great love was never there and it was just an illusion or some sociological compulsion to love somebody?

The love-related pain is of two kinds: of separation and of treachery. For a few months I have been trying to read “The Count of Monte Cristo”; it is a very thick book but still, had I been able to extract enough time out of my daily routine I would have been able to finish the book, but anyway that is another subject.  The protagonist of the book is framed falsely by the people who are jealous of him both for his financial success and his success in obtaining the love of his life.  He is imprisoned, and no doubt he is very sad when he is taken away from his lover.  But his agony breaks all bounds of reasoning when he learns that in his absence his lover doesn’t wait for him and marries the person who had falsely framed him for treason (she doesn’t know that her present husband was responsible for the sad turn of events, but it hardly matters). So she also gets included in the list of people he wants to take revenge from. The treachery of love incites both hatred and pride.  Pride, for being the one who loved till his or her last breath.  Hatred, for being left for another. To understand this feeling, you have to go through it.  Treachery of love turns some into exceptional poets and some into psychopathic murderers.

In today’s world separation due to societal pressures, at least in educated classes, is not a great factor.  Here I would quickly refer to the case of the Muslim boy who recently died in Kolkata because he was in love with a rich girl whose parents were opposed to the alliance: the boy was allegedly murdered by the city police.  So such things still happen in the society but for the argument let us assume that they are not a norm and they don’t happen in the civilized world.  Ranjha (the hero of a Punjabi folklore love epic written by the great Sufi poet Bulle Shah) turned into an ascetic when due to societal differences he couldn’t spend his life with Heer and eventually they both died of separation.  This is where things get mixed up a bit; what causes greater agony in love?  The separation due to third-party intervention or the separation due to treachery of a partner?  For instance Heer and Ranjha could have spent their lives peacefully thinking that even though they were not physically close to each other they still loved each other. A great amount of strength can be derived from the fact that a person in a faraway place loves you from the bottom of his or her heart. So did Heer and Ranjha died because they couldn’t live with each other, that they couldn’t mate? Obviously they would have had sex had they gotten married  because after all theirs was not  a motherly, or a fatherly,  or a sisterly, or a brotherly, or a friendly love and neither was it the kind of love we have for Almighty. Many people take a leaf out of these legendary love stories and take drastic steps when they fail in love. But a love that prompts you to kill yourself is not actually love; it is a craving, an obsession that drives you out of your mind and you end up killing yourself.  This is a mental illness and not a romantic emotion.

So what would be true love?  I think true love wouldn’t depend on getting to live with the person you love.  True love is just there, irrespective of the kind of reciprocation it generates.  True love lets you live a productive life even if you “fail” in love.  The best example is the parental love.  Okay here I am not going on a tangent; I am using the example of parental love just to drive in a point.  Parental love is a love that does not depend on a return. Your parents love you just because they are your parents; they keep loving you even if you have abandoned them to the extent of calling someone else your mother or father (of course there are exceptions). As long as you are healthy and prosperous they will be satisfied (assuming the other problems don’t bother them like money or health). This you cannot say about a lover. A separation or a shift in loyalty is bound to cause lots of pain and anger.  The happiness becomes a joint affair when you are in love.  Your lover loses the right to be happy with another person; he or she should only be happy with you.  This feeling lasts as long as you don’t get another partner who is even better than the previous one.  Do you call it love?  Rather it is a circumstantial feeling; it changes with the change of circumstances.  True love, in its real essence, doesn’t get affected with the change of circumstances.  It doesn’t matter to the true love whether the other person lives with you or with someone else, or is happy with you or with someone else. A love that doesn’t depend on togetherness can be the cause of eternal joy I think.

Sandeep on his blog dissects an article published in The Hindustan Times written by some extremely biased (or clueless, a greater possibility) historian/writer named Ramachandra Guha. My analytical writing has been living in the dumps for quite some time but Sandeep’s take on Guha’s politically and culturally confused contemplations is quite engaging.

Recently Amardeep posted his reaction to a journalist’s outburst against bloggers. The journalist says at the beginning of his article:

Every English-speaking Indian man between 25 and 60 has written about the Hindi movies he has seen, the English books he has read, the foreign places he has travelled to and the curse of communalism. You mightn’t have read them all (there are a lot of them and some don’t make it to print) but their manuscripts exist and in this age of the internet, these masters of blah have migrated to the Republic of Blog. [ link ]

Amardeep rightly says that the writer hasn’t done his research properly and hasn’t read blogs that he should have really read before drawing such immature conclusions. I’m sure the writer didn’t read Sandeep’s blog.

Why do conventional writers and journalists (most of them, not all) hold blogging with contempt or downplay it as an elite fad? There was recently another article saying that bloggers were nothing but scavengers surviving on the toils of real journalists. Actually, they don’t understand blogging, and those who do, hate it or fear it.

A blog is a communication tool, a social media tool where people can express themselves and interact with hundreds and even thousands of their readers on a regular basis. It renders voice to people who had no voice until its advent. Anybody can today have a blog and share his or her opinions, philosophies, joys and concerns. Blogging empowers you to react immediately. Have some opinion on a newspaper article or a TV program or a movie, or a book or politician? Log into your blog account and share it with your readers. Just discovered a new recipe? Write it on your blog. Got a great video clip? Share it on your blog. Anything that can be digitally published, can be published on a blog.

Blogging initiates a two-way communication, and this is something feared by journalists, MSM people, politicians, and all those who thrive on the inability to react. In pre-blogging times the most you could do was send a letter to the editor if you read something nefarious like Guha’s article. It was up to the editor to publish your letter or whether to “edit” it or not. The Hindustan Times would certainly never publish Sandeep’s letter in its present form. And even if it were published, it would only be available to the HT readers. His blog post can be read by thousands of people from all walks of live. For instance, I read it just now and I have never in my life read HT.

Blogs also jump in when the mainstream media (MSM) fails to cover relevant news. Recently Mridula highlighted an incident where a laborer’s child died due to the callousness of IIT Kanpur authorities, and I too wrote about the incident. Taking a cue from different blogs the MSM too has started highlighting the shameful incident. Similarly when Manjunath was murdered the TV channels and newspapers woke up only after the incident had been widely discussed on various blogs. Bloggers have forced many multinational companies like Dell, Sony, etc. to mend their ways. Journalists, with their limited reach, would have never been able to achieve such feats.

Instead of criticizing blogging, journalists and writers should embrace blogging to reach a wider readership.

Here you can read diverse views on blogging.

[tags]journalists, msm, blogging[/tags]