Ram II – The Welcome Back

Act I – The Allure of the Lazy Blogging
In favour of lazy blogging, actual blogging took a back seat, to the point it was suffocating, but still had a pulse. The antagonist in this story isn’t evil, it’s Twitter. The dark side of blogging, the lazy side. The pull of a micro-blogging country where anything you said was perfectly A-okay.

Bad drafts published & flying, soaring, the wings of the blue bird strong. Even a fat fuck like myself was sucked into its gravitational pull. It truly was that strong. As said though, it was not evil.

It’s been extremely valuable to me in it’s early days. I’ve made priceless finds, from making me (debatably) knowledgeable to my making acquaintances and friends that to-date are probably the closest people to me.

Reminiscing the 2009 as though it were the good ole days. Honestly, the Twitterati of 2009 was a thing. Here’s an article on Tech Digest that could have got me fired from my day job for being so prolific on it: Britain’s Top 20 Tweeters. Instagram, Vines & Snapchat were not even sperm in the web sphere at that point.

Like with any successful thing though, the bastardisation (synonym: commercialisation) was inevitable. The corporations came, the celebrities came and so came the cockroaches & trolls. Its self-inflicted downfall in the eyes of the ‘aam aadmi’*, had commenced, the owners of the platform came out of it well-off though. By 2014, they even got listed on the NYSE. In hindsight, it was a stroke of genius to leverage laziness, a default setting in most human beings.

And so, the plight of the resistance**, seeking replacement avenues to hangout were upon us. Some surfaced (plurk?), alas, none really shined enough to uproot the corporation. So we just hung around, in hope that dying friend might find a miracle cure. I mean it still had merit to be acquainted. It was knowledgable, a means to stay informed, to remain in touch with the geographically challenged, a limp pimp for the unholy self.

With years passing by though, the frequency of my posts and interactions dwindled. I’m not going to directly take credit for this, but the price graph of the listed TWTR stock also seem to dwindle. Almost a directly proportional relationship. Make of that what you may. FADE TO GRAPH.

Ram is the fucking trend!!!! Huzzzaaah!

Act II – Life on Another Planet.
With a proverbial backpack full of dreams and self-pity, inadvertently, I found a whole other place for interaction. Known commonly as the ‘offline’. It was strangely familiar. You could interact with other individuals and have them interact back. As you shared memories, opinions and the like, much like with social media, there were nods of approval, disagreements, trolling. It’s almost as though the whole offline existence was a trope of the online one & it was similarly endless. A world demanding exploration that would take lifetimes. Overwhelming at times, an awe in others, I quickly learned to become selective with it.

I discovered another continent, another country, then another. I liked it. I shifted my entire life here. I made new friends. I found love. I wore down her tough exterior and convinced her I was a worthy partner. We got married. We had zeroes of children. I found family, a home, happiness, yet there was a shadow that was bound to catch up with me.

With time, I felt something was off with the offline. Like something was trying to reach me from beyond it. I had flashbacks of being told by the Oracle Younger “You are the internet!”. I saw a bunch of movies, I had ice-cream. I walked the streets and one fine day looking in the mirror I felt an urge.

I uttered the words slowly, concentrating. I. I am. The internet. Involuntarily tears flowed like the implied of a static emoticon. The reality hit me hard. The betrayal, the neglect. What had I done? My geographically-challenged friends and acquaintances lost, suckered by the infinite black hole of the offline. It was decided in this moment, something needed to change. I needed a plan to fix this.

A-Team, A Plan!

Act III – Hello, Again.
In a nutshell, I decided I need to bring this place back to life & so I shall.

You may have noticed that I’ve started re-publishing entries from my old site ramchandra.me.uk, each one needs a couple of minutes of format tweaking & link fixes, so I’ll continue with that over the coming months, retro-fitting it as new content also heads your way.

Clearly, there have been a whole bunch of developments, personal & otherwise that have occurred in the years I’ve been on hiatus here, which I promise to share episodically. Hopefully they’ll hold as palatably as pizza does. (Gotta aim high!)

For now I just want to chime in with a “Hello World v3.14” and a promise that I’m back.


*aam aadmi = common man / mango people
**resistance = no idea what we’re supposed to be resisting, but where there is organisation, I’m told there is always a potential uprising known as la resistance.

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