A post about posting

I did more or less abandon this blog.

Not because I was writing less - I was writing more. I was writing a lot actually. And speaking a lot. Doing workshops and meeting a lot of people. It was too exciting for me to find time to reflect.

Predictably though, that phase is now over. I have done a lot and learnt, but now it is time for me to get back to blogging.

And as I restart, I confront the question again: Why am I doing it? These posts were supposed to be breadcrumbs for remembering, so that I remain grounded. They served this purpose wonderfully well when I look back. But several years now, I fell into the public/private persona trap. There is so much I can't write about, and that made honest writing almost impossible.

But I am also at that stage, in life and professionally, when being crazy isn't a bad thing. I have always been on the unreasonable side, trying to push the envelop and eschewing security and money and conventional things, but always followed the rules. My grandfather perhaps is responsible: His view was that rules make a society and he always rued the rule-breaking tendency of contemporary Indians, pointing out that Gandhi and his civil disobedience has something to do with it. But I have been exploring this line forever - to be able to live a creative life but at the same time, of being decent, being respectful and being considerate.

I have realised that this is easily misunderstood. Many people think I am afraid when I am trying to be respectful. Or that I am weak when I sought harmony. There is this popular cultural expectation that a loud, confident person have more to offer than someone quiet. Then there is the question of money: How much does one project wealth and build one's persona around that? Again, upbringing: Growing up socialist - this time, under influence of my mother's side of the family but I guess there is also an element of being a Bengali - I have this deep aversion towards showing off wealth, which I have never actively pursued. All of this makes for a certain approach towards blogging, totally unsuitable for the influencer-led world, totally antithetical to personal branding.

But the good thing is that I have reached a point when these things stopped to matter. Particularly, in the last few years, I have gained confidence in my own ideas. Some of these ideas were successful, which was good, but both success and failure contributed to the confidence. This is because I could almost see things coming. And, when I still followed the path that led to failure, I was doing it knowingly and due to some other compulsion, such as commitment, etc. Therefore, two things happened: One, I grew confident of my own judgement, and two, I learnt to accept failures better, and trained myself to do things knowing that they may lead nowhere.

This last point is perhaps the most significant for me. I have learnt to do things without expectation. This puts me further at odds with the prevailing goal-driven culture that I live inside. Everything has to be pre-defined and we should all work towards a pre-defined and productive objective all the time. And yet I learnt the value of non-expectations. 

Only lately I am discovering that this can make a tale of serendipities. No grand theories, no proclamations or polemics, though if those passions arise, I shall not shun them. But now that I have almost killed this blog by non-writing, I may start again under the cover of obscurity. Now I am not under pressure to write about something - like my professional interest in Higher Ed - and I am roam around the 'ideas world' and talk about personal. Being no one in particular has its benefits and I want to enjoy some of those.