Ever since my childhood days, I’ve always had a fetish, a craze, a rage for perhaps the cheapest, the divinest, the godliest and the most frequently served service at my house- the Newspaper. Oh Yes! My voracious liking for the ‘Voice of the Nation’ began with me being awe-struck and at times amused by the ‘Picture(s) of the day’, the caption contests and the Garfield and Dennis the Menace series (Oh com’on, I was just too little to read on ‘heavier things’!). With more and more of reading some sense and reading the sensational, I switched over to the burning hot and burning red ‘front page’, before shifting to sporty columns and ultimately ending at the elite editorials, the ‘Comments’ and the ‘Think-overs’. I could still remember those hasty mornings, when I used to literally gulp down some disemboweling facts and figures with the glass of milk I emptied down to the full, unaware of the school bus which had already been delayed because of my hard-core habit.
Slowly and gradually, I was taken aback by some blooming blogs, bucketful buzzes and tickling tweets and found ‘My Space’ in the virtual world, only to savor a sudden down pour of some more novel ideas and exhilarating personal experiences and to relish a ‘Follower’s burden’! I wonder if any burden could ever be so amazing, so satisfying and so enchanting. On the whole, the older-but-still-in-use forms of fury (newspapers) with an electronic-touch lead to a power-packed YOU, verbally, intellectually and knowledgably.
Behold! Hope you like surprises for I might leave you with your jaws dropped down! There’s something which is as popular and old as a newspaper and as widespread as a blog. From the past few days, I’ve been noticing some strange scribblings. The most interesting part is that these writings are neither a part of any publication, nor a blog or not even a splog! Oh no-no! I’m not talking about the sacred writings on the historical walls, since those alien scripts are beyond my cerebral reach. I tend to remain on the simpler side here. Well, I’m talking about the scrabbles, the scratchings and the doodles devised by the common man, just to express his feelings, emotions, sorrows, miseries, happiness, elation or whatever comes to his mind, with the ’public walls’ serving the dual purpose of a canvas and an easel( Maybe, that’s why Facebook too has a ’Wall’). It’s actually a nice- little publication where you make a note and leave it ‘public’! Another fact is that you yourself are the reporter, writer, cartoonist and the editor of this publication. Plus you don’t have to worry about the regularity of the editions since you are not ‘officially’ engaged in such an activity. Write whenever some solid stuff strikes your skull. A vast writing space is waiting for you. You just need to escape your ‘future readers’ ’ eyes while writing. Isn’t that adventurous too? You might be thinking this is somewhat similar to the internet blogs. But these ‘Public blogs’, what I like to call them, are better since they are accessible and readable to those who don’t even know the A,B,C of computers….actually the C,C++ of computers, I should say.
Talking of my age, I’m surrounded with so many such blogs in my university. Whenever we’re having a boring lecture (Oh please! When don’t we have one?), out comes a writing tool and a public blogger is born. He with his ‘creativity’ runs this tool only to add to the beauty of the frail wooden desks. Every now and then I come across such inscriptions and some of them make me smile, some make me giggle while the others make me guffaw (No bad thoughts please). I can identify a potential-philosopher, a cool dude, a good-for-nothing fellow, a geek, a despo or a nerd from these writings…no need to give your profile information separately.
Getting out of the university, I can see some love stories engraved on the trees, where the names of the ‘creators’ are carefully contained within the boundaries of a heart-shaped structure, not to forget the Cupid’s arrow, dear. The lovers certainly seem to be ‘brave’ enough to screech a ‘heart’ on the heart of a silent biomass. But traditions and customs are made only to be improvised later on. Similarly, such activities of graffiti and street art, when given the aid of lustrous, glossy and shiny spray paints, attain a more modern and a gen-next look. The territorial extent of such blogs seems endless, taking in railway stations, bus terminals, planks, pillars, boulders, rocks and not even sparing the public toilets!(Best place to flush out your frustration.)
I don’t know if you’re allured into becoming such a blogger after reading this, especially the ones who like to decorate themselves with the title, ‘anonymous’. I’d personally not recommend this kind of activity to anyone, which though having the pros of a newspaper and a blog has its own cons, the major being damage to public property. But one can’t deny that such kind of ‘media’ is really cheap. Even cheaper than a two rupee newspaper:p
