About me – in 2024

Over the course of my blogging journey in the last two decades (yes, I began blogging in 2004, when hardly anybody knew what blogs were and before blogging became the most powerful tool of independent social media that it known for today) I have had the pleasure of associating myself with some wonderful bloggers and lovely friends, foremost among them being Sakshi (sakshinanda.com), Sid (iwrotethose.com) and Rekha (rekhadhyani.com), my ‘Core Team’ friends as I refer to them as.

Back in 2014, exactly a decade ago, when WordPress announced that they would publish an annual calendar of prompts for the year, a crazy idea popped into my head about this collaborative project where the team would attempt to post for all of the prompts in the year. Thus was born Project 365, and the first three bloggers I approached would then go on to become more than just fellow bloggers and Core Team members, they would go on to become dear friends over the course of the first few months of working together.

The best part about us was the fact that while we were all fiercely independent in our approach to blogging and writing in general, we were also open to each other’s ideas and opinions as well when it came to how to run the Project in general. We backed each other up without any ego hassles and covered each other’s backs as and when the occasion demanded it. Between the four of us, we handled the Project so well that we ended up enjoying the entire experience which then led on to bigger and better things for all of us.

2014 was year in which all four of us were in transitory phases; Sid was midway through his first manuscript, Rekha quit her 15 yr job in October, Sakshi was just about branching out in her book beta-reading and book-editing endeavors and I was just about starting off with serious book reviewing. This shared interest in literature and the written word ensured that we stayed friends even after the Project officially ended in Dec 2014. While Sid and Reks went on to complete their first book in 2015 and kept on writing more and more, Sakshi ended up developing quite a formidable beta-reading and book-editing venture from her home itself. And me, I ended up devouring more books than ever before and today average around 2-3 books a week in terms of reading them and publishing unbiased reviews on the blog.

Milestones came and went, but we stayed friends. Our children grew up, started reading books of their own, went to school, college and are contemplating post graduations today, but it gives all of us great pleasure and happiness to see that we have all passed on our love for the written word to the next generation as well.

This blog has been a constant companion of my thoughts, both book related and otherwise, over the last two decades and will continue to be so until I find it in me to put finger to keyboard and keep typing. Even when the fingers stop co-operating, I always have my faithful voice-to-document converter which will ensure that the blog stays alive as long as I have coherent thoughts in my head which I can convert to spoken words.

Here’s to a few more decades of this enduring love for words, and friends who love words.

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This post has been written for Project 365 : A post a day where the idea is to publish at least one post based on the prompts provided. Today’s prompt was to write an ‘About Me’ page for my blog 10 years from now.

Celebrations

Dei machas, how about catching up tonight for a quick round of drinks followed by some dinner at my place? Both drinks and dinner are on me…The big day has finally arrived. I am free.

I hit on the Send button on the Whatsapp group with a couple of my best friends and my cousin as its members.

I was quite sure that they would be shell-shocked at the sudden invite, that too on a weekday, given my propensity to plan all such drinking sessions well in advance and the tendency to schedule it only on weekends when all of us would have a chance to indulge in a drinking binge, if required, and wear off the hangover the next day when none of us would have to go to office.

But today was different, and tonight’s celebrations were for a special reason. After a good two decades of slogging my posterior off in a job which provided me with no sense of achievement (except probably for adding a moderate sum of money to my savings account at the end of the month), I had finally managed to achieve a substantial break-through in my life. I had finally finished off all the substantial financial commitments of my life and today was the day when the last of them had been fulfilled. I had finally paid off my daughter’s tuition fees for the last semester of her Post-Doctoral studies. I was now a ‘free man’, at least when it came to having to earn money to live.

Over the last five odd years, my living expenses had catapulted to all-time highs with my daughter’s medical course fees and her marriage expenditure on top of my regular household expenditure. It was in these years that I thanked my wife for having instilled a high degree of financial discipline in me and having run a tight ship financially since the time we got married. All these years, we curtailed all unnecessary expenditure and had strategically invested our savings in a manner where the outflows more or less matched all the significant financial milestones in our and our daughter’s lives. And today, finally, a lifetime of this discipline had reaped rich dividends, both literally and figuratively.

After having paid the last instalment of tuition fees for my daughter’s medical education, my wife and me were left with enough savings which yielded a more than sufficient stream of monthly income for us. We had finally reached a stage where I didn’t necessarily have to work for a living, per se, at least financially. I finally had time to pursue my own passions without having to worry about whether I had enough money to sustain my family for the rest of my and their lives.

This called for a celebration. And what better way to celebrate than by having two of my best friends and a cousin over to dinner and drinks? After all, they had stood by me through all these years and understood what it is that my wife and me were trying to do all these years.

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This post is entirely hypothetical in nature, although it contains more than just a small amount of ‘wishful thinking’ on my part. This post was written for Project 365 : A post a day where the intention is to publish at least one post a day based on the prompts provided. Today’s prompt was to write about how I would celebrate some wonderful, improbable, hoped-for-good news.