Starting afresh

And I have moved...finally. I had been having problems with blogdrive for a long time now. While it was one of the better designed and more promising blogging sites at the time blogging in India was just about starting to gain popularity (I am talking about a good 7-8 years aago), blogdrive lost its way subsequently. With the larger players consolidating in the form of wordpress and blogger, the others were either forced to shut shop or, as in blogdrive's case, have a pathetic excuse for a blogging site. The servers kept going down and the blog page refused to open once too often. Finally I got the better of inertia (more pronounced because there was no single click and transfer option available and I had to painstakingly copy-paste each individual entry and more importantly, each individual comment from one place to the other) and decided to move on.

The moving exercise, as in any movement, took a lot of time and a lot of cajoling the dear old me to stay true to the conviction of the continued utility of this blog. There were so many moments in the middle when I almost junked it, what with knowing that I have not been regular with writing and not being too sure if I would be, even in the future. Sanity prevailed on all such occasions and I kept toiling at it...and interestingly, the more I worked at it, the more passionate (and not tired) I became about carrying the thing through to completion. While doing the copy-paste stuff, I was more than once or twice, caught in the tales of those days, the posts and the comments that told a story of their own. It was such a different world...the blog had, for the first time in my life, made me socially active...so much so that almost an entire batch of about 120 people (not to mention the seniors and then the juniors) actually regularly read my blog and many commented on it too with, what I can now pronounce, an alarming frequency.

The comments on each of the blog entries that invited them reminded me of so many people...so many that were close to me but now appear to be lost somewhere in the distance (Mayank, Prashant Kumar, Ravi...) so many that were just there for the fun but are now out of the radar (Yash, Vikhyat...), and very very few that were there and are still very much around. Of course, life and work and the associated stuff have taken their toll and distances were but, to be expected. But then, wasn't blogging supposed to be a solution to this? Wasn't a blog supposed to have been my way of telling the world what I am up to and wasn't it supposed to have been the world's way of telling me that it cared about what was happening in my life?

So why did it not happen the way it was supposed to? Yes, I stopped writing and consequently, people stopped coming back for updates and then, even when I wrote, there was no one to read it since they were already tired coming in and going back empty handed...they had already given up on me.

So, with the new blog (and the upcoming new year), I hope to revive this space and make Mode C at least an image of what it once was for me...a big part of my social life, a place where I could be myself and be liked for it, a place where I had my friends and foes, my fans and critics...may raison d'etre.

I begin here with a call out to all of you. If you do chance upon this place, do come back for more and do engage with me...I shall try my best not to disappoint you this time around.