Blogging Again?

Welcome to my website and welcome to my blog. This is the first of what I hope would be a glorious collection of articles numbering in the thousands.

Friends and acquaintances to mannodiarun (and known aliases- redzeppelin7, themeekkaiser, the works) know that blogging is no alien concept to yours truly. I ran a blogger page for years that boasted close to 90 published posts by the end, most of them angsty ramblings of someone in his early 20s. A look back at some of these posts fills me simultaneously with embarrassment and pride; I no longer relate to much of what I wrote about, but I appreciate the way those words made their way out of my mind.

I regret not continuing the blog (it has been deserted since the spring of 2015- what a different world that was), not least because there has been an exponential rise in “things to write about”, which has sadly coincided with a nosedive in my enthusiasm to put words to blog. In the time that elapsed since I last wrote something that wasn’t a 280-character tweet, an instagram post, or a scientific article (which counts as work and thus, not real writing?), things have happened that certainly deserved to be opined on by anyone who claimed to be a blogger. Empires have risen and fallen, my personal and professional life has transformed, our relationships with our favorite sports teams have evolved, and there has been a global pandemic that brought the world to its knees.

I picked up the blogging pen, so to speak, on various occasions over the years, but always let the ink run dry before putting to paper anything meaningful. These attempts adorn the drafts section of my blogger account and scattered .docx files on my laptop. I wanted to and started to write about the life of an Indian immigrant in the US, about the rise of fascism, white supremacy, and a general breakdown of our social order, about my experiences as a PhD student, about my many excursions through America’s national and state parks, and of course, about the unbelievable tragedy and horror of Covid-19. Oh, how has the world survived without my thoughts on these matters? If they followed me on twitter, they certainly got glimpses of my thoughts; many, many glimpses in fact, 75,000 of them. I clearly had a problem of expressing myself too much on a microblogging site and not at all on the blogging one. Was I merely a product of our times? Who has the time to expand their thoughts into a 1000 words, when a couple of sentences would suffice and send them on the way to their next thoughts?

Anyway, the first post of my new blog is no excuse to ramble endlessly. I am somehow a man of words too many and too few. I now have my personal website, so no more blogger or wordpress for me (or learning what substack is). My hope is to update this blog at least once a week, if not more often. I will talk about my research, about European football, about the great American wilderness, and about life, the universe and everything. Crucially, I think I will write for myself and not for anybody else. The best writers I know write simply because they want to write, and not because they want to be read. I admire and wish to emulate that.

This has been a nice sojourn away from the doldrums of a regular work day. Here is to many more such sojourns.