Why blog?

Blogging pays off.

Reading and writing is all I can do.  Well, other than cooking and eating and playing bridge, that is.  They are part of who I am. 

In the old days, when I used to be a university professor until my former employer decided that I was expensive to keep around, blogging served me well with my teaching and professional writing too.  The blog was one way I kept notes to myself, and to anybody else who was interested in the kinds of topics that I blog about.  Some students found out on their own about this blog; after all, a simple Google search is all it takes to land here.  They often commented that the blog had everything they needed for my classes, and more.

All that is history now.  There is no longer a need for teaching and professional writing.  Yet, I blog.

Why?

Of course, there is a huge difference in the topics I blog about now compared to years past.  The posts do not reflect the old professional interests and the courses that I used to teach.  I have been liberated, so to speak, from those needs.

In this new version of the blog, what am I trying to do by writing everyday?

For one, it is about me.  Writing clarifies my thinking.  It helps me consider multiple perspectives and I arrive at the bottom-line that satisfies me at least for the moment unless I read something that compels me to change my mind.  The clarity within, in this world of wonderful ambiguity, is precious.  It is like how after a few attempts my version of the paneer-curry has gotten to be so good that recently a friend even asked for the recipe.  I couldn't offer a simple formula because I have none.  I sent her a narrative instead ;)

Second, like how a friend's taste buds are influenced enough for her to ask for the recipe, blogging is also about influencing the mental tastes of others.  Any writer, big or small, anonymous or decorated, wishes to impose upon other people, as Joan Didion explained in Why I Write:

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

It makes sense, when you think about any writing that you read.  Whether it is a piece in the Economist or whether it is Lolita or even Fifty Shades of Grey (gasp!) writers want you to listen to them and change your mind.  (My old line of work, teaching, too is no different.)

Didion remarks in that essay:

Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell.

Orwell opens his essay with this:

From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

That is not my story though; as a child, as a teenager, and even through the undergraduate program, I never fancied myself as a writer.  I was not born to write, unlike what Orwell and most other writers apparently felt.

Orwell writes that all writers are "vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery."  The motives are many:

I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.

The first of those four motives?

Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grownups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one.

Only Orwell could have put that so bluntly.  I am guilty as charged!  And Orwell makes it clear that money is not the motive--"less interested in money."

Of the other three, I like the "political purpose" that Orwell writes about:

using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

Thus, I write.  In my own limited way, I want to alter other people's ideas.  There is no doubt about it being a reason for blogging.  I do this fully aware that I am no Joan Didion nor George Orwell.