Wanna Be Somebody?

The complete unedited version of the article appeared in the Times of India dated 10th September 2008 for my blog readers below:

Many years ago, when asked by a friend’s acquaintance how he could get in touch with me, one presented one’s visiting card bearing office and residential addresses and phone numbers. He had a quick look at the card and, studying the coordinates detailed in my card, responded that it was of no good if it didn't bear my e-mail address!

My friend promptly informed me that times were when anybody who was 'somebody' would have an e-mail address. Not wanting to be 'nobody' for long, it was important to me to rush to the closest computer and plug in to the internet and get myself an e-mail address. Having become 'somebody' with a new personal identity, one sported it on one's visiting cards and even began to ask others if they had one.

It was my turn to ask others, "No e-mail address?" This tag of 'somebody' did not last long though. Soon enough, some chap frowned when he learnt that one did not have an instant messenger in place. "You've just got to download it for free", he informed me. In those days of bandwidth scarcity, it would be hours before the download would give me back my status of being somebody. Another friend would then taste the air of my superiority for not having one for himself.

I learnt soon enough though that 'somebody' had a short shelf life and moved quickly from one possession to another. My instant messenger did not have voice capability, background patterns, couldn’t exchange pictures until upgrades were installed and one could go back to becoming 'somebody' all over again. Soon the instant messenger had to follow me on my cellphone.

Recently, with my increased interest in blogging, it was time to go down that same path again.
“I blog, therefore I am” proclaimed bloggers at a city meet.
“Plain vanilla blog!”, said a fellow blogger.
“No counter? Live traffic indicator?” asked another.

Further questions from fellow bloggers (usually the younger ones)
“No subscription features like RSS?
( For the uninitiated, RSS is not the feed that the BJP subscribes to – it is the feed that readers subscribe to from Bloggers and website when updates are posted)

"No Feedburner?" Why would one want to burn your feed? one may wonder.
This is only a subscription to one's blogposts!
“No Blogrolls?”
“Not yet a member of communities like Digg, Del-icio-us, Technorati?”

Whew!!! So many things to drive traffic! Not for me - I cannot drive anything - I can only drive people mad!

If you ever tread this path, you would come across various terms like Labels (which incidentally are words describing the subject of your post so that they pop up on searching for specific subjects), Live Traffic indicators, Tagging and so on and so forth. Just as one would not know what a poke or a superpoke is until one opens an account in Facebook, Bloggers will learn this only as they go along on their blogging journey!

For a layperson, a separate Dictionary of Blogger’s terms is a need of the hour, I would imagine. It would be helpful if someone puts up the ABCs of Blogging on the internet. If I am entrusted with the task it would go as below :-
‘A’ for ‘Artickles’
‘B’ for ‘Blogs’
‘C’ for ‘Comments’….. and so on.

Nobody wants to remain Nobody - Everybody wants to be Somebody!
That is human nature! My pursuit to be ‘somebody’ in the blogging community continues. Alternating between being nobody and somebody, one wonders if it would be better to remain nobody? Or would my pursuit be much like the journey of the small boy, Santigo, in “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho, when all that mattered was the journey and not the destination?

After all my efforts to keep up with the Blogging Joneses, yielded no results - Neither significant Traffic by way of Blog-Hits nor Adsense revenue to justify my indulgence! I finally slumped into my chair - “Give me a life!” I sighed.

“How about ‘Second Life’?”, my daughter piped in opening up a whole new journey!

Some time later... maybe, I thought to my self.

The following lines came to my mind:-“We must not cease from exploring and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time”
– T.S.Eliot’s poem, ‘Little Gidding’ (the fourth of his ‘Four Quartets’)

I am thankful to Krishnan, a fellow blogger to share the below Lewis Carroll's quote in the Comments section:

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" I have blogrolled Krishnan alongside!