Twenty Years of Blogging!

Pertinent Observations made its debut on 27th July 2004, and celebrates its twentieth birthday today!

Yesterday I was looking through my Substack, and found this post by Bryan Caplan where he mentioned that he has now been blogging for twenty years. I quickly remembered that I started blogging in July 2004 as well, and a quick check revealed that my blog’s birthday is today!

An email from LiveJournal (my first blogging platform) confirmed it!

This is the original URL of my first blogpost. It was about a concept nowadays known on Twitter called “Kogul”. It was making fun of the Tamil alphabet which has massive overloading, resulting in funny spellings (in English) in Chennai for non-Tamil words.

Now what does Gopi Gupta, Vegetarian have to do with all this? For starters, Gopi Gupta is not a “he” but an “it”. It was on our hostel menu last week. On one hand, people wanted to taste this exotic sounding dish but on the other, they didn’t want to be cannibals. Finally, a few reluctantly took a few spoons of it. It was neither exotic nor human flesh. It was just our good ole’ Gobi Kofta! So much for spellings.

27th July 2004 means it would have been three days before I travelled to Chennai to collect my degree certificate from IIT Madras.

The Beforemath

I had never been much of a writer. I had always had lousy handwriting (I still do - sometimes I struggle to decipher my own notes from one day ago), and was fairly slow at writing. Considering that I was topper types, I had always assumed I was “bad at English” because my relative competitive advantage in that wasn’t as much as it was in maths or science. Maybe I believed the law of conservation of talent then, and convinced myself I just wasn’t good at languages.

So I never bothered writing, and the opportunities were also sparse - the odd school or college magazine. Before the coming of the internet, there was a distribution problem - unless someone actually published something formal, it wasn’t easy to write something that gets read. And as much as I claim the contrary, I’ve always been a sucker for validation, and writing for myself in a place where absolutely no one would read isn’t something I would’ve ever done. Moreover, I hated writing - it was rather tedious and laborious.

A switch flicked in early 2003 and I thought I should make a real effort to write. Basically the official newsletters of Saarang (the IIT Madras cultural festivals) in both 2002 and 2003 were written by good friends, and I had enjoyed reading them. And I considered these guys cool. Among other things, “maybe I should be like them”, I reasoned.

I quickly dashed off a rather slanderous piece for The Fourth Estate, the IIT Madras magazine. It was about the forthcoming elections for college-level posts (general, cultural, academic and other secretaries), and my biases in that post were clear. The editors of the Fourth Estate were my friends, and my piece duly got published.

As it happened, the people I had slandered AGAINST won the cultural secretary elections. I then applied to be the “newsletter coordinator” for the following year’s Saarang. I made it public that I had applied for this, and in IITM, most people read The Fourth Estate, and knew what I had written. It was as if I had thrown an open challenge, and if they had NOT made me the editor, it might have seemed like a political decision. And I was the type that was (by then) fairly good at literary activities, so I had to be accommodated somewhere in the Saarang organising team. And I got the newsletter duties.

A few months later, there was a split in the IIT Madras official magazine. A rebel publication called “total perspective vortex” came up. The editors of that were even closer friends, and I wrote for that. I’m reasonably proud of what I wrote there. A few years later, I discovered a copy of TPV, and laboriously typed up the post and published it on my blog.

Socialites (not to be confused with socialists) are people with lots of time (to attend parties) and money (to buy new clothes for each party they attend). Initially this group used to consist of film stars, businessmen and their families, with Nehruvian socialism keeping most politicians at bay. But nowadays, even politicians seem to have joined the bandwagon. The status of a page three party and the space it receives in print is proportional to the number and ?reputation? of socialites in attendance.

I also wrote for The Fourth Estate that year. And then people seemed to like our Saarang newsletter (a couple of weeks ago, I met RAP, my co-editor for the newsletter, for the first time since I graduated from IITM).

Blogging Begins

It might have been in early June 2004. Undergrad had ended and it was a few weeks to go before I joined IIMB. God Sriram, Hariba, Manu and I decided to pay a visit to our old school (National Public School Indiranagar). I’ve forgotten if Paddy the Pradeep also came with us. We all met up at Manu’s house in Bilekahalli, and he drove us to Indiranagar. After returning from school, we were just hanging around his computer, and he showed us his blog.

It was the first time I was hearing of the concept. Manu explained what a blog is, showed a few other people’s blogs, and mentioned that there were two blogging platforms - Blogspot and LiveJournal. Manu would stop blogging a couple of years later, but his blog would play a very important role in my life before he stopped.

(it is funny that twenty years after he showed me what a blog is, I’m now doing business with Manu).

A month later (July 2004), after we (Manu and I, among others) had joined IIMB, I felt like writing an essay, and remembered this whole blog concept. I quickly spun one up on LiveJournal (Manu and Gandhi (another friend from IIMB) were active there), and wrote that Gopi Gupta essay.

Growth

The first year was slow - I wrote a grand total of five blogposts in 2004. My blog really took off in 2005, when I was interning at JP Morgan in London, and where I was frequently bored. Amazingly, one of the websites that opened in office was LiveJournal (you can imagine that a bank might block everything - a few years later when I worked for Goldman Sachs, everything was blocked there). And I started writing heavily.

My classmates, all similarly bored in their respective internships, read and wholeheartedly commented. I wrote more. All those posts must be preserved for posterity on LJ - I’ve lost my login now, which means there is no way to delete those posts!

Back in Bangalore for the next academic year, I continued to write. Looking back, I’m not particularly proud of my writing from 2005. I was angsty. A lot of posts were simple descriptions of what happened. But I guess everything begins this way.

November 2005 was pivotal for the growth of my blog.

First (OK it was strictly written on Oct 31, 2005) I wrote a “conceptual” blogpost where I ended up absolutely slandering some of my classmates. Soon, whoever in IIMB wasn’t reading me yet had started reading me. Of course, this had an adverse impact on some friendships (with the people I had slandered).

Then, I wrote about some girl I had seen at the Landmark Quiz that year, asking readers to help me find her (I haven’t seen her ever again). That post got “reblogged” by several other blogs. By 2004 standards, it went viral. That gave me a readership well beyond IIMB.

After that I think it was steady exponential growth until blogging became uncool a few years later.

Negative Optionality

People who know me will know that I’m always saying things that are not supposed to be said. The problem with being a blogger is that I end up putting these things in writing, which makes things doubly bad for me.

The other day my wife found a post from 2012 that was rather slanderous, and asked me to delete it. I duly did, and then started an exercise to clean up my blog. It was painful work - there was a lot of slander, but retrospectively censoring myself in a lot of cases didn’t seem right. I soon abandoned it.

In any case - if someone were to be diligent enough to go through my blog archives, I’m sure there is enough reason to cancel me on every single axis possible (now I realise LLMs might make this not so laborious a process after all!). I won’t dwell more into this now.

Positive Optionality

The blog has led to a lot of upsides in my life. In fact, if I were to consider everything that I have done, the one single activity that I have most upside from is my blog.

I mentioned Manu’s blog earlier, right? Sometime in 2006, Priyanka found it (they are distant relatives, and she had inherited one of his 12th standard guide books, so “knew” him). He had a “blogroll” (other blogs he followed), which included my blog. She found this post rather funny and scrapped me on Orkut. I scrapped back.

In early 2008, we started chatting on Google Talk. We met for the first time in late 2009. We got married in late 2010. We have two children now, at the time of writing.

In 2012, my career as an analytics consultant started off thanks to a comment on this blog. In 2020, I decided to shut my consulting practice and get a job. The one conversation with Delhivery that I thought might be an interview started with the other guy telling me “I have read your blog and so I know how you think. So we can use this conversation for you to ask me questions”.

In 2013, Mint asked me to write a column. In 2017, I published my first book.

Etc. Etc. As they taught us when we were in Goldman Sachs, “do things that create optionality”.

The Present

As you know I moved my blog to Substack late last year, primarily because people seemed to comment more here. My target is three posts a week (across this, my mental health blog and my data science blog). I don’t know if I hit it, but I write.

And I will continue to write. Thinking about it, the real inflexion in my writing came when I bought a computer (in June 2004). I had always been quick at typing, and now I could disseminate thoughts as they came to my head. And so I’ve been writing. And will continue to write.

Thanks a lot for reading! And thanks to everyone else who has read me for the last TWENTY years!