The Bloggers Guilt

By a blogger for a blogger

Diary Entry – 40

Life has been hard the last few months. I have several things to juggle - application for masters, Project work and other things which keeps my hands full. But what I do instead is login to bloggers and type away some crazy shit like this. When I am blogging a voice inside my head says the following:

“Yeah go ahead. BLOG. They should write a management book, about prioritizing, based on your life” *sarcasm*

So what happens is I feel terribly guilty about blogging and close my browser half way, with the hope of doing something useful and productive but end up watching an episode of some soap opera. Previously the voice in my head had only good things to say whenever I blog, but all that changed when I attended this job interview.

Interviewer: What are your hobbies?

Me: I write sir. (Nothing else actually counts. Watching television, texting your text buddies no no)

Interviewer: Oh what do you write?

Me: Sir I have written for my college magazine, I have been an editor blah blah

Interviewer: That is not really an example if you say writing is your hobby. Hobby is when you do something in your spare time.

Me: I also have a blog. (What else was I supposed to say?)

Interviewer: Oh you have a blog? How much time do you spend on this Facebook?

Since when did Facebook become a blog? And how will you answer that question? Sir I visit facebook once a month? He asked me a question that had no right answer. So I said:

Me: Sir. I don’t have a Facebook account.

When the results of the interview came out, I knew that was not the right answer. I have been thinking how blogging is productive and how it is different from facebook, ever since. That is how the guilt started.

But you shouldn’t take the word of an old man on technology. It is the problem with people who are in their sixties. They confuse shit. You will often find someone that age, tell you that blogging is a waste of time. They will have no idea what it is to begin with. The other day an uncle who lives in my colony told my mom that he wanted me to come to his house. He had something to teach me. My mother thought he was going to give me lessons on spirituality. She kept bugging me to go. This is what happened when I went there,

Me: Hello Uncle. How are you.

Uncle: Oh hey. I wanted to show you something I learnt in the computer. The computer is on, come on.

He is going to show me something on the computer that I don’t know already? May be he is a SEO or a web designing guru. Wow I never knew.

I went and sat near his computer.

Uncle: You know how much I love videos and music?

Me: Yeah?

Uncle: I found this awesome site which has so many videos and songs. It is fantastic.

Me: uh?

Uncle: It is called Youtube.

Me: :| (WOW)

Uncle: I will show you how it works.

Me: Uncle I know how it works.

That is when I realized uncle was deaf.  He could not hear a thing I said.

Uncle: These videos will cost me some 60 – 70Rs if I got them as CDs outside. Here I can get it for free.

Me: I see. :| (Shaking my head)

Uncle: You know you can download these videos also.

Me: Yeah I know.

Uncle: I will show you. Here is a thing which is called IDM.

For the next half an hour he explained how to search videos in YouTube, how to play them and then download them. We spent the next half an hour watching videos of old Hindi songs in HD. I should be given a medal for patience.

It will be fun to be an old man who tortures his grandchildren with long lectures about Youtube. But just hope you are deaf so that you cannot hear your own grandchildren cursing you.  

If we become old and tell our grandchildren that we had a great blog when were young, we can expect a reaction similar to the one I gave my colony uncle when he told me about Youtube. It really is no big deal to have a blog. What is so productive about it? Maybe it is unproductive to a lesser degree when compared to watching soap operas and facebooking. But it is still a waste of time none the less.

I still chose to write shit like this over doing something else, because it is fun. But the guilt that comes with blogging when you have other important things to do is equivalent to the guilt a married man gets when he is cheating on his wife – you are not supposed to be doing this because someone (or in this case something) is more important than this. So an hour ago I took this questionnaire about blogging, that a fellow blogger made me take. There was this question on how important the number of readers were for me. It used to be very important for me before when I started blogging. But with the kind of comments that some of you give to my blog post, I think why in the world you people exist. I write a blog post about something and one blogger will give me a comment saying “Nice”, as if my blog is a girl’s ass or a costly sports car. People like that usually don’t read anything  other than the title. They expect you to read their blogs in return for the great comment they left. If you have a blog with readers like that, you should feel even more guilty that you are writing stuff for such losers to comment on. 

But I guess life is all about doing what you love and what makes you happy and if blogging makes you happy like it does in my case then that is reason enough to feel good about blogging.

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