The trouble with bloggers in India is that they take push-button publishing seriously. The internet is still something unnatural and alien, rather than familiar and personalised territory. A blog is not used simply as a web log, the very defining purpose of a blog, but instead used as a platform to showcase talent.
That is, people post articles and poems rather than thoughts and ideas. Blogging is your space on the web where you can basically do anything that you want to do. There are no restrictions in terms of what you can or are even expected to write. People do not use this freedom, and instead strive to be clever in each and every one of their posts, something to keep a reader glued to the blog, something innovative, and even strange.
I am not saying that people who want to do this shouldn't do it, but it does come across as slightly stupid if you treat blogs as merely, and I use the word merely, a platform to show off your talent. Almost all Indian bloggers have meaningful, intelligent, wannabe devilishly funny, and therefore hideously boring and extremely tiresome blogs. All of them have to mean something.
Bloggers from abroad, however, blog almost everything. Evens stupid things like "A spot on the wall interested me. Then I got bored and diverted my attention elsewhere."
Absolutely delightful to read such blogs. A no holds barred window into someone's life. Replete in embarrassing detail, unwarranted angst, and repulsive fantasies. More personal and candid than Indian blogs can ever be. Candid is the word.
I follow a few blogs, and I wish I could blog like that
2 comments:
Nopes you've contradicted yourself! A blog is a personal expression, and perhaps one's personal expression need not be one's mundane day to day rituals. I live my goddamned mundane life, I don't wanna write about it too, it's only when something out of the ordinary happens, then that's cool.
A lot of the non-Indian blogs I read blog only well thought out ideas, so it's not a purely Indian phenomenon.
My point is that push-button-publishing is looked on as something big. People do not relax around their blogs, and think that publishing it on the web is a big thing. This is mostly because the internet is unfamiliar territory for many people here.
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