blogging – Page 3 – Pertinent Observations

Bloggers and anti-bloggers

I know this post “dates” me as someone who started blogging back in the peak era of blogging in the mid 2000s. But what the hell!

I think you can consider yourself to have “made it” as a blogger when a post that you write attracts abuse. Sometimes this abuse could be in public, in the comments section of the blog. At other times, the abuse is in private, when someone meets you or calls you, and abuses you for writing what you wrote.

As long as you’ve been reasonable in your blogging (which the early years of this blog’s predecessor cannot exactly claim), abuse on your comments section is more of an indicator of the thin-skinnedness of the abuser, rather than you crossing lines on what you should write about.

At this point in time, it is pertinent to introduce the class of people who I call as “anti-bloggers”. Sometimes they might themselves have a blog, but that is not necessary, what is necessary is that they have a “holier than thou” attitude.

Anti-bloggers are people with especially thin skins who are always on the lookout for something to outrage about, and blogs, which allow people to express themselves freely on a public forum without editorial oversight, are a common whipping boy.

This outrage could come in several forms. The thicker-skinned version of this outrage happens from people who abuse you only if they think you’ve abused them on the blog (good bloggers take care to never mention names in a negative manner, so this is usually a case of “kumbLkai kaLLa heglmuTT nODkonDa” (the pumpkin thief looked at his shoulder; it’s a Kannada proverb meaning something like “every thief has a straw in his beard) ).

The thinner skinned version of anti-bloggers find it even easier to find things to outrage about. Look at the Bangalore post I’d written ten years back. There was no hint that I’d written about anyone at all, but the post received heaps of abuse, from people who manufactured some kind of entity that the post purportedly offended!

The most annoying anti-bloggers are those that abuse you when you simply pen down an observation that is there for all to see. I won’t take specific examples now, but sometimes the simple act of reporting a fact that is evident to everyone can offend people, for its existence on paper (a website, rather) gives it new-found legitimacy!

This last bit can also help explain the annoyance of some sections of the “mainstream media” with “social media” such as blogs/twitter. The worthies in the mainstream media had established certain unwritten rules by which certain facts/events wouldn’t be put down on paper.

The mention of these events in social media (which is unedited) suddenly gave these events/happenings sudden legitimacy, which steered the overall narrative away from where it existed during the mainstream media monopoly, annoying the mainstream media!

One penultimate point – anti-bloggers are the same people who talk about the glories of the days prior to social media (this piece in The Guardian is an especially strong specimen), when people could only read news that was filtered and possibly censored by newspaper editors.

And finally, ever since my credentials as a blogger were established about a decade back, some people have started explicitly mentioning to me when they are saying something “off the record”. And I’ve always respected these conditions!

Commenting on social media

While I’m more off than on in terms of my consumption of social media nowadays, I find myself commenting less and less nowadays.

I’ve stopped commenting on blogs because I primarily consume them using an RSS reader (Feedly) on my iPad, and need to click through and use my iPad keyboard to leave comments, a hard exercise. And comments on this blog make me believe that it’s okay to not comment on blogs any more.

On Facebook, I leave the odd comment but find that most comments add zero value. “Oh, looking so nice” and “nice couple” and things like that which might flatter some people, but which make absolutely no sense once you start seeing through the flattery.

So the problem on Facebook is “congestion”, where a large number of non-value-adding comments may crowd out the odd comment that actually adds value, so you as a value-adding-commentor decide to not comment at all.

The problem on LinkedIn is that people use it mostly as a medium to show off (that might be true of all social media, but LinkedIn is even more so), and when you leave a comment there, you’re likely to attract a large number of show-offers who you are least interested in talking to. Again, there’s the Facebook problem here in terms of congestion. There is also the problem that if you leave a comment on LinkedIn, people might think you’re showing off.

Twitter, in that sense, is good in that you can comment and selectively engage with people who reply to your comment (on Facebook, when all replies are in one place, such selective engagement is hard, and you can offend people by ignoring them). You can occasionally attract trolls, but with a judicious combination of ignoring, muting and blocking, those can be handled.

However, in my effort to avoid outrage (I like to consume news but don’t care about random people’s comments on it), I’ve significantly pruned my following list. Very few “friends”. A few “twitter celebrities”. Topic-specific studs. The problem there is that you can leave comments, but when you see that nobody is replying to them, you lose interest!

So it’s Jai all over the place.

No comments.

Our documented lives

I think I’ve confessed here several times that I like reading my old blogposts. In fact, I like reading my old blogposts from 2006 onwards – there was an inflexion point towards the end of 2005, and I hate my posts written before that. It was almost I was a completely different person.

Anyway, of late, these nostalgia trips have taken a different direction. Firstly, in 2006-10, I used GTalk fairly extensively, and most conversations are still archived (except for some people who explicitly turned off the saving). So once in a while I pick a random person (most often it’s the person who’s now my wife, and most of my GTalking with her was before we had even met) and check out my conversations with him/her.

Sometimes it just sends me on a bout of nostalgia. Sometimes it reminds me of what I (and these people I used to talk to) was like back then, and wonder how I’ve changed and so forth. At other times these posts remind me of what was “hot gossip” back then (yes, I was a major gossipmonger in my younger days), which, thanks to the fundamental fleetingness of gossip, I normally don’t remember. When I remember such gossip, it’s a fun exercise to reconcile the subjects of gossip with their present selves.

Another activity I take up randomly from time to time is reading people’s blogs. Some of these have been mostly taken private as these people in question have embarked on successful corporate careers. I still have my LiveJournal account, so that helps me access some of these blogs (and others have kindly shared passwords to their now-private blogs with me).

The kind of trips these take me on is similar to what the old chats inspire – some nostalgia, some recollection of what different people were like back then and how they’ve turned out (I also make sure I read the comments), catching up on gossip of that day and all such.

In a way, I’m quite glad that so many of us live such documented lives! In that sense I quite hate Twitter and Facebook, for it’s bloody hard to search for stuff there (except for Facebook’s this day that year feature), and with a lot of documentation having moved there from blogs and GTalk, it’s quite sad!

PS: Sometimes I indulge in these nostalgic activities jointly with my wife, and occasionally it’s not fun, since she ends up discovering a part of my history which she didn’t know existed. Documentation has its downsides as well!

PPS: It makes me wonder what “oral histories” (I’ve always regarded them as a fraud concept, but I’ll save my description of those for another day) will look like one or two generations down the line, when so much of our documented histories will be available, if we choose to make them available.

On writing a book

While I look for publishers for the manuscript that I’ve just finished (it’s in “alpha testing” now), I think it’s a good time to write about what it was like to write the book. Now, I should ideally be writing this after it has been published and declared a grand success.

But there are two problems with that. Firstly, the book may not be a success of any kind. Secondly, it will be way too long after having finished it to remember what it was like to write it. In fact, a week after the first draft, I’ve almost already forgotten what it was like. So I’m writing this now.

Writing is a full-time job. I got this idea for the book in October 2014 when I was visiting Barcelona for the first time. I wrote the outline in November 2014. Despite several attempts to write, nothing came out of it.
During a break from work in October 2015 I managed to get started, but I’ve re-written all that I wrote then. Part-time effort doesn’t just cut it. It wasn’t until I came to Barcelona in February that I could focus completely on the book and write it.
You need discipline. This probably doesn’t need to be explicitly stated, but writing a book, unlike writing a blog post, is a fighter process, and you need a whole load of discipline and focus. After a week or two of preparing the outline, I prepared fairly strict deadline regarding when I would finish the book. I had to reset the deadline a couple of times, but finally managed it.
There is no feedback. I think I wrote about this a few days back. The big problem with writing a book is that you spend a significant amount of effort before even a small fraction of your customers have seen the product. So you soldier on without any feedback, and it can occasionally be damn frustrating.
You feel useless. Writing a book can introduce tremendous amounts of self-doubt. One day you think you’ve completely cracked it, and your book will change the world. The next day you start wondering if there’s any substance at all to what you’re writing, and there’s any point in going ahead with it. On several occasions, I’ve had thoughts on abandoning it.
Getting away helps. The only reason I didn’t abandon the book when I had my bouts of self-doubt was that I was away in Barcelona with nothing else to do. It wasn’t as if I could ditch the book and find some work to do the next day. Being away meant that the TINA factor pushed me on. There was no alternative but to write the book.
Getting in a draft is important. You are likely to have bad days when you’re writing. On those days you feel like giving up. On putting things off for another day. Reams have been written about great writers stalling their books for several days because they couldn’t find the “right word”. I don’t buy that.
Found that when I’m in a rut, it’s better I simply push through and finish the chapter. Editing it later on is far easier than writing it again from scratch.
There is a limit to how much you can write. When I said it’s a full time job you might think I spent 8 hours a day on the book. I took around 70 days to write it (including a 10-day vacation), and the draft weighs in at 75,000 words (I intend to cut it before publication). So it’s less than 1200 words per day on an average.
That doesn’t sound like a lot, but trust me, writing on a continuous basis is quite hard. A lot of time goes in fact checks and in getting links (I don’t think I still have all the footnotes and endnotes I need for the book). Writing a book is far more complex than writing a blog post.
Writing is tiring. This isn’t something I figured out while writing the 2000 odd posts I’ve put on this blog. When you’re writing a book, and for an audience, you realise that you get tired pretty quickly. I don’t think I was able to work more than four hours a day on any of my “writing days”. And four hour-days would leave me a zombie.
You need a schedule, and a workplace. I did the pseud romantic thing. The entire book was written at this WiFi enabled cafe near my place in Barcelona. Pseud value apart, the point of having the workplace was that it brought a schedule and some discipline to my days. I would go there every morning on writing days (exact time varied), get a coffee and sit down to write. And not rise until I had finished my target for the session.
Two days back I went there to work on something else. I figured I couldn’t – that cafe is now forever tied to my writing the book. The kind of focus required there was of a different kind.

I’ll stop for now. I hope to republish this blog post once the book has hit the stands!

How social media affects your life

My first attempt at writing of any kind was in 2004, when I edited the daily newsletter at Saarang, IIT Madras’s cultural festival. It was a fun experience (I remember digging out my newsletters sometime back, but cant seem to find them now), and I think RAP and I did a pretty good job.

Given that events would go on late into every night and we’d to bring out an edition every morning, some “preprocessing” was key, and I decided to solve the problem through some “online writing” (at the same time I was doing my B.Tech. project in online algorithms, but I digress). As and when I would make a pertinent observation (I borrowed the name for that newsletter, too), I would try and think about how I would describe it in the next day’s newsletter, and immediately jot it down in a notepad I carried.

This way, by the time RAP and I met every evening to compile the newsletter, most of the material would be in place and all we would have to do was to compile, edit and typeset it, and the newsletter would be ready. One time, when we knew that a quiz would go on till dawn (as per tradition), we wrote up the article even before it had happened based on how previous editions had gone. The winner’s name was inserted in the morning just before printing.

The reason I’m telling this story (which I might have told before) is that it inculcated in me the habit of trying to instantly describe in written word anything I saw. Going forward, it became a habit, though it didn’t have much outlet. Later in 2004 I started this blog, and when I would remember the thoughts I’d thought to describe things I saw, I would put it down on this blog.

Twitter changed all that. Now, as soon as I could describe something I saw in a meaningful (and short) fashion, there was an outlet for instant output. Facebook made it even better, allowing me to tell stories with photos and without a word limit (Facebook did photos long before Twitter did). Instagram did the same.

So seven or eight years on social media (I joined Facebook in late 2007 and Twitter in mid 2008) meant that my skill of quick written pertinent observations about just about anything I saw got a lot of encouragement (though, most times no one would react, and at times I would get trolled).

A month after going off social media, I realise that this habit has gotten completely ingrained into me, and irrespective of what I’m doing I’m thinking more about how I’d describe it in a few words (and maybe a picture), rather than enjoying the sight or sound or conversation or whatever! And knowing that I’ve denied myself this mode of output (social media) temporarily, it feels a bit odd when I mentally make one such observation, knowing there’s no way to put it out!

The thing is while I used to already do this before I got access to instant social media, the extent to which I’ve started reacting this way has changed significantly over the years! And I don’t know if that is a good thing.

Anyway, here’s an old style pertinent observation, being made much delayed, and put on this blog (rather than on any other media). I found this place called “ze fork on the water” on the Lake Geneva shoreline yesterday!

Twitter and negativity

One of the reasons that sparked my departure from social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter two weeks back was an argument with my wife where she claimed that Twitter had made me too negative, and highly prone to trolling (even in “real life”). Accepting a challenge from her, I offered to go through my tweets over the last few months, and identify those that were negative. I also offered to perform a similar exercise with my blog.

I started off with the intention to go through tweets in the last one year and delete anything that was negative or “troll-y”. I allocated myself an hour to accomplish this, along with a similar exercise for my blog.

I must have spent fifty minutes going through my twitter feed, and didn’t manage to go back more than two months. I was surprised by my own sheer volume of tweeting. What was more surprising was the amazing lack of insight in most of those tweets – there were horrible PJs that I’d cracked just because I could, there were random replies to other people which didn’t add any kind of value, there was outrage about the lack of outrage and some plain banal life stuff (apart from some downright trolly stuff which I deleted).

It made for extremely painful reading, and I could hardly recognise myself from my own tweets. Apart from some personal markers, I would find it hard to recognise most of these tweets as my own if they were to be presented to me a few months later. It was a clear indication that it was time to exit twitter (though since I have a rather kickass username there I’m not deleting my account).

The ten minutes I spent that day going through this blog, however, was a sheer delight. I did end up deleting a couple of outragey posts (both of which were essentially collections of tweets which I’d collated for posterity), but most of my posts were mostly sheer delight! There was some kind of insight in each of my posts, and I’d lie if I were to say that I’m not proud of what I’ve written.

It’s not that I’ve not written shit on this blog (or its predecessor), having written posts as late as 2008 which I’m definitely not proud of. What I’ve noticed, however, is that I’ve evolved over time, and my writing style has been refined, and I think I continue to add significant value to my readers.

Twitter’s constant engagement feature, however, meant that it was hard to evolve there and hard to escape from the cycle of banal and negative tweets. My tweets from this February are unlikely to be qualitatively very different from those 5 years back, and that’s not a positive thing to say.

The thing with Twitter is that its short format encourages a “shoot first ask questions later” kind of thinking. You end up posting shit without thinking through it, and without having to construct a reasonable argument. This encourages outrage, and posting banal stuff. Spending one minute typing out a banal tweet is far lower cost than spending 20 minutes typing out a banal blog post – the latter is unlikely to be written unless there’s some kind of insight in it.

Outrage is one thing, but what’s really got to me with respect to twitter is its sheer ordinariness, and temporality (most tweets lose value a short period of time after they’re posted). It’s insane that it’s taken me so long (and three longish sabbaticals from twitter) to find out!

Bring on the Blook

I’m normally not one to notice such stuff, but I was randomly browsing my site stats the other day and found that I had published 1997 posts till then (not including the three that I’d published and subsequently withdrew for various reasons). I’ve written two more posts after that which makes this one the 2000th post on this blog (including its predecessor). It’s taken a bit more than 11 years (I started blogging in August 2004) to reach this milestone.

A couple of years back, I’d considered writing a “blook”. “Blook“, for the uninitiated, is a book that is based on a blog. So you don’t really write a blook. You simply compile posts from your own blog, fix them in a logical order, write a foreword, and there it is! Back when I had considered the blook, I thought I didn’t have enough good posts on this blog. And then set myself a target of “another 200 blog posts”. I forget when I set this target. It doesn’t matter.

If I’ve written 2000 blog posts so far, I’m sure at least a 100 (5%) of them are pretty good, and good enough to share with a wider world than my readers? So this time, I’m seriously considering publishing a blook.

I’m looking for an editor to assist me in this exercise. The job of the editor is to go through my 2000 blog posts, and identify a 100 or so “good posts” (which are in a sense “timeless”) and figure out a way to compile and curate and put them together under themes, perhaps, in order to compile a blook. I could possibly do it myself, but I might be biased, and attached in unhealthy ways to certain posts, so I’d prefer a trusted third party to take this up.

So if you think you can edit my blog into a blook, or know someone who can do that, please do let me know. I’m really serious about it this time. We can figure out a “structure” to compensate your efforts. And you will get editing credits for the blook.

A little celebratory speech before that: when I started writing in 2004, little did I know that I would hit 2000 blog posts one day. I thank all my readers, loyal and disloyal. I thank people who have cared to comment on this blog over the years (excluding the spambots), for it’s they who’ve kept me going. I thank people who’ve brought up subjects from this blog for discussion in social gatherings. And last but not the least, I thank my wife, who I met through this blog (it’s predecessor to be precise), and who constantly berates me for not writing enough about her!

Oh, and don’t forget the blook!

Books and Kindle Singles

Recently I started re-reading Vikram Chandra (the novelist and Berkeley academic)’s book “Mirrored Mind”, which has been published in the US as “Geek Sublime”. I hadn’t read it earlier – I had only read the Kindle sample and then discarded it, and I recently decided to pick it up from where I had left off.

In fact, that was hard to do, so I decided to start from the beginning once again, and so went through the introduction and preface and acknowledgements and all such before diving into the book again. This time I liked it better (not that I hadn’t liked it the first time round), and so decided to buy the full book. But somewhere midway through the full book, I lost enthu, and didn’t feel like reading further. My Kindle lay unused for a few days, for the “loaded” book on that was this one, and there was absolutely no enthu to continue reading that. Finally I gave up and moved on to another book.So one point that Vikram Chandra makes in the introduction to the book is that he initially planned to make it a Kindle single, but then decided, upon the urging of his wife and others, to make it into a complete book on coding and poetry. While the intent of writing a full book is no doubt well-placed, the result doesn’t really match up.

For when you try and turn a Kindle single into a full book, you try to add words and pages, and for that reason you write things that aren’t organically attached to the rest of the book. You want to add content, and depth, but instead you end up simply adding empty words – those that you could have done without, and chapters which are disconnected from the rest of the book.

And so it is the case with Vikram Chandra’s Mirrored Mind. There is a whole chapter, for example, on the sociology of the Indian software industry, which is clearly “out of syllabus” for the otherwise excellent novelist, programmer and creative writer Vikram Chandra. He goes into long expositions on the role of women in the Indian software industry, the history of the industry, etc. which are inherently interesting stories, but not when told by Chandra, who is clearly not in his zone while writing that chapter.

And then there is the chapter on Sanskrit poetry, which is anything but crisp, and so verbose that it is extremely hard to get through. There is nothing about code in the chapter, and it is very hard to cut through the verbosity and discern any references to the structure of poetry, and that lays waste to the chapter. It was while reading this chapter that I simply couldn’t proceed, and abandoned the book.

This is by no means a comparison but I’ve gone down this path, too. I’ve written so many blog posts on the taxi industry, and especially on the pricing aspects, that I thought it might make sense to put them all together and convert them into a Kindle Single. But then, as I started going through my posts and began to piece them together during my holiday in Barcelona earlier this year, I got greedy, and I thought I could convert this into a full “proper” book, and that I could become a published author.

And so I started writing, mostly in cafes where I went to for breakfast (croissant and “cortado”) and for coffees. I set myself ambitious targets, of the nature of writing at least two thousand words in each session. This might help me get out a skeleton of the book by the time my vacation ended, I reasoned.

Midway through my vacation, I decided to review my work before proceeding, and found my own writing unreadable. This is not always the case – for example, I quite enjoy going back and reading my own old blog posts. I’m quite narcissistic, in other words, when it comes to my own writing. And I found my own work-in-progress book unreadable! I immediately put a pause on it, and proceeded to fritter away the rest of my vacation in an offhand way.

I got back to Bangalore and sent the “manuscript”, if it can be called such to editor extraordinaire Sarah Farooqui, I don’t know what trouble she went through reading it, but her reaction was rather crisp – that the “book” was anything but crisp and I should cut down on the multitude of words, sentences and paragraphs that added no value. The project remains stillborn.

So based on these two data points, one from a great novelist (none of whose novels I’ve read), and one from my not-so-humble self, I posit that a Kindle single once conceived should be left that way, and authors should not be overcome by delusions of grandeur that might lead them to believe they are in the process of writing a great work. The only thing that can come out of this is a horribly overblown book whose information content is no greater than that of the Kindle single originally conceived.

Long ago on this blog I had written about “blog posts turned into books”, after reading Richard MacKenzie’s book on pricing (Why popcorn costs so much at the movies). The same holds true for Kindle singles turned into books, too. And when I started writing I intended to be a 500-word blog post, not the 900-word monster it has turned into. I wouldn’t blame you if you if you didn’t get this far.

Dispassionate blogging and Wife Bonus

So I’ve figured out that the key to being a good and interesting blogger is to be able to look at things dispassionately and not let your value judgments crowd out your reasoning abilities. Of course, while saying this I’m assuming that I’m a reasonably good blogger (based on feedback, implicit and explicit, that I’ve received over the last decade, and given that I’m coming close to 2000 posts here).

So earlier this morning I was talking to a friend about long distance relationships and careers and marriages and responsibility sharing, and he sent me a link to this rather fascinating concept called the “wife bonus“. The money paragraph:

A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a “good” school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting.

So I responded that this looks like a rather interesting concept, and started my own analysis of why this works and these bonuses have been structured in the fashion that they have. Unfortunately the discussion went nowhere.

Because my friend who sent me the link found the concept disgusting and abhorrent and demeaning to women, and he was fascinated that I had managed to actually analyse it without feeling the same kind of emotions. As I write this, the conversation continues (as the old Coffy Bite ad went). Ok I googled and found that it’s actually “the argument continues”. Here is the ad:

So based on this one data point, and a few other data points from my and my wife’s blogging past, I figured out that such dispassionate analysis (I’ll present my dispassionate analysis on wife bonuses later in the post) is key if you are to be a good blogger. Because such dispassion allows you to not get swayed by the emotion or repugnancy of a concept, and instead analyse it to its full merit.

In this case you start wondering why these highly qualified women don’t work, but are “interested in art”. You start wondering about how a family’s finances would work if the qualified wife doesn’t work. You start wondering who controls the budgets, and considering that one half is not contributing financially, how stable such marriages are.

So my hypothesis, which I’ve never bothered to test, is that people who have access to funds but don’t have an independent source of income are less careful about spending it optimally than those who have access to funds on account of their own sources of income. To be less politically correct, the hypothesis is that housewives (and househusbands, to be more politically correct) are less careful about their money than people who work.

So now if you have a spouse with no independent income source, but want to make sure she has access to sufficient funds while making sure she doesn’t fritter away the wealth, the best way of achieving this is to ringfence the money under her control. Which means that giving her control of your bank account is not optimal, but creating a separate purse which is under her control is superior! And thus you create what can be classified as a “wife bonus”. As simple as that.

Now I realise many of my readers will find this blog post repugnant, for it is not politically correct, and they will allow their emotions to take over and brand me as a misogynist or a chauvinist or whatever else. All because I looked at an existing phenomenon logically without attaching a value judgment to it. And by doing so, they deny themselves the opportunity of reading my analysis. But there are others who are happy that there is someone doing this dispassionate analysis, and they will like such analysis. And my blog popularity grows on that front.

My wife has been blogging heavily through her life in business school (coincidentally I started blogging a decade ago when I was in business school; and we met each other through LiveJournal), and has already got to the stage where her professors read her blog. And while a lot of her classmates read her blog, there are some who have problems with it, that she writes dispassionately about everything without value judgments.

Anyway, I sent her the NYTimes piece on the wife bonus. She replied that she also wants one now!

Modifying old blog posts

The wife and I have both spent the last day of 2014 consolidating our blogs. I’ve imported my posts from the two other blogs that I’ve been writing for the last couple of years – bespokedata.in and rq.nationalinterest.in. The plan is that rather than having a dispersed voice across blogs, I’ll integrate everything here. As part of that exercise I’ve made some personal blog posts password-protected, and made some others private.

Of course there are some “arbit” posts that are still visible, and when I do end up putting my name on this blog they’ll come to be associated with me. But then I consider them to be part of my character – if you strip away the arbitness from my body of writing then it might as well have been not written by me. Impersonal writing is just not for me.

Anyway so while I’ve been consolidating my blogs and taking some posts private, the wife has been doing something similar. Today she started what she says is her eighth blog – she calls herself a “compulsive blog starter”. As part of the consolidation process, she has imported her posts from her seven previous blogs into this one.

Now, some of these seven blogs are old, really old, and contain posts that she is not currently particularly proud of. And she has spent a considerable amount of time today editing and deleting some of these posts – most of which had been written as far back as in 2006. She says that some of the stuff she had written back then is not consistent with the person that she is today, and hence it is worth deleting. I’m not so sure.

I think a blog is like an online diary. Among other things it’s a record of your thoughts at a particular point in time. Going back a few years to someone’s blogs helps us understand what that person was like at that point in time, and perhaps do a comparative analysis of what they were then to what they are now.

While the wife has been modifying and deleting some ancient blog posts, I’ve also been dealing with some old blog posts, but in a different way. I’ve been reading them. And reading my posts from 2004 and 2005 have helped me understood my thought process in those years, and what my life was like then. These posts help me understand some of the decisions that I had made then which I have subsequently questioned.

Of course there is more than a fair share of cringeworthy posts from that period, but my logic is that while they may not be consistent with the person that I am today, they need not be. By updating those posts to make them consistent with the person that I am today, I’m making them inconsistent with the date tagged to the posts!

Nothing is permanent, and that includes a person’s frame of mind and way of thinking. It is almost a given that one is likely to find one’s old writing (irrespective of how old it is) cringeworthy on some front or the other. That however doesn’t mean that a person goes back in time changing one’s thoughts to make them more contemporary! For doing so destroys information that is embedded in the post as it is!

So I must mention that I’m not particularly in approval of the wife’s updation and deletion of her old blog posts. While I’ve done something like that (taking some posts private) I haven’t destroyed any information nor changed them in an irretrievable fashion. Modifying old blog posts is like rewriting history!