Dus numbri

Tomorrow marks 10 years of this blog’s existence. Around 1700 posts and close to 1.5 million words (an approximation based partly on a formula from the Elder Days when Blogger.com provided total word counts!), give or take a couple of hundred thousand. Strange to think of it, and a little scary too when I skim the archives to find a post I have no memory writing (sometimes little memory of even the book or the film it is about), or read something written by my 27-year-old self that I now completely disagree with or feel terribly embarrassed about. (But then, to paraphrase a famous writer, life is about getting things wrong and wrong and wrong, and then, after careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.)

Wish I had the time to do an elaborate post full of memories, turning points and links to missteps and highlights – and maybe I will in the near future. For now it's enough to say that Jabberwock – which I began in September 2004 with no sense of “purpose”, no idea that it had any long-term prospects or that anyone other than the four or five friends to whom I sent the link would ever read it – has been responsible, directly or indirectly, for most of the good things that have happened in my professional life since then. That’s one reason why I continue to be so proprietorial about it and update it regularly with versions (sometimes twice as long) of most of the pieces I write officially, even though this consumes time and energy, and sometimes seems pointless given that the websites of most newspapers and magazines are better organised and more publicity-savvy today than they were ten or even five years ago.

I have been hearing for years that blogs are passé, but this hasn’t been a “pure blog” for some time anyway – more like a writer’s site, a storeroom for the officially published stuff. That said, even with readership and comments falling over the past 3-4 years (largely the effect of social media and increased online clutter), some of the most rewarding discussions I have here are in the comments sections of relatively “bloggish” posts that don’t intersect with the official writing: this one, for instance, which grew and grew into a discussion board (with just three participants, but still) about continuing developments in the Star Plus Mahabharat. It's amusing to see comments still coming in on ancient posts such as the one about Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, a book that has a profound effect - for good or for bad - on anyone who survives it. (And sometimes it isn't so amusing: I disabled a rant I once wrote complaining about Julia Roberts's teeth, because the post became a magnet for vicious comments from people who love her as well as people who hate her.)

Anyway... more such reflections another time. The site will continue, but I may soon shift it to another domain with my own name, change the design a little, perhaps do away with the Jabberwock “brand”. (One of the things I have done recently is to add a cloud of labels/categories on the right sidebar, but this is very much a work in progress - hundreds of posts haven't been labelled yet.) Will provide updates about all that. Meanwhile, do keep reading.