Wednesday, December 19, 2007

To Blog or Not to Blog ? 'Tis the question....

What were my hobbies, I was asked, by one of the questionnaires I was to fill up as a part of my application to an MBA course. "Reading?" I thought. A Tom Sawyer in Class 5, a Room on the Roof in Class 9 and an Imperial Blandings in the final year of Engineering being the only three books one has read in his 24 year long lifespan doesn't qualify one as a reader per-se ? Or maybe it does! So I put down reading as a hobby without much thought. To think of a second hobby turned out to be a much tougher task than I had imagined it to be. What did a B-school have to do with an applicant's hobbies I wondered. As if academics, sports, extra curriculars weren't enough to judge one's personality,character... and all the other irrelevant stuff these B-schools seem to be interested in. 'Essay writing!!!'.. the words flashed past my mind. After all, if one is interested in reading (as he says he is and as is thus believed), it's quite natural for that one to be interested in writing as well. And as luck would have it, my mother had preserved the 2 certificates I had managed to win in essay writing competitions in Class ... ahem.. 7! Essay writing competition won in Class 7 to buttress claims for good writing skills for an MBA course? Well, as they say, something is better than nothing and thus I picked up the pen to put down Essay Writing as a cherished hobby. Just as I was about to scribble those two words on the questionnaire my pen refused to move. Somehow I felt those words didn't belong to that piece of paper. I was applying to a post graduation course, I reminded myself, not to a correspondence course in passive journalism. But at the same time I didn't have much of an option. Essay Writing was the only other activity I could count as a hobby of mine. It is in funny situations such as these, when lazy souls such as myself, when left with no option, decide to do that one thing in life which they believe is to be done very rarely. Which is to say, they try to think! And on this rare occasion I felt enlightened when, after an hour-or-so of struggling to think, it struck me that Blogging could be a euphemism for that embarrassing activity which is called Essay Writing. But I didn't even have an account at any blogsite. What the heck, I thought to myself, if I don't have one, I'll create one. And here I am. Having created an account more than a week ago, this paragraph is all i have been able to think of since then. Maybe I should have left it at reading.