How can your blog turn 14 when Instagram is only 11?

With our three babies

Our first baby, Finely Chopped, turned 14 today and I thought I will write about this while our next two babies, Baby Loaf and little Nimki, give me company.

It has been sixteen months into the pandemic and K is in the last few days of her work from home life and we are trying to make the most of the time that we got together.

Baby Loaf became a part of our house last February. A month before the first lockdown. Nimki was born in May in our building. A lockdown baby. He became a part of our brood a couple of months later. Since then we have celebrated Baby Loaf’s second birthday (based on an approximation, as we did not know him when he was a baby) and little Nimki’s first, and are still together at home.

No one knew that it would be the last she would see the premises of the office they had just moved into when K came back home from work that fateful afternoon in March 2020. The show went on, and how, for them as work from home life began. For the last 16 months I got to see first hand how hard she works. And felt very proud! She will go back soon and we will miss this.

I began to chronicle our days during this period on the blog. Just as I did when I started the blog on 7th October, 2007.

Nothing exciting about the food today so far barring the lovely anda bhurjee cooked by our new morning cook, Kalpana Tai. Banu has bunked again. We have booked tables at Izumi tonight and at Masque on Sat to celebrate.

I remember that evening 14 years back when K came back from work and told me about this ‘new thing called a ‘blog’. She suggested that I share my opinions on the restaurants that we visited on the blog, instead of telling her later about everything that had gone wrong. Hence, she named it ‘Finely Chopped.’ Finely Chopped slowly became a diary of my life with food as an anchor. It was no longer a review blog.

The word ‘review’ today is bandied loosely and usually stands for poorly disguised attempts at copy writing and not analytical writing in any case.

The definition of a blog has become rather fluid too. There are tonnes of ‘bloggers’ today compared to when I started when I knew of less than a handful. Dig deeper and you will see that most refer to their Instagram pages as blogs and of late, reels. Not to spaces hosted on blogging platforms such as blogspot or wordpress where bloggers could create website-like digital diaries for themselves.

I smiled when I saw an Instagram story of a fellow cat lover today which said ‘miss the days of old Instagram in this age of reels.’ To think that we bloggers once said this about Instagram! And now people are talking about missing Instagram!

Seeing the world pass by.

This sums up the story of social media in the past few years. It has changed at a breakneck speed with new sites and mediums coming up and new formats too. It is the age of video at present.

One can be like the proverbial ostrich that stuck its head in the sand or be willing to adapt to the changing times. I have tried do the latter to the extent possible. Trying to tell stories in different mediums and hoping that people would listen to them. I continued to blog because I love doing so.

There is a lot that I have my blog to be thankful for. Of realising my childhood dream of writing a book. Of writing a column (2 in national newspapers, 1 in a national magazine, 3 on online sites). Of making the transition out from a corporate career to following my heart. All the wonderful people I have met. Readers, restaurant owners, chefs, writers, hoteliers. Many of whom were once confined to pages of print or to TV screens in my life. The awards the blog has won and the recognition it has received. Most precious of all, the reader comments and DMs that I receive. And even more precious is the sense of peace, fulfilment and joy that it gives and some of the lovely friendships that have come out of it.

 

I often wryly say that I have no team. Or put out pictures of our cats and write #TeamFinelyChopped.

The truth is that none of what I just wrote about would have been possible without my wife Kainaz, AKA K. It is her support and more than that, belief in me, that is truly the wind beneath my sails. I realised today that I should stop saying that I do not have a team. I have the best team in the world!

Team Finely Chopped

How will things be 14 years later? Hard to predict!

I could not have predicted back in 2007 that I would be sitting at home on a weekday as I am today. Having completed a consulting project a couple of days back. With no office to go to. No boss to answer.

Typing this on my own laptop and not an office desktop. That too a Mac.

With two cats flopped beside me (I was never fond of cats earlier though we had visions of a pet dog sitting by me one day while I wrote).

I would never have thought that I would question the relevance of blogging instead of thinking whether it will ever grow beyond being just a trend.

Enjoy each day as it comes, they say. Build the foundation of the future with each passing day.

I would like to think that I am doing so. Just as I had in the past. Without always knowing it.

Thank you for reading.

Cannot end before saying my customary thanks to my friend Kashi, who remembered the occasion this morning, as he always does, and wished Finely Chopped a happy 14th. It’s thanks to him that I became aware of this event in the first place! This time I did not forget thanks to Facebook reminders.

 

Thanks Kashi