In late 2004, in my first year of college, a school friend emailed me a link to something she called her “blog.” She was a good writer, and I remember enjoying reading whatever she had posted. But more than that, I remember being thrilled to discover that I could just as easily create my own too. In January of 2005, I wrote something for the first time that was public, available for anyone to see.
Thus began a 20-year-long tumbling, turning and quietly changing journey of vulnerability, identity, discovery, attraction, and other such whatsits.
One of my earliest blog posts was about my huge crush on a fourth-year student. In my eyes, he had it all – looks, personality, a fondness for language, and a taste in music that I related to deeply. Thankfully I had the smarts to not name him, but I wrote about the giddy joy I felt when I ran into him in our large campus or if he said “hi”, my wide smiles and hammering heart, and “the song playing in my mind” whenever I met him. Helpfully for my readers, I ended the post by saying he fell from my pedestal, but nevertheless, that I really enjoyed having the crush. When I read it now, I see my trademark ability to be the temper-er of expectations as well as the strong foundations of my eye-rolling at anything “romantic.”
My blog was named “chennaigal”. Living away from home – Chennai – for the first time ever, I felt my identity as a girl from Chennai the strongest, and I related deeply to its language, music, films and cultures. I had moved overseas for university, and was one among a handful of south Indians in a batch of nearly 80 students from India. While adjusting to a new country and culture, I felt extra lonely when I couldn’t connect well with the other Indians, most of them Hindi-speaking, most of their pop culture references very Hindi and north Indian. The blog assuaged some of my loneliness even as I navigated friendships and found my footing in university. I wrote about everyday things that caught my attention in this new place: the culture of freebies, how grass was mown, frustrated teenage musings about culture, Tamil film music, college festivals, local food, and so on. I wrote with irreverence, sometimes worshipping, sometimes mocking, people and cultures. I wrote with wide-eyed wonder and naïveté, unashamed to talk about things even when I didn’t know enough about them, making mistakes with grandiosity and the conviction that I was right.
As was the trend then, I’d not only write on my blog but also spend hours reading and commenting on others’. Bloggers would ‘blogroll’ a list of blogs they enjoyed reading, and I diligently went through these, making my own list even as my blog started appearing in others’. My blog attracted comments too, and as readership grew, there was a point in time, I’m proud to say, when people would show off about being the first to comment on my new post. Many young men would patronise the blog, straddling the fine line between commenting on my post and attempting to become ‘friends’ or something more. But there were also, like me, millennials discovering the exhilarating freedom of being away from home with access to the world through the internet – and the homesickness, navigation of identity, and connections that these brought. The “Chennai” nature of my blog appealed to several (Chennai) folks, offering them a connection to their homes and an anchor as they sailed through college and early work-life.
A small group of “blog friends” eventually formed, and we’d spend hours chatting on Yahoo Messenger, getting to know one another with the blogs as our common base. Some were writers (or trying to be, like I was), some just wrote what came to their mind. For the first time ever I read content written by nobodies like me. As I write this, I’m quite struck by how common it is now, but it really was a big deal then; apart from newspapers that had “open pages” which accepted writing from laypersons, “writing” was serious: it was done by journalists and columnists and authors.
My blog friends soon weren’t just online friends. Many were from Chennai, and we began to meet during college breaks. Meeting in person strengthened friendships, and in some cases, budding crushes.
In my second year, someone posted a comment on an older post of mine, echoing my views about the superficiality I saw among my college mates who looked down upon film music. “I could fall in love with you for saying this!” this commenter said, and I tumbled into a one-sided yearning that surfaced every now and then with gusto. This man – well, boy, a year older than I – studied in Chennai and was therefore far from where I studied, but we spent hours chatting, exchanging our music libraries online, and talking about favourite movies and music. We lived in different time zones but I, an early sleeper, stayed up late to chat with him, he who followed typical Indian engineering college time zones. To connect with him better, I watched the Matrix trilogy and pretended to understand and like it. I listened to Led Zeppelin and thankfully really liked them. We met once in a Chennai mall, and he was rather quiet, which I should have read as reluctance but instead read as reticence, endearing him to me even more. I tried desperately to stay in touch, but he slowly became uncommunicative. Eventually I moved on, even though I didn’t let go of the idea of this person I built in my head.
Years later, going crazy with my parents’ insistence that I talk to a prospective (arranged marriage) match, I resurfaced this long-lost boy that I had crushed on, and was this close to sending him an email to ask to talk. I thought of conversation scripts to use with my parents to convince them about this “relationship.” Luckily, sense prevailed, and I decided to see if he was on Facebook – he was, and was married. Phew! It’s hilarious now, but also interesting that I trusted an online presence to be a reasonably true representation of one’s “real” self. Now I look at all online personas – including mine – as having a smidgeon of pretence, curation and ‘correctness’.
Over the years, blogging culture changed, with writing and commenting becoming less frequent. Facebook and Twitter had entered our lives, and blog-like musings moved to Facebook notes. “Writing” also was bolstered by online magazines, those set up by large companies and those put together by a bunch of bloggers learning on the go. My sister and I, too, started a monthly online magazine, Spark, in 2010, and kept it going for over 10 years, a feat that I’m incredibly proud of.
Life, too, was changing, of course: my blog friends and I had started working and could no longer spare enough time to chat and stay updated on each other’s lives. Relationships blossomed, heartbreaks happened, marriages were fixed. Most of them moved out of Chennai to different cities and countries, but some of them continued to make the effort to meet and even showed up at each other’s weddings.
My blog posts still continued, as I moved countries and cities. The writing improved, but also became more serious and deliberate. I reflected on the deep love I’d proclaimed on the blog years ago for people and cities, especially my identity as a “Chennai” girl/woman. And when I began my master’s in development studies and grappled with history, marginalisation and injustice, it became harder for me to apply in my writing the lightness that I could in the earlier years. In what seems to have become second nature, I wrote about my dejection, disbelief, and discomfort with Indian society. A few years later, my writing became rather inward-looking – no star-struck wonder or societal critique anymore. Eventually, in a bid to make my writing more “professional”, I moved from Blogspot to my own website – which too, lies languishing apart from some occasional post that is a dipstick into the complexities of life in my 30s. My blog friends and I are still vaguely in touch, aware of each others’ work and major life milestones.
But my blog still holds an extremely special place in my heart. It is where I sometimes go to draw courage and a sense of who I was before becoming who I am today. It’s a mirror to what I probably have pushed under layers of responsibility, life and work roles, and political correctness. I look back at it less for nostalgia and more for the journey of self-discovery it allowed in a world that was bursting open but without the scrutiny and punishment of today’s internet. I long now for a time when personal writing didn’t always need to feature a “lesson” – us young bloggers wrote because we had something to say, not because we wanted to appear profound or like we’d figured something out that we deemed fit to share with others. We wrote with a kind of abandon, without polishing parts of our selves to make them worthy of public consumption and approval.
A few years ago, long after blog culture became dormant, I woke up to a comment on my blog from a stranger. My sister, an exquisite writer and also a blogger, had got a similar comment from the same person. A woman had read our blogs over a span of three days while waiting for the results of a biopsy after a cancer scare. As she sat at the cusp of a potentially life-changing event, our blogs had given her solace, joy and laughs. I remember feeling a shiver course through my body. I was overwhelmed, deeply touched to be told something so intimate and painful. My sister and I wrote back to her, and later learnt, much to our relief, that it turned out not to be cancer.
Today I’ve lost faith in and patience for most forms of online expression. But blogging gave me a sense of the power of the internet and words on it, and their ability to slash open an expansion of the self like I could never have imagined. And on a more everyday but life-altering level, the blog brought to me my partner – a reader of my blog since 2005, an occasional commenter, and a blog “acquaintance” that I would chat with online, but only met years later and instantly connected with.
