blogging Archives - Page 4 of 4

13/06/201215/04/2017

Back home

Dear blog,

Last we met I was packing my bags for Dehradun about a month ago. Yes I understand your concern at my long absence. No, I haven’t been in Dehradun all these days. I do understand how lost you would have felt with no one to look after you and get you your dose of posts. Now don’t be dramatic, you really weren’t in danger of imminent death.
Come on you know how it is in May and June.. what with the holidays, the reunions, the shopping, school reopening and the kids’ birthday I really did have my plate full. Those are NOT plain excuses. Give me a break. No, I wasn’t just shopping and chatting all the while. Even if I were, I’m in my city with my family just this one month each year. Yes of course you are family too but I really have been busy. Come on you know you’re important to me. Now stop sulking. Really, The Husband bears my absence so much better than you. What? He couldn’t have been celebrating. That’s a mean thing to say.
Will you stop smirking !!
Yes… well I’m sorry too. And I promise to you more posts… plenty of them. Thanks for being there. Muah!

Love
OM

10/12/201015/04/2017

Reclaiming life

This post won the ‘Life Changing Device’ contest on Blogadda. Got a Philips MP 3 Player for this one. Yay! The contest was judged by Kunal Sheth. You can read the other award winning entries here.

Since I started working I’ve changed cities pretty regularly. Each time I’ve looked forward to the move with great excitement. Setting up a brand new house while we stayed at the hotel was always fun. I would take a short break then start job hunting – new job, new friends, new beginnings.

However this time when the husband announced our time at Mumbai was up I had a sinking feeling. Setting up the house would be a nightmare with two four-year-olds getting underfoot. There was to be no job since I’d turned a stay-at-home-mom. We’d been in Mumbai since the kids were born and now I was to going to lose my entire support system – my friends who’d seen me through the toughest times and my trustee maid. I was leaving behind my whole world.

Just as I’d feared, the move was traumatic. The first month went by in a whirl of carpenters and plumbers. I struggled with a house that refused to run smoothly, maids who didn’t cooperate and kids who were … well.. busy being kids. And, I had no friends. The city was not new to me.. yet all my old friends were working. My mommy world didn’t connect with their media world.

Writing used to be my way to unwind and I’d started blogging right after the twins were born. The blog was for me.. just me. However, in this new house our study was at one end of the house and I couldn’t leave the kids and disappear for some ‘me’ time. The one pleasure of my life became inaccessible. It couldn’t get worse, I thought.

Alone, depressed and overworked I was nearing break point.

Some time back we had subscribed to a holiday package (which BTW we’ve never used thanks to the workaholic husband). Along with that package we got a complimentary laptop. My husband suggested I make use of it. I’m really not a technology freak. I figure out just about enough to keep myself going. The comp was an old friend but a laptop…? Desperation drew me to that dust-ridden carton in the loft. The laptop was out. I struggled to work without a mouse and surprisingly within days I was comfortable. Soon I found myself reveling in the freedom of the laptop and a wifi connection. They accompanied me to the kids’ room, the balcony, the dining table, the living room… wherever the kids chose to play. I was writing…. furiously.

Picture courtesy Google Images

That was the first step. Then I began to connect with other mothers. I found Parul who had a book to her credit despite a four-year-old and a baby (now she has two, books, I mean), Mad Momma and Rohini, also moms with two kids each who held full time jobs and surprise surprise there was momofrs who had twins just like me. They were in their terrible twos and she was a working mom. There was Y who has a young daughter followed by twins.. gasp. Could it get any tougher?

They all generously opened the doors of their hearts and their homes to me through their blogs. It felt like family. I could talk about my son’s tantrums and my daughter’s homework issues without fear of being judged. Oh I know they weren’t reading my blog but I was reading their’s and when I wrote I felt I was talking to them all… like I had ‘friends’ out there. They had the same issues, unruly kids and absconding maids included. And they talked about much more.. book reviews, films, family functions, issues, impressions. They were out there doing it all. Maybe I could too.

And then I discovered blog directories. For the first time I entered a contest and found myself attempting to write something NOT to do with my kids in a long time – a first since I quit my job. That was the icing on the cake. Then I actually won the contest .. talk about the cherry on the icing.

Coincidentally around the same time a few of my articles/stories were selected for various publications and I was actually paid for them.. hah. I was on a roll.. damn I AM on a roll. I have more virtual friends than real ones. I’m not sure that’s healthy but at least they’ve kept me sane.

My laptop and the wifi, that’s where it all started, that’s how I reclaimed my life.

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01/10/201015/04/2017

Notes from a journalist turned blogger

Writers who are journalists turned bloggers have to take on some special issues… if you’re one you’ll know what I’m talking about. And if you’ve been on the desk for a while the situation is even weirder. The thing is while at the desk you carefully cultivate a writing etiquette and slowly it becomes a reflex deeply rooted in your brain.. while blogging it’s just a pain in all the wrong places.

Compulsive obsessive word count disorder

Yes this is the first one.. the urge to check word count every few words.(92) I still have the itch to do it (100)…. and I have to continuously remind myself.. this is not a newspaper.. this is MY blog and I can fill it up with thousands of words of whatever I like.

Cap it

THEN there’s the thing about ‘first word in all caps’. Don’t ask how many times I’ve had to go back to a post and remove that ‘all capitals’ from the first word. Oh and there are so many other style elements… go away all of you… I’m a free woman …I’m a blogger for godsake!

Break it up

That’s what the editor told us.. if your piece is too long break it up.. and so the fixation with subheads. I simply can’t get away from the image of a reader frowning in distaste at a long page of unbroken prose. Being an avid reader of novels I lurve unending pages of prose.. but then reading and writing seem to be locked in two different zones of my brain.

PICTURE CREDIT: PIXABAY

Picture this

No article, features article specially, is ever complete without a picture. Don’t ask how many long hours I’ve spent surfing in-house photo libraries, Google images and a host of other sites looking for the perfect picture. For the blog of course it doesn’t matter. Yet if I don’t have one in my camera, I still fall back on Google images. Without a picture the piece seems so… incomplete. (BTW if you Google ‘journalist’ you just get images of the electronic-media.. had to search under ‘writer’ to get this one.)

And last of all.. the dreaded Media Net

If you’ve worked for a paper, specially the leader of them all, you know immediately what this is.. the bane of our existence at the desk. God forbid you mention a brand.. any brand in your write up.. or you let it slip past your editing .. you get a congratulatory call all the way from Delhi. “Why did you ‘promote’ that brand?” You write about a restaurant you can’t mention the name.. you can write about a disc.. but no name… you write about shops, resorts, watches and jewellery but.. no mentioning names without permission. Oh it takes plenty of practice and hours and hours of dressing downs (putting it mildly) to get it right. And finally when I did get it right, I quit.

On my blog.. Gawd I so love the freedom of it all.. not only can you name the brands you can even provide links to them.. Yay. Yet each time I do it… I get a guilty twinge.. a pang of conscience, part of which is still behind my work desk at FC Road.