One year of blogging...Looking back with thanks...

I wanted to write these some time in January in the New Year …that was when I completed one year on blogosphere … I was busy…very busy…and my mind was occupied with lots of unfinished work… I have managed to complete most of what I had planned satisfactorily… so I thought I’d get down to writing what I had wanted to … all of you would have noticed my fascination for fountain pens by now … it was in the initial days of this fascination that I got introduced to blogging … the early days of a hobby are days of searching for information; trying to gather as much knowledge as one can… and these days of course, Google has made it easier… so, while searching for information about fountain pens, especially fountain pens in India, I hit upon many sites…one of these was www.fountainpennetwork.com and among the others was the blog of a prolific blogger from Hyderabad … I made two good friends through these sites…I met Hari through FPN and Vinod through his blog (I got connected to Vinod through his post on Mont Blanc Meisterstuck FP; which is now my 'grail' pen!!)…

I tend to think of myself as somebody who is not easily swayed…but once swayed, I stay swayed…so, now I am swaying… Vinod’s blog inspired me to start my own blogsite and Hari’s phenomenal knowledge about fountain pens inspired me to stick to this hobby and develop my own knowledge base… I decided to concentrate on Indian fountain pens and I am happy that I was able to ‘discover’ for myself some obscure handmade fountain pen brands from my adopted state, Andhra Pradesh… I learnt a whole new vocabulary…

I started my blog tentatively and my first post was on my fountain pens…rather, a list of fountain pens I owned… before I knew it, there was more and more of fountain pens in my blog rather than books and music…my long-standing passions … and then I felt that collecting FPs and blogging had come together at the right time … I was able to concentrate on my writing and was forced to think, especially while writing about music and books … I had never written anything about music before and I tried it hesitatingly here… Shruti says my writing has improved…coming from her, it is high praise indeed, as she has always been a trenchant critic of my writing…

So, some good has come out of all this one year of blogging … I have, since those early days of blogging, met Hari and Vinod … they have visited me at my home (remembering my fascination with Mont Blanc FP, Vinod had thoughtfully brought his MB along with him for me to see when he visited me and Hari brings many 'pen' goodies from Mumbai whenever he comes to Hyderabad; Hari has recently acquired a MB Meisterstuck 149 and I am dying to see it...) and we have been interacting and have become my good friends… after leaving CIEFL, I have stuck to some of my old CIEFL friends and due to a variety of reasons, I could make friends out of only a couple of people from among my colleagues in the past 8 years…and when Shruti saw me interacting regularly with my new ‘pen’ friends, she was surprised and happy for me … Thanks Vinod and Hari…