I started this blog quite a few years back and blogging back then was about writing what you feel. That’s it. There were no expectations of you-scratch-my-back-and-I-will-scratch-yours. There was reciprocity, of course. But it never got in the way of us writing realistic posts and reading other posts and responding honestly. This world has evolved so much with the years and I am all for a positive change. But the culture that I see in this space now doesn’t look like my cup of cold coffee. Yeah, maybe it is not just the world of blogging changed, maybe I changed too. Maybe my perceptions changed too.
However, what bothers me more is the very same people who wrote brilliant posts are churning out the commercial rubbish, campaigning for brands that they had to google out to find what they stood for. I confess that I tried a couple of such posts and that is the worst thing I have ever done with respect to writing and I will never do it again. Not for a million dollars. If I want to make money out of writing, I’d publish a book or open a fully dedicated and commercial blog. I wouldn’t do this laying in commercial posts amidst personal stuff, thereby luring in your trusting readers to read the campaigns. And the height of all this is we don’t see that this is all just marketing strategy and the typical greed of making that extra few bucks is working out very well for the brand companies.
Also, have you noticed the topics that they choose for you to write? It is all hot topics which would make people go gaga over them. Like feminism. How many unrelated brands have beaten this same snake to death and we keep biting the bait. Or maybe we don’t care about it as long as we get traffic to our blog. Also, there are people who keep writing about how happy they are with their life, home, marraige, kids etc. every single month. I mean, why would you need to give a status update about your life on the internet. And to my dismay I found out that they are doing this charade to get back at their “enemies” and show themselves up in front of everyone. Sharing something about yourself is okay, but this? Get a life, please. That is one of the reasons why I stopped following and participating in the Action Replay theme where you talk about how your month was.
Anyway, where am I going with all this? Due to many factors, including me changing, I don’t recognize the friendship that I once formed anymore. I am still game for reading blogs that are worth it. I may or may not read, I may or may not comment, but you wouldn’t bother about it if you are writing for the right reason. Words, when put right, never fade away.
I have thought a lot about this even before but never got around to doing it because of the love I have for writing. But now I realize, I have been doing a great injustice in chugging on just to fit in, just to keep going as I used to. So I took a break for a few months from blogging, cleared my head, drew inspiration from like-minded bloggers and took a snap decision. I unpublished my blog page of Facebook and disabled comments on the site. That way, the only thing that will motivate me to write here as and when I want to, is the urge to write about something.
Until later 🙂
P.S: Thanks to Adit for getting me back on my feet and my inspiration. I know I am not quite there yet, but I will get there eventually.
