100th!

My blog has finally made it to it's 100th post today!! :) And after a lot of thought, tweets and discussion over how special I'm going to make this post, I decided to just go ahead the traditional way with taking you through my blogging journey and "how it all began". :D


I started blogging back in 2007, just when I stopped writing my personal journal (please don't go over my earlier posts now- they are way too kiddish and embarrass me sometimes but i choose not to delete them- they remind me of what I was like earlier! :P). I wasn't all that regular then and hadn't discovered too many bloggers too. In 2008, though, when I started getting a fair number of hits on my blog and stumbled upon so many other bloggers, I was amazed. My very first blog friends were RJ, Sakhi, Scorpria, Reema and Nikhil. I had a ball interacting with these new blog friends of mine on comment boxes. We tagged each other, awarded each other, had each other on our blog rolls. It was a nice new world we had created and I loved dwelling in it. Soon, these conversations would flow over to Gtalk; I still remember having a conference chat with RJ and Sakhi with both of them pulling my legs to no limit. Those were the days!


As time went by, people got busy; some quit their blogs and some went on long breaks. I started missing our little conversations but neither they nor I could help it. I do wish I could go back to that time again sometimes when I go over my blog roll.


A lot of my non-blogger friends ask me why I blog and I don't really have a perfect answer to that. A few of them are under the impression that people who blog don't have enough friends and that's SO not true! I think it maybe out of the need of sharing your thoughts across to people. With a personal diary, you can't possibly reach out to anyone. Blogging has created a whole new way of communication! When you blog, you completely open yourselves to people. It makes you feel good about yourself too, in a way, and you realise there are so many others out there just like you. It's sort-of like a platform to share ideas, to vent out your thoughts and your creative self.

I've had my share of bad online experiences- like there was this one time when a guy added me on hi5 (I was sixteen then; hi5 is as dead as orkut now!), we moved over to yahoo chat later, and the first time we chat, he tells me he's sitting in a cab right below my house! Turned out, he knew me all along somehow but had decided not to tell me lest I'd keep away (which I did, later! I didn't like the idea of him coming all the way to my house though he knew me, or whatever!). Another instance was of someone who had threatened to get cops to my place by tracking down my IP and what not, just because a person in our mutual friend list abused him for some reason!


Unlike social networking sites though, blogging is not something you can fake. And like Scorpria puts it in her post, it's so much more easier to trust blog friends than people on social networking sites. A blog is a reflection of a person's thoughts, and who can possibly fake that all the time? It's all about following your instincts. And trust me, I'd have missed out on a lot of wonderful people had I not taken a few risks there! :)


Sakhi and I bonded so well that we went on to exchange our phone numbers, postal addresses, landed at each others' places (we live in two different states) and met each others' families too! The thought that she could be fake never occurred to me even once for some reason. You always KNOW whom to trust somehow. 

Now, there are blog portals that help you discover some great blogs; blog camps that let you add faces to them! :)

Poonam, another awesome blogger, started a blogging contest a couple of years back called the Avant Garde Bloggies Awards. It turned out to be really big and helped discover some of the BEST blogs around!


It's feels great to be a part of something so wonderful! Cheers to all the bloggers out there! Keep posting! And I also hope you keep visiting, reading, and commenting :P


Ciao! :)