MM...!

MM!
2000 & counting!!

This is a momentous occasion for this, our blog, and hence a kinda special post to commemorate the occasion!

Well, this post marks the crossing of a little milestone of sorts on our blog.

We’ve reached the milestone of having published two thousand posts on our blog, with our ’Clear’ post on 04 May 2020!

On this momentous occasion, I thank God Almighty for bestowing His blessings on me right from day one, to help sustain the momentum on this our blog, for the past many years.

Secondly, my pranams and gratitude to my dad and mom, who initiated me at a very young age to the art of writing a diary.

Both have been such intense diarists, dad in especial.

Whenever I get a chance to pore over his volumes and volumes of diaries, I am quite literally dazed beyond measure.

By teaching me the nuances of writing a diary, they taught me how to value, how to appreciate and how to celebrate every single day of our lives on this sweet planet earth.

A simple rubric they taught me. And that was -

Divide your daily diary jottings into just three parts!

The first part - the new ideas, thoughts, values you’ve learnt today!

The second part - events that have happened today, news or otherwise, that’s so impacted, interested or influenced you.

Third part - income/expenditure column where you write down your income/ expenditure statement for the day!

That’s it! As simple as that!

And although I’ve quite tried my luck at writing a diary from the year 1989, it was only from 1991 that I took to writing diaries with such keen interest.

Those days, we had these ‘super deluxe’ ruled notebooks that were our little substitutes for a regular diary, and from 1993 on, eagle diaries were my continual resort that helped me pen down my day, every day, for more than a decade!

For fourteen years in like fashion, I systematically wrote down my diary, when in the year 2003, I chanced upon an article in the newspaper (The Hindu) that a nondescript blog-publishing platform titled Blogger, was acquired by Google. Curiosity having got the better of me, I eagerly looked up the meaning of the word ‘blog’ for the very first time! ;-)

Much convinced on the immense possibilities of having a web log, that very year, I thought of dispensing with my manual diary jottings, and from then on, decided in right earnest to give Blogger a try! And have been here ever since!

In the very beginning of this calendar year 2020, to motivate our kids to write down their thoughts, I had taken along with me almost 12 of my past diaries to my I MA Class, to enthuse them in like fashion, to try their hand at writing down their days and weeks! 

I also read out a few jottings from off my diaries, in a random manner, like for example, newspaper articles that I had found interesting, books I’d read, the abysmally low prices of petrol/diesel back then, or the price of a cuppa coffee ;-) or events that had so interested me.

After I had done with my class with them, one particular student, at the end of the class, came up to me and asked, ‘Sir, can I read your diaries’. ;-)

I said, ‘Well, you can see them all! You may even browse your way through the pages and see how I’ve written them down, kiddo! But reading them… well, I would feel a bit unnerved! Probably one day, for sure!’

The kiddo seemed to have understood, and before she returned to her desk, she said, ‘Sir, I’m going to try my hand at writing diaries for myself!’

And well, that’s the intention of this little post on our blog! As we have seen in the last past 2000^th post, habit formation is quite difficult to begin with. But when you resolve to stick to a routine for yourself you surely can!

Yes, you can!

Yes, we can!

Happy writing er... um... blogging to y’all dear readers!

PS: Last evening I got a call from a lovely friend, Prof. Rajesh, who was trying his hand at vlogging! He at one point, quite sincerely exhorted me to popularize our blog across platforms like facebook, insta etc, to help many more access it easily.

I so thanked him from the bottom of my heart for the wonderful suggestion!

That said, well, two lovely examples come to mind in support of why I don’t intend to! ;-)

Firstly, Yeats’ lovely poem titled, ‘An Irish Airmen foresees his death’, where the Airman of the poem, tells us his reason for participating in the first world war, and flying high above the clouds in his warplane! 

To the airman, it was ‘Nor law, nor duty bade me fight!’

Nor is it for ‘public men’ and ‘cheering crowds’, says he!

‘Then what was your trigger?’ you ask the airman, and he promptly and sweetly replies, 

‘A lonely impulse of delight!’

Having weighed his options carefully, he takes this decision, tall and bold!

‘I’m gonna fly! Fly I will!’, says the airman!

Yes! but not because of ‘law’ or ‘duty’!

Not because of ‘cheering crowds’ and ‘public men’, he says, but because, ‘I find such unbridled joy and such unalloyed happiness in the sheer joy of flying’, says the ‘born-to-fly’ airman!

And that’s reason enough, alley? ;-)

Secondly, moving on to the little master Sachin Tendulkar, who’s unarguably, one of the bestest cricketers the world has ever seen!

In the year 2007, at the county ground in Chelmsford, when Sachin was asked, ‘Why after all this time, at the age of 34, are you still doing this: playing cricket?’

Sachin replied, in his quite inimitable way, in his endearing boyish-voice, with a smile on his lips –

‘Well, I play, not for the records! I play because I so love the game! It’s all about enjoying being out there in the middle!’

A reply that by itself is worth a treatise, ain’t it!

An epical treatise as such!

image courtesy: a lovely cousin ;-)