Blogging: practise sessions to my becoming an author.

Simon & I…
Last evening over dinner at home in Calcutta, meeting ‘Poet Bitter Sweet’ – pseudonym for my fellow Sulekha.com blogger, I came to know only much later, as MVJ Simon an advertising professional, and creative director with several organisations.

We met online on blogosphere in 2007 – over our respective writings, his mostly poetry – just as I did so many other good writers, many with fancy pseudonyms, who I came to learn over the course of bloggers meets, were professionally very successful in varied walks of life. Perhaps my interactions were rich, as I tended to visit and interact on meaty, well written, intelligent blogs. So it was little doubt they turned out to be that of doctors who were Deans of medical and other reputed colleges, to High court lawyers, even judges, to many advertising professionals, senior naval and army also high ranking police officers. There were several journalists, columnists and authors, also homemakers who had intelligent viewpoints from plentiful exposure married to senior professionals who had lived all over India.

Now most of these people, some on Facebook as friends, wrote under pseudonyms. But I braved being just simply ‘Shuvashree’ from the start and when my blog was popular, also featured often, did I put up my photo and reveal my identity, updating personal and professional details.

I have had the opportunity to meet many bloggers as Sulekha is head quartered in Chennai where I lived from 2006 till 2018. Whenever one or a few reputed bloggers were visiting town, a Meet would be organised in their honour, either in the Sulekha office or outside. Then also, as a senior executive search consultant, Sulekha became my client.
They organised many a blogger’s meet and varied competitions, publishing anthologies to inspire and motivate us to write our best.
Mr Satya Prabhakar, founder and CEO, who I met many a times, along with Neha Xavier, was always directly involved with such initiatives as tie ups with major publishing houses like Penguin or reputed news papers.
It was my first travel piece on Kerala, published from my blog in Indian Express, then my 2nd poem ever, published in their anthology that gave me the much needed impetus to forge ahead as poet and author.

Thus blogging, in a public website as Sulekha.com, even if I did in some other platforms, and interacting with erudite writers at the peak of the blogging scene in India, slowly but surely built my writing voice.
This along with the build up of my narratives to write bold novels, stories and poems I later wrote in 5 of my books.

Blogging, thus was the source of my strength – that I could effortlessly try to make unsuspecting people, read at first 1000 words to 3000 and 6000 word blogs – to take on writing whatever I deemed I ought to say. As I soon realised, it was only a matter of time that my serious books even if not for the masses, or not seemingly commercially viable, would be read for a long time – if I continued to write in a simple, fluid, relatable manner.

Simon is visiting Kolkata, may be around for a year travelling all around north and east India. I have been motivating him to complete his novel. After a long stint in Chennai he is now based in Wayanad and is also an organic farmer, who’s planted over 3000 trees on a 6 acre family property in the midst of which he lives surrounded by river and forest. He also has plans to make a creative writing retreat there.

Last evening, to make the conversations more interesting and educative – Bishwanath the journalist, poet, travel author who took all the photos and I, also had our friend Pradipta Bhattacharyya over. He champions the cause of Kolkata Heritage, and is also from advertising and several other industries including TV, Radio, pan India.
Simon, the naturist that he is, brought us a lot of assorted fruits and Pradipta got the chocolate ice cream.
Over a homemade Bengali dinner after snacks with gin on mango or guava sharbat, we had a long chatty evening that ended near midnight.

Sharing a brief on my books, in the the link – all available globally in e-books and paperback: https://shuvashreeghosh.wordpress.com/2020/01/06/where-my-books-go-william-butler-yeats/

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