A Notebook that was once a Laptop, My Disenchanted Mom, and Blogging 101.

I am writing this post on my notebook. Until a few years ago, I used to call it my laptop.

A Notebook that was once a Laptop:

My notebook had to go through this painful experience of having its name changed, because for me the term laptop conjures up images of a saucy woman-colleague who had procured this sobriquet through her many liaisons, one of which had been witnessed by another curious and rather garrulous young lady. She had followed the former, seen her enter the cabin of a higher official, and was righteously shocked when she saw her perched upon that official’s lap.

The righteously indignant lady then mentioned this to everyone in our group, and insinuated that becoming a laptop may have been instrumental in the said saucy lady getting those three promotions in two years, while the rest of us were warming the same seats for the last three years.

But this story about my la…., well, my mobile computer getting a new name is incidental. This post isn’t about my notebook. It’s about the Blogging101 course, which is slated to end some time this week, and it’s also about Mom…

My Disenchanted Mom:

…who thinks that I am wasting my time in blogging-shlogging. She believes that I’ve sunk to this level and gotten all arty and bloggy, all because of wifey. Mom is of the firm opinion that she had handed over a bright young upwardly mobile engineer to wifey, who changed him into this pathetic programmer, who spends his time sitting in front of a monitor, doing nothing that she can boast about to her friends.

That was the bit about Mom.
Now, about…

Blogging101:

It wasn’t easy (and I am talking about that half of the course that I managed to finish, the other half must’ve been more difficult,) and yet, it was fun. It was akin to a party that you organize at your own place – you work hard, then you party hard, and then you work harder. I made a lot of new friends from all parts of the world. I read their opinions, their prose, their poetry, and learned about their lives. Most of the times we smiled and laughed together. I also remember an instance when I hurt someone with a word used carelessly. All in all, it was like a second life, lived in a parallel universe. And I loved it!

• I’ve still not followed all those blogs I want to follow.
• I’ve still not created my blogroll.
• I’ve still not visited all the blogs that I wanted to visit.
• I’ve still not written all the posts I had wanted to write.

I know I will. Whenever I can escape mom’s eagle eye, whenever I can steal a few moments from my bread-on-the-table projects, whenever I can smuggle my la…, notebook out on the terrace – I will try to catchup.
I’ll be there for the writing 101 course – and I hope to see you there.
Anand.

Translation for those who couldn’t experience the spice of the following terms:

Blogging-shlogging: A Hindi-Punjabi way of denigrating an activity and making it sound useless. You too can learn to use it. Repeat the term that you want to denounce, with a “sh” added at the beginning.

So, Dance becomes Dance-Shance, Art becomes Art-Shart…and so on.

Note that the denouncer “sh” works in other languages too. So Gana (Singing, in Hindi) becomes Gana-Shana.  

With that little capsule of Indian popular culture, signing off, again,
Anand.