A Farewell to Blogging?

Logging this morning on the blog

It’s 9.27 am.

My boys are sleeping on the bed in my study/ the guest room/ their room. We have a two-bedroom apartment, a luxury in Mumbai. This is why the second bedroom has multiple roles.

My boys are surprised to see me at my desk. My boys are creatures of comfort, as cats tend to be. As their dad is, too. ‘Our boys’ are two male cats. We see them as our children, just as other cat parents do.

How come Daddy did not go back to sleep? Little Nimki.

They were not the only ones I surprised this morning. Our car cleaner was also surprised when he saw me stroll up and down the lane in front of our house. He has not seen me since we employed him. He comes around 9 a.m. to take the keys from us. I wake up at 11!

He smiled and waved at me. I smiled back. It was 8.15 am then. He came up with me and took the car keys. I asked him his name after I gave him his keys. He told it, a look of surprise on his face. He is used to being one of the faceless masses who work to keep the wheels of folks like us going.

I stayed up until 4 a.m. reading Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafek. Her worldview subliminally influenced the last line of the previous paragraph. The title of this post is influenced by the fact that I am in a Hemingway phase right now.

I had decided to go home and write. I will explain why at the end of this post.

I love the rain unless I am stuck in them.

Last afternoon. Baby Loaf likes to sit beside me while I read after lunch, an espresso by my side.

The doorbell just rang. It’s 10 a.m. I have been writing. I picked up the multi-grain bread that the Deliver Apps person brought from the super posh bakery, a 5-minute walk from our place. The price of this added up to the monthly shopping budget my mum spent on expenses in the late 1980s.

The plan was to stop and make toast and eggs for breakfast and then sip on an espresso and write. But I don’t want to break the flow of words. ‘You should not start a sentence with ‘but.’ they told us in school. We were also taught the value of sin theta plus sec c (read the latter with the imaginary sound of teetering teenagers in the background, sec c, sexy). I worked as a sub-ed for a newly launched English newspaper in Calcutta. We were told not to use ‘also’. The newspaper does not exist. Nor does Calcutta (it’s Kolkata now, Koal-kata). I think I can dump some of the rules in the waste bin. They are archaic now.

Just as ‘blogging’ is. The way it was meant to be. The ‘log’ in blogging alluded to the fact that a blog was meant to be a diary of one’s life. A public diary. Written under a pen name. There were long-copy blogs. And photo blogs. They were meant to be spontaneous. Perfection was preferable, but not restraining.

Baby Loaf is a creature of habit. He takes after me.

Instagram is the darling of the moment. And reels. In countries where it is not banned, TikTok. When people speak of ‘blogs’ today, they mean these. And those behind them are professionals out to make a career selling things. Social media today is about selling and hustling, as is life.

We say that when we started 16 years ago, we blogged because we loved to write and loved the subject we wrote about. We were selling and hustling, to be honest. We were selling ourselves to our egos. I’m pandering to it if you want to avoid the word sell.

The purpose of this seemingly pointless post is to remind myself why I got into blogging. It was to write and share about what was happening in my life. I could do this with this gay abandon as I was one of the very few in my generation who knew what social media was. Everyone and their aunts, pun intended, are on it now. I am 50—an age at which one need not worry about being judged.

I love the rains as long as I am not stuck in them.

Which is why I will tell you why I woke up early. My therapist suggested in our session yesterday that I do not take the sleeping pill that I had been prescribed, as that seemed to be messing with me, and see how it went. I probably should not have mentioned ‘sleeping pills’ and ‘therapy’. This could lead to my being judged or cause concern to those who care for me. But I will because I feel that people should know that these are fine—just as consulting a doctor for dengue, god forbid, is. This is a cause that is important to me. To let people know that they are not alone in the world.

I did not take the pill as she had suggested. I read until 4 a.m., and I did not get up mid-sleep and binge eat as usual. Instead, I had a tiny bit of the sausage a friend of mine had got for me from a village in France and the chocolate he sent.

I fell asleep once I hit the bed. Our younger cat woke me up at 6 a.m., as he is wont to, to feed him. I woke up again at 7:45 a.m., feeding him and his brother. I did not go back to sleep as I am wont to. I woke up instead of going back to sleep, as my therapist had once suggested I do. I don’t always listen to her!

I went for a stroll downstairs; it was cloudy, and I love the rain. As long as I am not stuck in it and have to shout ‘I have the spirit of Mumbai.’

I came back. I chanted. I showered.

I blogged—the old-fashioned way.

I made breakfast after I finished writing. Our cook had come to work. Unlike earlier, when her presence would frazzle me, I have learnt how to blank her out and cook.