why i didn't blog about the pink umbrella...

Happy new year…

Better late than never goes the old proverb, heh heh…

I have been thinking why I actually don’t get time to blog any more – at least that is the excuse I have been dishing out to people who actually are so bored that they land up on my blog sometimes which true to its name has not changed much…

But much as I try to reason out, “NO TIME” is not the actual valid reason. If I look back at my archives and put an effort into bringing back my memories of the past, I realize that I have gotten most of my tasks done when I was the busiest – in terms of the number of tasks accomplished I mean. When I seem to have a lot of time on hand, and a to-do list to add to my guilt, things never progress beyond the to-do list I have created. Sometimes these to-do lists also disappear and I live in the constant fear that some day they will surface to embarrass me…

The more I think of it, time is not the issue I have with blogging or not blogging. I have come up with an interesting theory – information overload. Sometime back I had mentioned that I had wanted to blog about anything and everything I see/hear/feel/smell or taste. That is true… I believe every second in my life could be converted into a page long maybe longer and boring blog post. But then you may ask why I don’t blog more often and you don’t see a hundred posts a day.

Now the reason is something like aamir khan’s short term memory loss in Ghajini…  whatever I decide to blog about I seem to forget within a few seconds… now before you start questioning me about why I am not having a close shaven head with an L shaped tramline cut or tell my parents and scare the shit out of them, let me clarify. I don’t suffer from retrograde amnesia. What I suffer from is limited storage capacity.

Now the brain apparently has small pockets where it stores different kinds of information. The space allocated to my “blogging inspirations” would also fall into one of these pockets and obviously it is limited unlike the terabytes of storage available for USB drives these days. So any new information tends to over write the existing ones. So effectively every second I am going around thinking “hey I should blog about that pink umbrella” and the next instant I am saying “hey I should blog about that lady holding the pink umbrella” and slowly with a couple of more inspirations like “hey I should blog about how sexy that lady with the pink umbrella is” and “hey I wonder if all ladies with pink umbrellas are so sexy” the focus entirely shifts away from the pink umbrella… got it?

Anyways, I don’t think I can tattoo myself to blog about everything like aamir khan does here. But then I tried using a small scribbling pad, but now I don’t remember to update it. Actually, I even thought of blogging about my scribbling pad…

And then when I was trying to explain this to srk the other day, he gave me another view of things – I am not blogging becos my parents live with me? Mmm actually that is a pretty valid reason. I can only blog when I have no one looking over my shoulder to see what I am doing. That is just not exactly the way it happens though, let me elaborate.

So when my mom comes into my room and sees me furiously typing on my laptop, she is first of the impression that I am wasting my time on my laptop… which is sometimes the case when I am working… but other times when I am watching a movie or playing some games it gets irritating when somebody brands that as wasting time when that time can be spent in a useful manner by either sleeping or exercising or just having a nice and relevant talk about current affairs with your parents. So assuming that I do manage to cross over all this minor distractions and convince my mom that I am not “wasting” my time chatting with friends or doing office work and that I am blogging, next question that pops out is “WHAT !!! what is that?”

So I explain how a blog is something like an online journal/diary or just a place where you put up your views and opinions, all I get is a blank stare… that is when my dad who had been disturbed by that loud noise from his game of solitaire, comes to my mom’s rescue – “is that like a letters to editors of papers like The Hindu?” displaying that he is a true descendent of my grandfather who used to read the hindu for 8hours a day from the first character to the last and fold it perfectly into an A4 sized bundle and store it away in a cool dark place for the guy who comes once in 2 months to collect the old paper…

“Huh”, I come back to the present, while automatically making a mental note to blog about my dad’s age old eccentricities, I try explaining that it is nothing like that, and I just put it up there, and I don’t think anyone even reads it except for some guys who are equally vella like me… “Oh” is the only word that comes out in reply from which I understand that my dad ha s just dismissed off one of the most popular and powerful medium of communication in our generation as a utter useless waste of time, and casually returning to his job of saving the world through winning the solitaire game.

My mom seeing that I have been wounded by my dad’s callous remarks tries to pacify my ego blissfully unaware that things are going in the other direction actually. “Hey what are you doing? Mmm you are writing something? Wait let me read what you have written so far… mmm why are you writing about ghajini and short term memory loss like a disease ridden person… why can’t you write something else… something nicer about say the old movies of Sivaji Ganesan who is a much better actor than your aamir khan… oh what offensive words you have used here… don’t do that… I hope you are not writing about that drinking habit of yours for everyone to see… I will have a tough time finding a girl for you who also boozes hahaha”.

As she laughs hysterically over that PJ of hers, I am trying all in vain to maintain my cool… how do I tell her that I am not playing Dr.Jekyll at home and a Mr.Hyde in cyberspace… that I am no longer the scared school-kid she left all alone in that wilderness called engineering college some time back…

I just do a ctrl+S and put it in one of the labyrinths of my “My Documents” folders only to  forget the document totally and look at it after a few months have passed and totally forgetting what the lady with the pink umbrella looked like and I just do a shift + delete on that document. The details of the pink umbrella are now lost to the world forever…

PS. I would request the blogging community to kindly refrain from informing the authorities that I am a victim of parental abuse. I would like to diplomatically term it as a case of the generation gap. Or else somebody is going to get hurt real bad…