Post poll stock-taking

Well, I am writing with mixed feelings. 140-odd people apparently read my blog regularly and like it; as many as 85 have even done me the courtesy of calling the blog ‘educational’: that is most gratifying as far as it goes.

At the same time, I wonder a) why the number of members is so low still, given that so many people know me and so many people visit – what makes people so shy of publicly acknowledging that they visit a certain blog? It’s neither a crime nor a socially dangerous activity! b) why so many of the current members (there are more than 200 right now) didn’t vote at all, though I gave them almost forty days, c) why there are as a rule so few comments (I am comparing with some blog writers I know – not even celebrities either – whose every post attracts scores, even hundreds of comments), d) why certain posts that I write with great earnestness, whether it be a story or the essay I wrote just before this one, draw almost no comments at all, despite being visited hundreds of times, e) why I cannot attract more visitors to my other blog, and lastly, f) why some people visited my daughter’s blog eagerly when I announced its birth, but have since decided not to visit it again, or even if they do, never to comment on it. It would have been such good encouragement to a girl who is doing something better than what most girls of her age and social class do, which is nothing much beyond wasting their time and their parents’ money…

When there is no material expectation involved, one writes purely for the pleasure of sharing one’s most sincere and evocative thoughts with some friendly people. I write because I cannot help it: I have been writing all sorts of stuff ever since I was a little boy. But I wrote for a reading public only for a relatively short while, when I was into journalism. Since quitting that, writing has always been a private hobby, to be shared, if at all, only with a few interested pupils, family and friends. I got back into the public domain with blogging only because some old boys had urged me to make a beginning, saying that it would be a very nice way to communicate with a lot of people scattered around the world who want to keep in touch but cannot think of any other way – physical visits are rare or impossible, while conversations over the phone, necessarily brief and often abrupt and unexpected, are quite unsatisfactory. I did think it was a good idea (look up my second post) and took the plunge. I never do things half-heartedly, so – as should be evident – I have been at it assiduously all these years, writing not too much, but not too little either. And now I am beginning to wonder. Especially when I think of the paucity of comments, and when ex-students call or chat online and I get to know from them that they haven’t visited my blogs for ages. Is it time to give this up as a bad job, from which nothing much more can be expected? 

Give me a little encouragement, people, to show that my initial hopes were not wholly unfounded. If, that is, you really want this blog to stay alive. Otherwise, it will probably go the way of my orkut community, which is to say oblivion.