I vividly remember that afternoon in 2008, when I was still getting acquainted with the internet jargon and a classmate mentioned something called a blog. He elaborated it to me as a diary on the internet that I could choose to share with others. I had just recently gotten a personal computer and the internet was an unexplored universe; blog sounded exciting.

As I was already jotting down random scribblings in an actual diary and was thinking, what I was writing was smart, it would be cool to show it to someone. Blogs were the perfect haven to shelter my silly aspirations. I decided to start blogging and thus came about my first post on 24th September, 2008.

Another reason that I chose to write was to improve my spoken English. My spoken English was crude and I had a limited vocabulary. I started reading voraciously (first non-text book I read was sometime in 2006), and started picking up new words on a daily basis. The only way I could retain them, I knew, was to use them. To use a word like highfalutin or portmanteau in a normal conversation seemed outrageous. For a while, I did try spicing up my conversations with sophisticated words that might not have warranted a use in those scenarios; I ended up with a reputation of someone who uses flamboyant words, more than an average speaker.

But with my blog, enabled by my rants, I could experiment with my evolving language skills while prodding the worlds, both inside and outside. Early blog posts of mine are embarrassing but I still like to keep them online to just see how far I have come.

Naturally, once I started writing and actively advertised among my friends and started getting feedback on the posts, I liked the attention and stuck to writing them regularly. I started with quantity over quality but soon the process of writing got intimate to a core inside me. I started seeing writing as a vent — a medium of expression — and began to take it a bit more seriously.

By 2010, I was undergoing a transformation of sorts hanging out with my rebellious new group that was advocating, in essence, equality. These daily experiences gave me a lot to chew on and I ended up reflecting upon these experiences in my posts. It is quite stark, how this transformation happened and how well it is captured in my blog. As an example, if one were to track my ideas about religion it can be noticed how I started as a spiritual Hindu, then became an agnostic, agitated into a militant atheist, mellowed down to be an atheist and recently, I portray myself as some sort of a humanist.

There are several such trajectories of my personality that are explicitly captured in my blog posts. And to see that I have these snapshots of myself for the past decade is quite remarkable — a time travel of sorts. And each time I read an older post it is painfully obvious as to how inadequate I was then; I am also immediately reminded of the fact that a future self would find the present self, at least as much, inadequate.

I must admit, that I am glad and proud of maintaining my blog for a decade now. It has helped more than once to advance my career, capture special moments of my life, been a solace when I needed and also woo the woman of my life!

My blog, it seems, has come to be a true companion who stays back holding on to and curating the pieces that I leave behind.