For 12 years, I was a low paid news-nomad equipped with an eager mind, a thoughtful heart and an adolescent commitment to social change. As a close colleague told me those days, the newspaper I was working for in Chennai was an unparalleled platform for advocating change and my salary, an incentive for public service. I immensely enjoyed those days of journalism and writing - a great learning experience and a journey that taught me what real India was. It was also a journey in which I met thousands of extremely interesting people from across the world whom I wouldn't have met otherwise. They shaped my perspectives, my life and my knowledge. The language I tried to produce was based on scientific evidence and was soaked in reality.
An early encounter I had in this journey was with an emerging health challenge that was spreading fear and panic: the HIV/AIDS epidemic. That was in 1991, five years since the virus was detected in India. Since then, I have been travelling with the epidemic, both as a journalist and as a human being. A large number of my friends, women and men, are people living with HIV/AIDS. While some of them died, some of them are living valiant lives. I learned the meaning of resilience and triumph of human spirit from them. I still continue my journey with the epidemic, closely observing the pathways of its spread and its impact on people.
Six years ago, I left journalism and joined the international development sector. It was the beginning of a new learning experience. New skills, new acquaintances and exciting new opportunities. However, a few months ago, I realised I had stopped writing and my instincts and skills have begun to atrophy. The question before me was, whether I go back to the print media or create something of my own.
Luckily, I am living in a world of Google, YouTube and iTunes - a world in which the new unavoidable element we ought to consume to be valid and alive is called bandwidth. It is cheap and universal. So here I am, back to writing. This time, I need to call it blogging. As digital guru Nicholas Negroponte says in his seminal work "Being Digital", when there are bits, why do I need atoms?
Photo credit: G. Pramod Kumar, 2006
