Why Blog?

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Not infrequently I do ask myself why I indulge in this crazy daily blogging.

The answers are many:

Within months of my retirement in August 2005, my phy.iitkgp.ernet.in account was blocked and deleted.

With this I lost my umbilical cord with my students and well-wishers and became a non-person, sort of.

I enjoyed my freedom from e-mailing for sometime. But some of my junior faculty at IIT KGP, for reasons best known to them, expressed their wish to make myself available to them in the cyberspace with an internet-account. So, I asked my son to create one for me. He chose Yahoo (gmail being nascent then). He asked me what I would like to have as my login. Obviously it would be 'gps1943', because my students call me names by this gps moniker; and 1943 reassures them that this is the same old buffoon they knew at IIT KGP.

As Sam Weller would say: "It is just one step from drinking to debauchery; and e-mail to blogspot". My son asked me what should be my blogspot title: Obviously 'gpsastry', no pseudonym. And my 'Profile' should just have my Yahoo e-mail id.

Rest as they say is history.

I went crazier than usual.

An unemployed pensioner should invent some diverting employment for himself if he wishes to remain physically and mentally healthy and not bore people around him to distraction.

First I tried reading. But it can't be a full-time activity, since books are expensive to buy and are a punishment on the dwidnling eyesight.

Writing creative pieces on a daily basis is a dashed tough activity and is like the proverbial mental-iceberg: choosing a topic takes about 8 hours of 'pondering'; composing mentally the 'material' takes about a couple of hours. So, 10 hours daily are spent with no strain on the eye (other than the 'inner' one). Actual blogging at the keyboard takes a couple of hours. This too can be done almost 'blindly'.

And when the piece is posted, there is this Jim Corbett feeling: "Something Attempted, Something Done". A great sense of pseudo-satisfaction.

And almost at once the question arises; what next for tomorrow?

And the twelve or so hours of mental activity is no hindrance to daily household chores like dropping the daughter-in-law at her place of work driving the decade-old Maruti 800 (which requires no brain in Hyderabadi honking traffic that moves at snail's pace if ever it does), buying vegetables, playing with the granddaughter, teasing the wife, and filling the drums with erratic water from the dry taps etc.

So, it is a full-time activity, much more demanding of 'inventive powers' than just teaching Physics at IIT KGP.

The bonus is that one does get in touch with old students at the steady rate of one a month, for mutual benefit.

Apart from that, it is like the Selfless Action of Gita: "Blog and Forget".

And I had this longstanding illusion that I am a 'humorist'.

Now, ask any 'humor-writer': it is ten times more demanding than just writing clean good serious prose; it is a pain in the neck.

But humor being essentially a self-deprecating activity, one can score some brownie points on others: Calling your self a donkey enables you to call others by implication asses; unbeknown to them.

That is highly rewarding.

So, these are briefly the virtues of daily blogging.

Just try for 3 months and tell me how tough it is and so how pleasantly triumphal.


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