My posts are generally chains of thought leading to each other without much of post hoc rationalization. In fact, on many topics blogging has helped me develop thought processes and reach my own conclusions as I wrote about them. Thanks to my friends who encouraged me to blog, I've had this beautiful journey of 10 years, albeit with many large gaps in between. I sometimes look back and wish I had written more. More often, I look at now and wish I wrote more. But then, thoughts and ideas evolve at their own natural pace, and until they are mature enough, they don't do anyone any good.
Yet, this blog is not meant for expressing my damn opinion about every damn thing. After all, the world doesn't really give a damn. Thoughts expressed in this blog should be of some value to the readers. Although it may not always achieve that intended effect, but I try my best. In this age of posts which have character limits, blogs with predominantly textual content are a load difficult to bear for net-surfers. To be honest, even I don't generally read articles as lengthy as the ones I myself write, unless I find them very very very interesting after reading the first few lines! But I strongly feel real value can't be delivered under character length limits like 140 characters. Such limits can work only for breaking news which say something unsettling without revealing much detail and keep the reader shaken for some time. Or for celebrities whose each word matters, no matter what they say.
I sometimes wonder about the future of this blog and its content. This blog has changed locations thrice in its career. It was first hosted on o3.indiatimes.com in 2006. But indiatimes gave up on that site, I don't know why, and as it was getting increasingly difficult to post stuff on it, some time in summer of 2007, I moved the whole content - post by post - to livejournal.com. I literally copied each article and pasted into livejournal editor, and also set the date of the article to its original posting date - livejournal allowed setting dates for posts. That's why you see some of my oldest posts on blogger - the current host of my blog, still dated as per their original dates. The movement to blogger from livejournal was done using a tool that did some XML based import from livejournal and export of the XML to blogger. And the great thing about that tool was that it was capable of copying everything - content, title, date, comments - and create a copy on blogger. I had to move to blogger around 2011 coz the Russian guys who ran livejournal decided to shut it down and sent me a date by when I had to move... So I had to move. And I mapped this blog to sochvichaar.com domain name, which I bought for the first time in December 2012 after having an eye on its availability for a long time and finally convincing myself that I wasn't wasting any money buying it. My blog was always called SochVichaar, whatever be the parent hosting location. And having a URL itself called sochvichaar.com for my blog feels awesome, and gives a unique and exclusive identity to my blog.
I could never make any money from this blog... People don't click the damn ads, although I do have a good number of visitors now. So, ladies and gentlemen, please click these ads hanging around and make me some money. I am at $15 right now, earned over 5 years... And need to reach $100 mark to get paid by Google (should I call it ALPHABET now?)!
Here's a video - it's my interview taken by Pankaj Mishra when we were at IIML. He did it for an assignment for some course. But like anything else he does, he conducted this interview with a lot of seriousness, which I didn't expect when we started. Although it doesn't show up much, I also got a bit nervous as the conversation was getting recorded with the camera only on me. I think it was Sankalp Mittal who was holding the camera, and he did a good job. It's interesting to hear my views 6 years back. We don't change much, do we?
