She Almost Makes Me Want to Believe in the Possibility of Reincarnation

She is 76. She looks 60 at the most. Her hair is still jet black (may be dyed, but it doesn’t really matter.) She danced like there is no tomorrow…literally. She said, “I’m in limbo now…not deeply entangled in the worldly existence anymore, but not quite up there either. And when you reach the limbo, at least you no longer have any inhibition about dancing.” She enjoyed her dancing so much that, at rare moments, she overlooked that her voice was cracking because of breathlessness from the dancing. She almost forgot that thousands of fans filled the auditorium to listen to the singing legend that she is, not necessarily to watch her having a good time on stage—dancing, cracking jokes, and just being a diva with the characteristic innocent but starry tantrums.

I can't believe I am writing back-to-back fan posts, as my last blog was about admiring Shah Rukh Khan, but this blog forced itself out almost at midnight after I came back from Asha Bhosle’s live concert at Cupertino earlier tonight. I already knew that Asha is a prolific singer, but tonight I learnt that she has recorded 13,000 songs in her career, and counting! I had watched her perform live back in 1998 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. I was impressed even then when I came to know that she was 65, and still commanded the stage like a young, dynamic performer, who was definitely much more than just a singer. It was simply astonishing to see her tonight after twelve years, as if she has been frozen in time! She looked exactly the same. Her trademark diamond bracelet and the sequins on her brightly-hued saris still gleamed as dazzlingly as they did back then. She is still the vivacious ‘girl’ whose youth rubs off on you. That she can still sing ‘Piya tu ab to aaja,’ ‘Chura liya’ and ‘Mera kuchh samaan’ with ease was enough for me to sway with her music, overlooking the occasional off-key tonality. But, when I was coming out of the auditorium at the end of the concert, I did overhear a few teenagers complaining about being rather disappointed by Asha’s performance. I don’t blame them. They most likely didn’t grow up listening to new chart-buster numbers by Asha as we did. They may have heard her songs being played by their parents, or may have only heard the remixed versions of the originals sung by Asha herself, or some other cover-version artists. Recorded or re-engineered music often sounds more perfect, but lacks the soul of a live performance. The soul is something you connect with as a result of your collective memories and emotions associated with the songs. Unfortunately, the disappointed teenagers didn’t have that advantage. They just saw an old woman delivering an average performance and getting distracted by her own antics. My poor teenagers! One day your children will also come out disappointed from a Nick Jonas concert!

Well, for me, I did feel the soul tonight. The concert was totally worth spending more than half-an hour stuck in traffic trying to find a parking. The boom of the live orchestra resonating within my body, the wild shake-twist by the middle-aged silicon valley techie in my front seat, even Asha’s dancing, and her co-artist Sudesh Bhosle’s gentlemanly gesture of stealthily stretching his hand in case the singing and dancing diva trips by accident—every little thing worked for me. The ageless Asha almost made me want to believe in the concept of next life after this one, if I get to come back with half her talent and energy.

(photo collected from the internet)

My Name is Fan

The other day I watched “Ishqiya,” the latest Bollywood offering from the insanely talented Vishal Bhardwaj’s stable, and I was so impressed, that I felt the need to let all my social network friends know what a great movie it was. The obvious question is: how do I compare “Ishqiya” with the recent big banner productions, “3 Idiots,” and “My name is Khan” (MNIK). If you think you have got a clue from the title of this blog, then you may be in for a surprise.

On a cinematic experience scale, I rate “Ishqiya” above “3 Idiots,” followed by MNIK.

But this blog is not about which movie I liked the most. This blog is about whether I am any less of a fan of King Khan. The answer is a big thundering “NO”! I am not a fan because my hero delivers the brainiest or even the most entertaining movies—there are other people whom I genuinely admire to cater to that need—I am a fan because I intensely enjoy the evolving human connection with him. As Eve Ensler’s recent book’s title proudly declares, ‘I am an emotional creature.’ I have grown up and am still growing up watching, liking, and emotionally connecting with the person that Shah Rukh Khan(SRK) is through his films. This connection is more real than a fantasy, and more fantastic than reality—the perfect twilight zone that I have willingly created for myself.

I know I am not the only one who feels this way. I think at some level, this blog took shape in my head when I read a very well-written tribute to SRK by another blogger Suhel Banerjee, the blog post titled, “My Name Is Khan – An Unabashed Fan Post”. Suhel writes, “It's been a little over a day since I came back from the theatre after watching Sir's latest offering - My Name Is Khan. Since then I have made several well meaning and failed attempts to review the movie. That's when I realised that the idol worshipping fan inside me won't let the wannabe movie critic come out till he has had his say. First heart, then head as Sir famously said in so many of his movies.” Thank you, Suhel. I couldn’t have expressed it any better myself.

So what is it about SRK that is so appealing? He is not the most good-looking person on earth. I have seen him perform live on a stage show, and I’ll be honest, I was not swept away. He looked ordinary. He definitely looks better on screen or even in the still shots, when the camera closes in, and you get a glimpse of the energy bubbling inside him exuding through his eyes. I hate that he smokes. I worry that he will die of lung cancer. I hate when he tries to act oversmart, and makes a stupid joke. But I love when his eyes well up in a talk show on TV, talking about his mother, who had died before she could see her son become a superstar—his greatest regret in life. You get the drift. I feel involved.

The fact that he is rather limited in terms of his acting ability, even after so many years in the industry, is actually quite endearing. When he acts really well—for example, in “Chak De India” his work is superlative and beyond criticism—everyone is still pleasantly surprised. As Raja Sen, the movie critic at Rediff so aptly describes while reviewing MNIK, “We know his name. Each and every one of us. He's been the country's de facto Superstar -- a position which inevitably brings its share of can't-act brickbats, the kind Brad [Pitt] and Tom[Cruise] still face with every release -- for nearly two decades[.]”

Surprisingly, I do not have the same kind of unconditional indulgence for Kajol. Arguably, she is a much better actor than SRK. When I watched “Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge,” in 1995, I liked SRK and Kajol equally. But while Kajol still reminds me of the young girl that I was, SRK reminds me of the journey that I have had from 1995 till now. Unfair towards Kajol? Perhaps. Irrationally lenient towards SRK? Of course! That’s why I am a ‘fan,’ and not an unbiased connoisseur, when it comes to SRK.

Over the years, Shah Rukh Khan has transcended the stature of a star, or even the stature of a mere human being in my mind. He has become almost a concept, or may be an abstract theory that I use to explain some of my apparently weird logics or idiosyncratic thoughts, convictions and/or actions.

Let me elaborate with an example. Last November, a close friend and I went on to enjoy a girls-only trip in the beautiful coastal town of Mendocino, away from our families. Being eternally-jaded working moms, we were justfiably thrilled when the trip was drawing near. We had made time for a luxurious pedicure session, and had planned to take perfect vacation pictures of us relaxing with our legs stretched on a poolside lounger--the camera panning on our freshly-pedicured toes. But when we actually went to Mendocino, the holiday feeling was so immersive on its own, that taking pictures to prove that we were really having a good time seemed superfluous. That’s when I discovered, the pedicure was more than a pedicure---it was an embodiment of the excitement that we felt at the prospect of an upcoming vacation. Much in the same way, Shah Rukh Khan is more than a Bollywood superstar. He is an embodiment of the irrational but immensely pleasing sways of my mind. Coming back from the vacation, I updated my Facebook status as, “Pedicure is Shah Rukh Khan in Mendocino.” Readers were expectedly confused, but I knew what I meant :-)

My name is fan, and I am not shy about admitting it.

Parallel Journeys

All of us walk side by side with others, sometimes as silent spectators (if not as voyeurs), and sometimes as companions.

I remember last year around this time I decided to appear for an important professional examination. One of my then-pregnant colleagues took the journey with me from the first day I decided that I was going to sit for that exam to the very last day when I declared triumphantly that I have passed. She didn’t have to share astute strategies of tackling the exam with me. It was not even in her practice area. But she got all excited about sharing her knowledge and proven strategies of exam success, because she enjoyed the shared journey. It allowed her to look back at her own days of taking competitive exams, the thrills of it —without actually having to do the drill herself— rather than thinking 24/7 about preparing herself for the life-after-baby. I was already a mother of a preschooler. I guess I needed the distraction of preparing for an exam. But at the same time I was also walking the vicarious walk of a first-time mom-to-be—from accompanying my colleague to a prospective daycare close to work that she was excited to find out, to sharing the ‘worried-Asian-mothers-in-laws-whose-pregnant-daughters-in-law-were-still-working’ stories. For women, it is all about compartmentalizing their life into these little boxes called work, family, hobbies etc., and happily seeing the demarcations blur.

Very recently, I took a parallel journey with another close friend, who just relocated back to India. She epitomized what a good neighbor should be. We knew each other from our undergraduate days in India. Then we happened to enroll at the same graduate school, happened to have kids at the same time (second kid for her, first for me), and happened to land in the same neighborhood in the bay area (at different times though)—none of it pre-coordinated, but all of it working fantastically for both me and my friend, and for our respective children.

It is not a secret that over time, most first-generation immigrants perfect the skill of living simultaneously in two worlds. With Obama as the President of the United States, you don’t even have to be sheepish about admitting your dual life these days. We pay equal attention to the gossip columns on Bollywood and Hollywood. We weep when our elderly parents let us know that they are managing fine by themselves, finally accepting the fact that their bright children are doing too well in their adopted land to come back, and then on the next day, we gloat in the glory of being ‘truly global’ in the flat world. Still, when a close friend actually moves back to India, we can’t help but feel sad. To compensate, we match virtual strides with the ones who are going back, and sometime we more than compensate—we actually have fun along the way!

For me the funniest experience was when I visited the Open House event that their realtor organized to sell their house. It was my friend’s husband’s bright idea that I go to the Open House event, pretending to be a prospective homebuyer, to have a feel about how things were going. I have visited their house countless times after we had moved into the neighborhood. I thought I’d raise suspicion, because it’d be hard for me to pull off the scrutinizing look of a prospective buyer who is visiting for the first time. But I guess I did an adequate job, assisted by the fact that with other families flowing in and out, it was impossible for the realtors to track my minutest expressions. I dutifully asked why the owners were selling, was I going to get a good deal because the owners were in a hurry to sell, how good the nearest elementary school was—the array of questions you are supposed to ask while considering buying a home. I even asked about the fruit trees in the backyard! And before I left, I promised to come back with my family for another round of look the next day.

Later that week, my friend informed me that the house sold quickly without any hassle. I was really happy for them. We hovered when they packed their final suitcases. Our children played together and sat down together to eat dinner. Nobody was overly sentimental. With emails and Facebook and photo sharing over the web, is there any real reason to be sentimental? But then why do you check your mailbox eagerly for the mail that describes how their first week in India was?

I am sure my friend left a piece of her heart in California too. She’ll think of her car still being driven on California roads by the current owner. She’ll think about our kids frolicking together in the swimming pool. She’ll think about the kids hiding inside an empty cardboard box left at her house after all their stuff had been shipped to India. She’ll think about orchestrating a business trip to the bay area as soon as the settling logistics are taken care of.

You can’t experience everything in your lifetime. But you sure can experience a lot more than just the things going on in your own life when you let yourself take the parallel journeys with friends that life brings your way.

The Secret Life of Inspiration

I went to listen to Andre Agassi talking about his hugely popular autobiography "Open" this Friday afternoon at the Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto. Agassi has always been my favorite on and off the tennis court, because I saw a vulnerability in his eyes that I related to long back. And now I know a lot more about why I identified with him in the first place. Among a lot of other things, his need to feel 'inspired' to achieve something is uncannily similar to what goes on in my mind many a time.

Agassi reveals in the book that he envied his arch rival Pete Sampras because of Pete's 'dullness.' "I wish I could emulate his spectacular lack of inspiration, and his peculiar lack of need for inspiration," Agassi says. I recognize a deep frustration beneath this seemingly self-serving (and frankly, somewhat insulting towards his esteemed opponent) comment. Only a person who is in a constant pursuit of inspiration will understand that how you wish you were not so dependent on inspiration, because the lack of need for it is so much simpler.

I myself have struggled with my dependence on inspiration. I have let myself feel crippled when I left myself having to deal with multiple projects at various stages of unfinishedness, because I kept moving onto the 'next' project in search of inspiration. Perhaps we all need to cultivate an 'autopilot' mode to go through the days when we are not feeling specially productive, but still need to tackle the day's deliverables. Somehow accomplishing something even at your most uninspired ground state often self-triggers the cycle of inspiration. I now consciously try that self-triggering process by sticking a little longer to the most uninspiring of the projects to get it moving rather than dumping it altogether.

The other intriguing dichotomy about inspiration is that your own uninspired moment can be inspiring for others. When you are relatively less spirited yourself, you often listen to others or accommodate others better, and they feel encouraged and inspired. I have experienced this first hand in various ways. I tend to reach out more and be more sympathetic to others when I am looking for inspiration myself. Me feeling the lack of inspiration has sometimes resulted in some substantive charitable work, or sometimes in something as simple as me being a better mom/wife at home.

Coming back to Agassi, I was very touched by how candidly he admitted that tennis didn't feel inspiring to him for a very long time. But then he reached a point where he either had to walk away or choose tennis--which was his life, whether he admitted that or not. "I didn't walk away, and I chose it," he said. "Once I chose my life, once I took ownership of my life, the scale started to get balanced with what it was giving me. ...Tennis gave me [my] school; tennis then gave me my wife; tennis then gave me the time to raise my children and to live with them, and then it wasn't lost on me. ...It no longer only came with a price."

I must thank Agassi for confirming that the pursuit for inspiration is such an integral and organic part of one's being and evolving. He has inspired me for sure.

Two…One…(Zero)...Smoke the Ganesha

My son made me a blogger in 2006. Being a new mother felt so marvelous, that I couldn’t help but start blogging. In summer 2009, my ego has made me a micro-blogger.

Micro-blogging at Twitter (and Facebook) has made me lazy enough that I haven’t been blogging at all lately, while my number of tweets is speeding towards century, and friends have been noticing the spike in the frequency of my Facebook status updates. I knew this would happen. I even wrote a blog when I signed up for my new Twitter account, speculating whether I would blog less (and micro-blog more) down the line. Sadly, my speculation proved to be true. And, what seems to be a collateral damage, I have become a more narcissistic writer than I ever was! When I used to solely blog, I felt conscious blogging about myself all the time. Thus, I used to intersperse the “me-blogs” with blogs on more universal topics or short stories. But micro-blogging and other social networking tools inherently stoke narcissism, and somewhere in that apparently innocuous ego-driven journey, I ignored my original muse—my son, who has been appearing less and less in my creative output.

Well, I have finally decided not to resort to the lure and convenience of micro-blogging before I finish this long overdue ode to my son.

Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t been any less fascinated by my son than I used to be when he was a baby. In many ways, his current 4-year-old persona is much more interesting than his babyhood, as he now possesses the skills to express himself in so many different ways. But a few things have sure changed. Firstly, I now take my son as a constant in my life, so that I don’t feel the need to chronicle every experience and emotion associated with him, as if they are evanescent treasures. Secondly, I have gradually felt more comfortable writing about things other than my son, when I realized that I reach wider audience that way. Again, ego takes over at times, but even a mom is allowed to have an ego, right? However, honestly, a kid has so much more potential to create a ‘writable moment’ for you, just because their world is so unpolluted. Let me just try to illustrate.

My son is totally into the idea of recycling. Every Thursday morning, he would accompany me to the big recycle bin in the backyard to dump the co-mingled recyclable trash in the house. Now, we are talking about empty glass bottles and metallic cans here, which do make a lot of noise when you dump them all together. It was a little too much for my son, and one day told me, “Mamma, can I do the paper recycling only, because the bottles yell at my ear.” I couldn’t have come up with that expression “yelling at my ear” to describe the clank myself!

Then there were One and Two. These are the two tiny little goldfishes that are always busy swimming in a glass bowl in my son’s room. They are fairly new acquisitions. I took my son with me for my ‘homecoming’ trip to East coast in September to enjoy my two weeks off between my old job and new job. One of our East coast friends’ son had a goldfish named “Zero.” My son was so inspired by Zero, the goldfish, that he ordered his dad over the phone to buy him goldfishes even before he would go back home from his East coast trip. The Dad obliged. My son obsessed over what to name the goldfishes the whole time we were inside the plane on our return flight. “How about I name them ‘For Here’ and ‘To Go’?” He asked. I thought they were pretty good innovative names. But before I could nod my approval, he said, “How about, ‘Jack’ and ‘Jill’?” By that time, I knew there will be a deluge of suggested names that usually come in pairs. (What’s next? ‘Prosecution’ and ‘Litigation’? Pardon my job-speak.) But he suddenly stopped toying with the names, and said, “I will name them One and Two. They will be the brother and sister of Zero.” The definitive tone in his voice told me that he was done with his exercise in nomenclature, and found the idea of bi-coastal goldfish siblings pretty darn satisfying. So we now address our goldfishes as One and Two. Sometimes my son also calls them “Ekta” and “Duto”—literal Bengali translation of One and Two. He practices his Bengali-speaking skills with his goldfishes when he is in a good mood.

Another time, it was “the poor kid” incidence. We frequently tell our son that he should not buy any more new toys, because he already has too many of them, and he should think about the poor kids who don’t have any toys. After the lecture in socialism, we went to see a newborn at a very close friend’s place, and my son declares, “This must be a poor kid, because I am not seeing too many toys here.” I seriously hope my friend didn’t hear him! But, to tell the truth, I sometime wish we could go back to his newborn days, where the number of toys were under control!

The latest quotable quote that came from my son is, “Let’s smoke the Ganesha.” Now this asks for a little bit of context for the uninitiated. Late September to mid October is the season of religious festivals in India, and the diaspora celebrates those with equal enthusiasm. My husband and I are not remarkably religious persons, but we love the celebrations. Our son may turn out to be a more spiritual being than either of us, as he is plain fascinated by the colorful and gorgeous action and paraphernalia of deity worship. He has managed to put up a shrine under a rhododendron shrub in our backyard, and borrowed a decorative metal “Ganesha” (The Hindu Elephant God) figurine from the fireplace mantle to grace the shrine. He puts fresh flowers there whenever he remembers, and asks Ganesha to keep everyone in his family safe and healthy. He even prayed for his best friend on his birthday. Now he wants us to invite all our friends, and have a full-fledged puja and celebration in our backyard. Yesterday he picked up some fragrant incense sticks from an Indian store when his dad took him there for grocery shopping. He has seen his grandma motion the smoking incense sticks in circles while serenading the deities in India. He asked me, “Mamma, can you light these sticks, because I want to smoke the Ganesha.” I obliged and he ‘smoked’ his Ganesha with the “smokers,” the term that he has coined to describe the sticks.

I can not finish this piece without sharing his most famous quote: “It takes a teamwork to make a baby.” I am sure he learnt it from his teachers, but when delivered by a precocious 4-year-old kid, it gets a special dimension.

I am glad I finally got to write my tribute to my constant source of inspiration. Now can I go back to being lazy and narcissistic again? :)

Full Circle in the Valley

Blackberry is addictive. No question. Even a non-workaholic like me check my message first thing after I open my eyes every morning even before I get out of the bed. It has become a reflex action.

Mine is an East coast law firm with big and small offices in the West Coast. By the time I get up at the Pacific coast, my inbox is already populated with a daily dose of professional newsletters, routine conflict check emails, and lately, with motivational messages from the managing partners from the East coast offices narrating recent success stories of engaging new clients and new businesses. This morning was no exception.

The firm CEO sent an excited message about engaging new business from a tech client, GigOptix, “a leading provider of electronic engines for the optically connected digital world.” This is a photonics communications company. Once you switch to patent law, it becomes a professional necessity to dilute your subject matter expertise in order to cover the breadth of technologies that come your way. Still, being a Ph.D. engineer who wrote a thesis on photonic devices, I got very curious to explore the extent of our firm’s engagement in GigOptix matters. Are we going to do their patent work? Am I going to be part of the GigOptix team at my firm?

I went to GigOptix’s website to refresh my memory regarding their technology and to know more about the key people running the company. The CEO, Dr. Avi Katz’s name rings a rather loud bell. Where have I heard his name before?

A search in the nooks and crannies of my brain for information stored long ago takes a few seconds. Oh, I remember now. I studied one of his patents on gold-tin eutectic solders when I was working as a first year graduate research assistant at the University of Maryland, back in 1997! The patent was granted in 1993 on an invention that Dr. Katz came up with while he worked at AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey. (I later read in his bio at the GigOptix website that he has more than 70 patents!)

Back in 1997, I had no inkling that I would end up being a patent law professional myself. I had groomed myself to be an academic researcher. But patent law appealed more as a career during some introspective moments while I was pregnant, and I joined a boutique intellectual property law firm in Washington DC in 2005.

Strangely, even at my first job in patent law, I had these “full circle” happenstances. I applied to my DC patent law firm, as I knew their name through the University of Maryland’s Technology Transfer office, who handled the patent application on my graduate work on electronic packaging (along with my Ph.D. advisor and another researcher). Coincidentally, my first boss at the DC law firm was the same patent attorney who wrote and successfully prosecuted my patent application into an issued patent. I talked to him over the phone as an inventor in 1999, six years before I became his colleague.

In late summer 2008, we moved to the silicon valley as my husband joined Google. (Since we are on the topic of coincidences, it won’t be completely irrelevant if I mention that I wrote patent applications for Google at my DC firm even before my husband joined the company.) I joined the Palo Alto office of my current law firm in September, 2008. In November, 2008, a big group of lateral attorneys from a now-defunct law firm joined our firm. It didn’t take long to find another coincidence. Apparently, my current next-door neighbor, who came with the big group as a lateral Partner, knows my second boss at my DC firm very well. They had adjoining offices at the Patent Office when they were both US Patent Office Examiners!

Coming back to Dr. Katz and GigOptix, I am thrilled at the possibility of working with someone who inspired me when I was a young researcher more than a decade ago. Silicon valley is full of these people, who started as hard-core researchers, and then took on greater/more diverse roles in technology companies. The valley makes me feel everyday that I have landed in the right place. This is where you and your friend talk about “copyleft” while shopping for school supplies at Target. And it does not hurt, when Meg Whitman (ex-eBay CEO) says at a conference, “You look familiar”! I am sure Meg mistook me for someone else, but I got my anecdote alright.

For a techie, the circle is not completed until you come to the valley.

Tweet Tweet: Is that the sound of change for a Blogger?

I have finally taken the plunge. I am on Twitter now.

I was not a virgin at the social networking scene. I already have Orkut and Facebook accounts. Agreed, that I use them less now than when I first began, but one thing remains unchanged—in my mind, I always treat my Orkut and Facebook accounts as platforms to have a conversation with someone, kind of like a public chat room. Twitter to me is more about expressing my little thoughts without necessarily having a conversation. My first “tweet” was not exciting at all: I let the world know that I was going to leave my office in 5 minutes, because my in-laws were coming from India. I didn’t think this information was going to be important to anyone in the world. I was not communicating with anyone to make a plan through my tweet, but still, writing this down and seeing it published on the web felt liberating.

This communication without any specific purpose is the fuel that runs the social networking engine. I have really close friends (including family members), who just don’t see the need for social networking. These are people whose company I really enjoy. But I can clearly see that they don’t get anything out of the experience of social networking without any specific purpose. My personal viewpoint is, you are not forced to use social networking. It is a tool to cater to you, and if you can use it to your advantage, then why not? After all, social networking is still free!

Lately I have attended some high-visibility silicon valley conferences where venture capitalists and tech company executives were pulling their hair out thinking how to monetize this phenomenon of social networking. But I don’t think anyone even dreams of charging the users money for accessing the social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook, Twitter and others. There is just too much competition for the patronage of the users. But people are taking notice at the behavioral patterns of the users that emerge from their social networking footprints. Even video game company CEOs admit that they recognize people’s need to connect socially, and as a result, the famously individualistic traditional model of video gaming is evolving into a more socially-connected playfield, where each player is interacting not only with his/her machine and the virtual characters, but with other real players (often friends rather than strangers across the internet) playing simultaneously.

Coming back to Twitter, I posted three tweets today…all related to my professional field (which is intellectual property law, if you must know). So far I have only used LinkedIn for web-based professional networking (and often for a purpose), but I can see how Twitter can make that social/professional demarcation fuzzy. After all, a thought is a thought, whether personal or professional, and if you happen to be on Twitter at the time that the thought occurs, you are going to tweet, whether you are at home, or at work. I know people set up Twitter profiles devoted to focused topics (including focused professional topics), but I am too lazy for maintaining multiple Twitter profiles. So my tweets are for sure going to be a hodge-podge of whatever is going on in my life.

One thing I am interested to see…is Twitter going to kill or at least influence negatively the blogger in me? After all Twitter is not only about social networking, it is about microblogging too. Till now, I have only blogged when I have had a topic which was at least moderately substantial. Fleeting thoughts sometimes begged to be written down, but if they didn’t fall under the umbrella of a theme, I couldn’t entertain them to be included in a blog. I also blog when I feel like a rain cloud: so heavy with unreleased words in my brain, that writing is the only way to feel light again. I guess Twitter is going to provide some sort of shelter to those flickers of random thoughts, and there is a real chance that I will experience frequent catharsis, and will not feel the need to unburden myself through a blog as frequently as I do now.

Well, flash fictions didn’t kill short stories. May be blogging and micro-blogging can co-exist too. I have to wait and watch myself. And what’s more, I think a middle ground will emerge. Twitter has this 140-character limit, so you are forced to keep your entry short and succinct. But what if you need a little more room to complete the story? There is a program called Twitzer (a Firefox add-on) that shortens your text so that you can go beyond 140 characters. There is a real chance that someday somebody will offer a formal platform for mini-blogs.

Until then, happy tweeting (and blogging).