I believe that it is customary to look back on life on some special dates. Birthdays, anniversaries of other sorts, on your death bed...dates like that. Me, I suddenly feel the need to look back on my blogging and writing on some arbitrary day. One would think that April 10th, which was the date in 2009 when I started this blog, or 14th Feb, which is the day in 2012 when I revived my blog, may be better dates for such retrospectives. ('Better that it never happens', you say? Whose blog is it anyway?) But, hey, I am the guy whose eyes, with a fine disdain for clocks and calendars, started demanding reading glasses well before 40 years of age, which is supposed to be the customary age for such things. So why expect any calendar-dictated logic for anything I do?
So there I started, in 2009, writing nineteen to a dozen and expecting the brightness of my writing genius to draw readers in like flies. (Bad analogy, I know. I mean who really wants to be considered a fly. Could not think of a better one this time. Apologies. Though, considering that most of the 'readers' are bots...) And discover that the page-views I was seeing on the blog stats were all mine, eagerly visiting and revisiting the blog to see if anyone had condescended to land up. (Yeah, yeah, I know I should have set up the blog for not counting my own visits. I owas new, wasn't I?) So, I summarily abandoned the blog for a longish while.
Then in 2012, I revived it upon hearing about blog aggregators - Blogadda and Indiblogger at that time - wherein one could attempt to get unknown people to actually read your blogs. (Now THAT is one of those business models that get created and destroyed within a tenth of your lifetime in this day of the internet. Those were the guys who saw value in being intermediaries between companies and 'blog influencers' on social media. Little did they realize what the advent of Facebook, Instagram etc would do to their business model.)
That was the golden period of my blogging. I always THOUGHT I wrote humor but, you know, there is always a niggling doubt. And fear of rejection, especially with humor. You can get away with being somewhat tragic, somewhat thrilling...you know, halfway measures are fine. Humor...you either hit the bulls-eye or you do not. Is a joke that does not make you laugh 'somewhat a joke'? So, it was very gratifying when my blog got listed among the 'Top 5 humor blogs' by BlogAdda; top 13 humor blogs by Baggout; when it was in the top 40 humor blogs by some Philippines website (Philippines? Now, how the hell...but why look a gift horse in the mouth? Especially when you do not know whether it is just about to barf). The icing on the cake was when a RSS aggregator, Feedspot, listed my blog in the Top 100 funny blogs in the WORLD! Considering that the list included 9GAG and all, that was when I really felt that, perhaps, I was not deluding myself when I thought I wrote humor.
Not that I thought that, of all the billions of people in the world, I counted among the top 100. I mean, come on, not even one post of mine had gone 'viral'. (A blessing, that, come to think of it. Viral posts ARE like Covid. Only happens when it is controversial and then...well, the aftermath is not particularly humorous generally, unless you are thick-skinned. Me, my skin is like tissue-paper.) The thing was that SOMEONE not only thought I was a top humorist but actually told the world so!
I must have allowed it to go to my head I suppose. True, I had a few stories out in three anthologies. True also that I was actually asked for a novella by a small publisher, without my having gone around submitting my work for consideration. But, without all this blogging 'success', I may not have ventured into writing a humor novella.
This thing about writing a book was a revelation, I tell you. In fact, if you have been reading my blog fairly regularly, I HAVE told you in great detail in another rant here. When I had my book - A dog eat dog-food world - published, I had no idea of all that I had to do to sell the damn thing. I ended up feeling that a good author is someone with the writing ability of a Shakespeare, the charm of a George Clooney, the salesmanship of a P.T. Barnum and the serenity of a Buddha. Now me, I'm none of the above, so...
And, yet, the book managed to sell out its first print run. (All 100 copies of it, thank you for the applause. I did say small publisher, did I not?) There was no second run, the publisher having gone out of business. (NOT thanks to me, damn you. I did say that she sold all that she printed, didn't I?) The ebook, which I still hold the copyright for, keeps sporadically selling a copy here and a copy there. Apparently not everyone believes that books rot with age, like food, and cannot be consumed unless fresh.
You know, the funny thing was that I got reviews comparing me with PG Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Jerome K Jerome and what have you. Well, that's par for the course. If you write horror, you are the Indian Stephen King; write thrillers, you are the Indian Robert Ludlum and so on. And if you happen to be an American writing horror, it is likely to be 'Move over Stephen King; so-and-so is here'. So, it is but natural that a humorist almost automatically becomes the 'Indian PGW'. What astonished me was that, in a world that really knows only PGW as a humorist (other than stand-up comedians), everyone pulled out a different humorist for comparison. I was a bit peeved that they missed out Oscar Wilde (somewhat like Jerome K Jerome reading a list of diseases, finding himself afflicted by all of them, and miffed that housemaid's knee had somehow left him alone). But, then, if the only Wilde book they had read was 'Picture of Dorian Gray'...well, morbid was not what I wanted to be known for, anyway.
Where was I? Ah, being compared to great humorists and even having the book called 'the entire Philip Kotler dipped in gooey chocolate'. (Going by the size of the ONE Kotler book prescribed for Marketing Management, that would require MOUNDS of gooey chocolate!) The problem was that almost all of this was from relatively unknown people...social media friends and quite a few strangers; even Business Standard carried a review of the book.
Friends and family? Apart from the rare few (other than those I managed to badger into doing it), there was marked silence. Whether they felt it was a guilty pleasure (you know, like loving James Patterson but being ashamed of admitting to such low-brow interests and, thus, speaking only of Rushdie and Roy in public) or were diplomatic ('Why tell the poor guy that his book made me barf?') or would rather forget even my existence, leave alone my book's, I do not know. Considering that, with Whatsapp groups and all, your 'marketing' probably starts off with friends and family, I cannot help feeling that they possibly go "Ewww" like I am shoving a rotten fish into their face. Feeling like that, I am, quite naturally, a genius at marketing my books. ('IIM grad, writing spoofs of marketing management and a dud at it?' you ask? Why, pray, did you think that I chose to major in finance?)
What's the point of all this? Come on, you really expect coherence and a point in a RANT? Really?
So, anyway, it's been a while since I wrote, simply because I am not up to doing all the rest of what goes into selling a book. So, why I should have suddenly developed an interest in raking up my dead past, I do not know.
Except that, when I did, I found that I was STILL in that list of top 100 funny blogs. Hanging on by my fingernails, likely to drop off any time soon, but yet...
And, thus, hope springs eternal. Maybe I can egg myself on to write another book soon.
And you...you can start practicing your 'rotten fish' expressions!
