Smiles for Miles

 It has now been more than a decade since I started blogging. I vividly remember living in Patna to execute a project for a major telecom operator when my blog was born. I would pen whatever thoughts occurred to me and soon I found that people were reading my blogposts and commenting too! The excitement of seeing the response was as great as writing the blog. For the first time since I commenced blogging, this has been the longest lull in writing.  The journey was very eventful and I made friends and learned much from my fellow bloggers. 

I got an opportunity to rub shoulders with some very good bloggers like Purba Ray and Alka Gurha whose sharp incisive wit could make even the dreariest subject worthy of attention. The poetic verses of Saru and her penchant for writing posts won her accolades. Awarded travel bloggers like Mridula, Manjulika Pramod, Abhinav Singh, Dipanshu Goyal and Pranshree Devi each have their unique style of seeing the world and taught me to appreciate the beauty when travelling around. I met a few of them at blog events like various workshops held from time to time and events like MP Tourism Mart amongst others. I even managed to get Manjulika for one of the NGO events where she taught children to make things out of waste material! It is a long list and I will not be able to do justice even with best intentions.

I am linking some of my earlier posts where I made mention of some of the bloggers who I came across on this journey. ( http://www.rahulsblogandcollections.com/2016/02/the-perks-of-blogging.html  and http://www.rahulsblogandcollections.com/2016/12/mona-lisa-alive-at-louvre.html)

One of the earliest followers of my blog was Ramya, from Bengaluru who would read regularly and offer her comments. Years went by. and her younger sister Ranjana too read my blogposts. I never got a chance to meet them and once when I was in Paris I chanced upon meeting the younger sister and her husband at the Louvre. I wrote a post about it as given in the link earlier.  I met her again in Delhi a few years later. However, Ramya the elder one moved out of India to the USA  with her husband and except for an exchange of greetings, I never met her.

Come July this year, suddenly Ramya informed me that she would be meeting her folks in Bengaluru and would also come over to Delhi. We met at the Delhi airport and recognised one another instantly as if we had met earlier. I was able to see the real face after almost 15 years since the first interaction on the blog. The next day she wanted to see the parts of Delhi for which the city is known the world over like Akshardham, Chandni Chowk, Gurudwara Sis Ganj, the spice market in Khari Baoli, the clothes market at Nai Sark besides indulgence in the local food. She wanted to experience the ride in local autos and on the metro rail besides exploring some hidden corners in the old city

I consider myself fortunate to have enjoyed her presence and my wife hosted her like one of our family. I could never have imagined that I would make friends for life just by blogging. The perks of befriending almost strangers who now are like an extension of a family can only be accredited to blogging. I am singularly lucky to have met many such blog friends not only in India but in distant places like Singapore, Germany, Switzerland and Sri Lanka too.

A chance foray into the world of blogging has earned me friends with some well-known travel bloggers, food bloggers and lifestyle bloggers. Some of them are printed authors, media persons, IT professionals and accomplished dancers too. The world of blogging has rapidly transformed in recent times with microblogs on Instagram, Facebook, and X( erstwhile Twitter) and the growing popularity of reels and vlogs has turned the tide. I thank many of my fellow bloggers who have made my journey a memorable one and the innocuous hobby tuned me into a blog enthusiast for a lifetime.