Most people who have met me in person would unequivocally agree that I have more than one funny bone in terms of the fact that I am able to laugh at anything and everything and more so when they directly relate to me. Having provided that small disclaimer, let me plunge into this semi-autobiographical, psycho-analytical post about why I chose the name mahabore for the blog, its etymology, et al.
Back in early 2004 just before getting into B-School I was quite active on a popular students’ forum called pagalguy (guess what, it is still around but looks like it has become an exclusive MBA Students Only forum). And when I got my final call letter from IIM Indore, I was almost immediately added to a new thread initiated by the second year batch from IIM-I which was created as a forum for the new first years and the second years to interact and as a sort of informal welcome to all us first years there. It was there that I virtually met Govar, one of my batch-mates who would then go on to become a good friend of mine on campus as well.
Now while I prided myself on being technically savvy then (at least for somebody who studied commerce in my under-graduation) and being an early adopter of most new technological fads, Govar stumped me when he asked me whether I had a blog. When I asked him what exactly a blog was, he was surprised as he felt that I had a reasonably good flair for writing (based on some of my pagalguy interactions and some of the write ups I had uploaded there) and that I should start a blog with Blogger (this was before the company was bought out by Google). The idea back then was that both of us would document our B-School experiences through our respective blogs, which could then prove to be useful for other B-School aspirants.
Given that these were the earliest days of blogging in India and that anonymity was the name of the game for most online interactions back then, I decided to go ahead and start a blog under a pseudonym. Despite all exhortations to the contrary, I believe that I am not an extremely creative guy myself and still cannot take myself too seriously. My initial reaction when Govar asked me to start a blog and start writing was that “I don’t write that well. This is just going to be me rambling on and on about how life at Indore is, how the hostels are, how the food at the mess is, and things like that. Nobody is going to read and like this boring stuff. If anything I am going to bore people to death.”
And thus, the name mahabore suddenly popped into my head. The idea being that I would not only be boring but boring to the nth degree, a maha-bore!!!
Funnily enough although the blog was intended to be written for folks outside B-Schools it ended up being quite well read by my own batch-mates, seniors, and peers from other B-Schools wanting a peek into IIM-Indore. In fact, if you want to read some really bad writing, naïve points of view, vaguely constructed posts and in general want to kill some time do hop over to this link which are the very first posts in my old blog. And if you are in the mood, you will figure out that most of the comments as well are from my own batch-mates who were in rooms in the other hostel blocks.
Anyhow, that was a reasonably long and winding story about how my blog got its name and humble beginnings if I may say so. After B-School, life took over, almost all my time was gobbled up by the fact that I was burning the midnight oil in office on most days (especially when there were power-cuts and the entire office’s power was running on a diesel gen-set) and blogging took a back seat. While there were intermittent posts, they were few and far between and I had almost stopped blogging by around 2009 or so.
Somewhere around that time I happened to notice a few posts in the WordPress platform and the platform struck me as something that was made for writing easily, so to say. It looked like they had made the entire process of beautifying a blog with good templates, the widgets, etc simpler and wanted bloggers just to focus on their writing, and I therefore took the plunge.
This time around I didn’t think too much of the name at all, mahabore, although not a well known brand by then had become an integral part of my online personality. Even after starting off with the WordPress blog, my frequency of posts still left a lot to be desired, and it was only in July 2013 that I started giving my blog the level of importance that it is getting right now.
Seven months down the line I have realized that writing, as a process, a discipline is extremely cathartic (see how I used a really big word to prove my point) to me. It is something that I cannot do without anymore and for sure will remain an inalienable (another big word) part of me.
While I am aware that the prompt asked me to explain why I chose my blog’s title and this post is about my journey of blogging so far, the fact remains that the journey is what determined the title. It was not like I had a title in mind and gave it to the blog, it was the origins of this blog that determined the title. And thus, ends the story.
===============
This post has been written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts where the idea is to publish at least one post a day based on the prompts provided.
Today’s prompt was “Explain why you chose your blog’s title and what it means to you.”
