After a long day’s work, he comes back home. Lights the fire and hangs his coat behind the door. Pours in a glass of scotch, lights a cigarette and picks up the pen and paper to pour down everything that had occurred to him during the day. He was good at making mental notes, and having a sharp memory helped him pour it down on the paper under the flickering orange light of the fire.
This is an image long lost, long extinct. Good old writing is dead. Well, it had to. Modern technology brought in typewriters, then computers, laptops and now smart phones. Books became Ebooks and kindle smirked at the library around the corner.
I still did not complain. I too am writing this on a laptop. I too read my newspaper on a smart phone and I too have lost my library membership card in a pile of prehistoric books.
But, what I complain of, is the commercialization of blogging. An art that came as a pleasant gift to the reading world. A world where non authors painted their imagination on a canvas called the internet. Where the non reader read a small article and debated about it with his friends. A world which made reading and writing cool again. Food blogs for the gastronomes, travel blogs for the people living out of backpacks, verse blog for the people with a taste for scotch( and rhyming) and technology blogs for the geeks.
But all of them, were nicely structured, lovely to read articles. Formed of sentences, with interjections and punctuations. Paragraphs changed to shift the mood of the reader, and exclamations put to make them jump off their streets.
Do you have a sense of nostalgia right now? If yes, you too can join the ‘Save Good Ol’ Blogging’ group.
A kid born today would never see what the age of blogging looked like. Books would still be kept as showpieces in the living room, but these words written would be lost in this enormous internet cloud. What they are seeing in the name of blogging is: “10 best blah, and 20 photos for blah blah, and a million other blahs popping up”
Yes, photos are nice for the eye, and a .gif’s are funny. But the way words describe an emotion is unparalleled.
For example I have put below, a photo of the sunset from one of trips to Rann of Kutch. Thought the picture is nice, how I would put them to words is:
“It is a couple of minutes to 5 pm and the sun has started its homeward journey. Turning orange of its tiredness it yawns across to see the white salt of the desert shimmering as if it was saying goodbye. To every meter the sun went down the horizon, the desert changed its colour from orange to red,red to brown, before finally turning a pale black because of sadness. It now waits for its other friend, the moon to turn up. It knows how moody the moon is. It would only show its complete face once a month, and it was this day today. The Rann always thought why can’t I have both my present with me at the same time?”
Writing this gave me the nostalgia I was looking for, and I am very sure you will garner more out of the imagery of the text, that you did out of that photo.
Long things short, I wrote this article only to bring out the reader back in people. Don’t let your wordpress or blogspot profiles lose to instagrams and picasa’s. Even a million pixel camera will never capture what a nice little paragraph would. Words have always kept the essence of memories and stories alive, don’t let them die.
Till next time, keep blogging, keep reading.
Scribble Magic 