Humble Beginnings – An origin story

I know I have provided an origin story of my blog in the ‘About the blog’ section, but then for the sake of newer readers and others who have not checked out this section, let me indulge you with the origin of Mahabore’s Mumblings (or Jamster’s Jams as the blog was known in its earliest avatar).

My blogging journey began in June 2004, due to the constant prodding of a new batch-mate of mine at IIM Indore who would go on to become a good friend of mine as well. He was this techie who was always at the cutting edge of the latest gadgets and trends and back then was when Blogger, now known as Blogspot was still independent of Google and was just about making its mark.

Impressed with a few of my longish posts in pagalguy.com, an online forum for MBA aspirants, he poked and prodded me to start off a blog with the sole intention of disseminating information about life at IIM Indore for other MBA aspirants in the future, as well as to enhance the online reputation of the fledgling institute (at that time).

Apart from these reasons, another important reason for me to start the blog was to let my friends back home at Bangalore know what life at Indore was like and what the grind at a B School entailed. It is a different issue altogether that none of them even bothered to come online and read my blogs, due to various reasons, primary among them being that these were days when broadband was just about seeping into various corners of the country and was still prohibitively expensive in those days.

While the first two years of my blogging (Jun 2004 to Jun 2006) almost exclusively dealt with life at Indore, the occasional trips back home to Bangalore during the semester holidays, the frequency of my blogging took a lull when work caught up with me in 2006. I used to sporadically blog between 2006 and 2013, mostly posting reviews of movies I watched in those days with quite a few random posts thrown in between. These were days when I was either shifting residences in Hyderabad or going mad with crazy busy schedules at work and with household chores.

It was only in July 2013 when I shifted back to Bangalore and when my daughter turned two years old that I started blogging with renewed vigor. I joined a blogging group and the writing prompts provided by them as well as participating in the Ultimate Blogging Challenge in Oct 2013 ensured that I started churning out posts very regularly. Sometime in this period was when I had a renewed interest in Indian mythology and noticed that my initial few posts generated a reasonably amount of enthusiasm among readers. This encouraged me to read more and write more about Indian mythology and little known stories and incidents and slowly this kind of became a recurring theme on my blog.

Another genre which I started dabbling in quite seriously was to re-write storylines of movies which I had recently seen and enjoyed. And given that these were Malayalam movies and I don’t have too many readers on the blog who have actually watched these movies, they were also well received by readers and this encouraged me to try these as well once in a while.

Apart from mythology and re-writes of movie storylines, I also dabble with micro-fiction every once in a while and also publish book reviews of books that I read and enjoy. So today, the blog is a mish-mash of various genres with no particular focus area and to some extent has something for everybody. Does that bother me? Not one bit. And the primary reason for this situation not bothering me is the fact that it is only in the last six odd months that I have discovered new facets in my own writing style and narrative style. In original compositions and when rewriting popular narratives from Indian mythology and other sources, I have figured out that I have developed a distinct style of writing that seems to strike a chord with readers. What that style comprises of is something that I am still trying to wrap my hands around and in the process of figuring out. Until then, the readers of this blog will have to ‘suffer’ in silence while I keep experimenting with various genres of writing such as book reviews, movie retellings, mythological retellings and a few original pieces of micro-fiction thrown in.

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This post has been written for Project 365 : A post a day where the intention is to try and publish at least one post a day based on the prompts provided. Today’s prompt was to state the reasons why I started to blog, and elucidate as to whether that original reason still held good or whether my blog had gone in a different direction than originally planned.

It would be great to read about why you started your respective blogs and whether it has achieved the purpose for which it was started, or whether it has gone in a completely different direction than was originally intended to do so.