B2B -- Back to Blogging

Hi There,

It is a thrilling feeling to get back to the blog site that I had created way back in 2009 and had pretty much forgotten about  all these long years. A lot of water has flown through the Main river / The Ganga / The Cooum (depending on where you live, that is) and all of us are pretty much different persons from what we had been from those times ... this is a pet theme of mine, that we are all evolving and so, we are not the same person who we were yesterday or last year or last decade ... me sounding so wise, no.. !!

Well, to come to the crux of the matter, just yesterday I had penned a piece titled "To B or Not To B" and was wondering where to post it. Now I have a place where I can call  MY OWN - my own pretty neat little corner where I can rant and rave and write whatever I want and not be ashamed of "oh!! what will they think" ... after all that is exactly the freedom that all bloggers are after, which is why they blog in the first place.

So, here I go... let me "copy-paste" the piece I had penned yesterday, heralding my re-entry into the blogging world.

To B or Not To B

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is said to have famously asked himself “To Be or Not to Be…” and ever since those times (or perhaps even long before Hamlet uttered those words), this profound existential question has been reverberating from many different men and women in many different corners of the world during very many different circumstances, symbolizing the perpetual dilemma that humanity has been thrown into. So much so that one Professor of Engineering Drawing is said to have asked a student of his “2B or not 2B” pointing to the pencil that the student was holding.

The dilemma that I have been mired into may sound very much like the famed Hamlet question, but actually it is slightly different – the “B” here standing for blogging, so by successfully applying the law of substitution, this question should be correctly expanded into “to blog or not to blog”

That brings us straight away to the moot question that has been holding me back all these weeks, months and even years from putting pen to my thoughts (or to be precise, from putting key-strokes to my musings) thereby tormenting the hapless creatures of the cyber-space with one more site that they should decide “to read or not to read” … so I am making life more complex and proving that the existential dilemma can have several more dimensions, not just of the “being” type but will at least include the “reading” type from now on.

Well, to cut a rather long preamble short, I have finally made up mind to write, at least from time to time, a short piece (or even a long piece) ranting away to glory on all topics under the sun, but most likely on topics concerning business, money, profits, organizations, management etc. and sometimes even regarding technology – appropriate and inappropriate, sustainable and unsustainable and so on and so forth

Writing is a very critical skill and has been part of the 3R that we have all been “educated” with – together with Reading and aRithmetic. However, simple while it may sound, WRITING is indeed rocket science and is not easy meat as one may tend to think. Although one may have written any number of long essays during the school days or any number of Lab reports during the Engineering days or any number of Case Analysis reports during the MBA days, writing still requires a certain nuanced skill that not everyone can claim to have mastered. Some scholars hold that it is a skill that you are either born with or not born with – meaning you cannot “acquire it” – but that can be debated.

One of the challenges that I faced when was toying with the “To B or Not To B” question was – “where do I begin” and thereafter “what do I focus on”? Not to blame me, when someone has put a finger into practically every conceivable area of business and technology over a period of three decades and then condescends to share the acquired wisdom with the wider world, one can easily get into the illusion that one can write on at least 100 different topics and still have some left in the shelf.

But then what one writes about should also be interesting to the reader, since blogging is not just about “writing” as it is about “reading” or “acquiring a readership following”, so of what use is a blog which no one other than the writer would read…? So, while I may claim expertise over 100 different topics, will the potential reader give me a thumbs up?  Or will I have egg on my face? So the risk perception applies a filter to the potential topics for the blog.

Hovering to the same topic of making a topic interesting, if someone writes on a topic that is widely well known, it may evoke a “so what.. I have already seen this elsewhere” type of response and on the other hand, if the topic is too esoteric, then it could again evoke a “who cares…never heard about it” type of response. So, blogging would end up being a tight-rope walk where one should write on topics that are already written about but presenting a new perspective, giving a new spin. So, here I thought I may have an advantage, having been a spin bowler during my cricketing days, I could still put my “spinning skills” to good use.

Not that I am totally new to blogging either. I had tried my hand at some or the other form of blogging since 2005 but all of them lost steam after a few initial posts. Perhaps, the topics that I had chosen during those attempts were not appropriate to sustain a long-haul momentum. Perhaps, I had not yet matured as a blogger. Perhaps there could have been a hundred other reasons.

Nevertheless, experience is a great teacher and every failure is a stepping stone to a higher success, as they say. So, here I am, after surviving a few failures in blogging, dusting myself off and standing up in the arena once again.   

So, here I am, having made up my mind to burden my fellow human beings with one more billboard to visit and one more place where they can post their “likes” (or “dislikes”??) and “comments”. Being the optimist that I am, I hope my readers will take kindly to me. Let me hope it will be another case of veni-vidi-vici or more appropriately veni-scripsi-vici (scripsi being the Latin for WROTE)

So, here is my Statutory Warning to the inmates of Blogosphere – Watch out, here I come…Beware!!