liveblogging

Sometimes, when I realise that I haven't blogged in months, it feels like those months have slipped past without leaving a trace. Other times, when I read some of my posts, I think, this is crap, you're embarrassing yourself by posting online. Only rarely do I feel good at reading some of the stuff I've written. Anyway, I was reading Venkat's post today and I thought I should liveblog, in the hope that it's going to do four things:

1. Get me back into writing more involved and, hopefully, better prose.

2. Ensure my random jottings are consolidated in a single place.

3. I've been feeling cut-off from the mainstream world since a long time now. I listen to podcasts and follow essays/ blogs on more current topics, but possibly because I don't contribute to the discussion, it seems like I'm not part of a larger community. By posting my thoughts more frequently on the internet, I hope to engage some readers and maybe get into a more active discussion.

4. I'd become a better reader/ listener because I would approach it with the intent of writing about it; And also think about the topic more deeply while reading

The more I thought of it though, I came up with four reasons why it's a bad idea:

1. I'd be more obsessed with posting and so would actively engage with the content. I like that idea less than letting information come and envelop me. The first method seems too pushy.

2. The blog would turn into a less 'serious' space. So instead of letting ideas brew in my mind for weeks or months, I'd be responding to them with immediate effect. I know that the more ideal place for something like this would be Twitter but I don't think I have the energy or, more honestly, the mental capacity anymore to swim through such a forceful data stream.

3. This is in direct contradiction to my romantic idea of a writer, someone who jots in notebooks and lets ideas simmer for years before putting anything out, but there are people I admire, like Venkat Rao and Cory Doctorow, who have turned this sort of writing into a new artform. So I have conflicting feelings about this.

4. I'm sure I'm going to abandon this soon. And I don't want it to be another reminder of my incompetence. 

So, yeah, those two sets of ideas are wrestling inside my head right now but I'm tilting towards doing it primarily because:

1. I want to write more and I think my writing is really sloppy when I'm not writing for the internet. The romantic inside my finds that deplorable but the pragmatist says, meh, it is what it is.

2. This going away into the woods and coming back to the society only when I have all the answers doesn't seem to be working really. While the sceptic inside me genuinely believes that I don't really know what I'm talking about and there's no way anyone would be convinced by any of my thoughts, the egoist persists and says that the only way to get deeply involved in something is by having skin in the game.

So, yes, I guess I'm going to start liveblogging after all. For now. 

I'm currently doing Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta's Ashoka X course called Justice: Selected topics and controversies, and I'm going to start readings for class 5 in a while. And I'm going to post my thoughts through that.