Blogging for a living (The Goan)
Frederick FN Noronha फ्रेड्रिक नोरोन्या *فريدريك نورونيا
Blogging for a living
Heather Fernandes-Colaco/The Goan December 13, 2014
It’s like writing a journal, except it’s no longer private. Like online diaries that allow you to share your thoughts and ideas with the world, blogging, however voyeuristic it may seem, means big business, although it never really starts that way
Up until a few years ago, society sneered at anyone who quit their high-paying corporate jobs to become a writer, an artist or even a musician as these weren’t considered ‘real jobs’. Slowly, however, people began to realize that their passions need not remain mere hobbies. Remember the old adage, ‘If you do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life’? So people began to ditch their daily jobs to become professional guitarists, painters and even bloggers. “A blog contains a writers' own experiences, observations, opinions, etc. It affords you with the opportunity to have a conversation, and to answer any questions that people may have,” says Ulrike Rodrigues, a Canadian writer with a Goan lineage who arrived in Porvorim in 2008 with the intent of exploring Goa’s villages on a traditional Indian cycle. “People back in Canada are very curious about Goa. And because I’m a foreigner in this land, I tend to see things differently. The use of mothballs as air fresheners, for example, is simple inconceivable in North America,” she says adding that her blog ‘Girl Gone Goa: Travel, sex, magic and cycling in an Indian state’ is keenly followed by both the Goan diaspora abroad and foreigners alike.
Like Rodrigues, Helene D'Souza, the founder of masalaherb.com, a popular global food, culture and travel blog was also born and raised abroad, until she took an educational odyssey to Goa,where she met her husband and settled down. Emphasizing on how it is important to not just write at regular intervals, but to write quality content, D’Souza says, “When you blog, it is important to be informative and to entertain. There is no magic formula. Just be yourself.”
While it is true that blogging is a means of just documenting your thoughts and experiences so that you do not forget the people you’ve met or the places you’ve seen, it almost always starts off as a personal journey. An ‘eternal nomad’ Goyal has lived in 15 cities across India. “The first few years, I just blogged for myself,” she says, adding, “When you travel, after a few years, you tend to forget. So I started writing everything down as a way to document my memories.” ‘Inditales’ was started ten years ago and while it may be one of Goyal’s most popular blogs, “it is my business innovation blog, that I sometimes give step-motherly treatment to that earns me my bread and butter”. Goyal also has a third blog called ‘Anureviews’ which is in the Limca Book of Records for the maximum number of reviews across genres by a single author.
“As a blogger, it is important to identify your niche,” says Goyal. Which of course takes time. But 13 year old Trusha Ganesh defies this logic. A student of Vidya Vikas Academy, Margao, Ganesh started her first blog, ‘chiqutam.wordpress.com’ when she was only nine. “When I was younger, I used to write all the time – poems, stories, essays. So much so that my father decided to set up a blog for me. Everything I wrote, I would upload. A few months later, I decided I wanted to write about something specific and that’s when I started ‘preteenrebel.wordpress.com’,” Ganesh who is also the owner of two other blogs, namely ‘woofdiaries.wordpress.com’ and ‘theklutzdaily.wordpress.com’ informs. When asked about what gets people clicking, Ganesh promptly states, “Funny, humorous stuff of course.”
Beyond the blogosphere
And if you thought that bloggers were staid, boring, geeky people who spent all their time in front of a computer screen, you wouldn’t be more wrong. According to Revati Upadhya, the voice behind the words, pictures and music on ‘Haathi Time’, and all the food adventures on ‘Hungry and Excited’, the blogging world allows you to connect with so many new people on a much larger scale. “No matter what part of India I’ve travelled to, I’ve always had a blogger friend who I could meet or even stay with.” So you’re not just sharing details about your personal life, but also learning about others, while never knowing how many lives you could be touching. “I visited Bihar a few years ago and of course I blogged about it on my travel blog, posted pictures, etc,” says Goyal recounting a beautiful, albeit completely accidental experience. “Some months later, I received a mail from an Australian lady living in Calcutta asking about a little boy in one of my pictures. Apparently, she had seen the 5-year old selling chai in one of the little gulleys in Calcutta and suspected that he was a victim of child trafficking. While I did not know who the boy was, I did know where and exactly when I had clicked the picture. Eventually the child was reunited with his parents.”
So the next time you have a thought, why not write it down. It’s like having a conversation. Just write whatever’s on your mind, hit publish and that’s it. Your work is out there, accessible to millions.