I wonder why...

I loved writing. Specially my diary. Anne Frank is solely responsible for that. Unfortunately, after writing for almost a decade, more than a decade has passed since I wrote something in my diary. This blog is a desperate attempt to revive that - something I thought publishers would be queuing up for:-)

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Why a blog?

Why a blog?

Well, why not, regular bloggers might ask.

Let me take you back by a couple of decades to answer this question. Or probably, come to think of it, let me tell you something else first.

I have been very lucky. And unlucky. Lucky because I have been witness to the entire metamorphosis of a personal diary secretly hidden in a cupboard to a blog put up on the World Wide Web. And unlucky because there is still an element of discomfort with the fact that whatever I write in the Blog is open for anyone and everyone to read and comment on! I feel this is largely due to the fact I am still very used to the top-secret diary that I maintained in my locked cupboard during my teens.

That's when a friend pointed out that a Blog need not necessarily be an online version of the personal diary. It could something that qualified to be ‘public'.

That's what set me thinking – what’s the harm in even posting my ‘highly-classified’ diary as a blog? I have always believed in the Chinese proverb of living life as an open book. Why should I hide anything? (Not sure whether I would have been able to make the same statement in my teens when all of us had so many things to hide!) Friends, or would-be friends, should accept or reject me depending on how I am. Why do I need to put on a façade for my friends?

Anyway, now that courtesy my friend the decision to publish a Blog has been made, I was thinking about the metamorphosis from a leather-bound diary to an HTML-coded blog. For people like me, born in the early Seventies, we have been very lucky in witnessing the role of technology in transforming the world.

During my childhood, vinyl records and Vividh Bharati were the only source of musical entertainment. Come Eighties and the focus shifted to cassettes and Chitrahar. Nineties saw the scene change again. Cable television and CDs provided 24 by 7 entertainment. And the first decade of new millennium has, yet again, changed the face of entertainment. Kazaa, MP3 and iPods have ensured that you need not think beyond them for entertainment. At least, till something else comes up.

Drawing an analogy, the way I wrote diary has also changed a lot over the last three decades. I first started writing my diary when I was in the ninth standard (circa 1987). Last year when I went to my hometown - Calcutta, I had the chance to go through it and couldn’t stop laughing after reading the contents. It’s really interesting to know, how much a glance of the next-door-neighbour girl mattered then. Or for that matter how important it was to be asked for directions by a girl of another school, when you were monitoring the help desk in a school fest! That was how my teenage diary was. One particular year, even had me getting inspired by Anne Frank and writing “Dear Diary…”!

When I grew up, started going to college, the frequency of writing diary came down. But most entries had something to with what I ‘achieved’ – how I saved a goal in a football match, how the batsman was clueless about my googly and, of course, how ‘somebody’ was impressed at my crooning abilities in a social gathering! (Needless to say that somebody would soon be lost in oblivion and somebody else takes the place in the next social gathering) But all this was written in the leather-bound diary that my father got from his office.

Once I started working, things changed further. During my stint with newspapers, I met a leading computer scientist and came to know how he maintained his personal diary. He had created a program that would run in two modes – learning and communicating. In the first mode, you had to write about how you felt, what happened and how you reacted to a particular situation. Basically, you write your diary in the program.

Once the program ‘learns’ about these things, you can run it in the other mode and have someone interact with it. The program would check with its database (your diary) and behave/respond exactly the same way as you would! In a way, it would be your alter-ego and provide you with digital immortality.

The scientist even told me that if you could make the program ‘learn’ about you, by writing your diary regularly for a few years, it could actually behave like you in all situations!

I tried this as well. But as has happened with everything else in my life, this initiative too got buried in the priority list by something else assumed more importance at that point in time.

Isn’t experimenting with blogging the next step?