so-did-i The Story Behind

It was a dark lonely night. Though it was not raining, the sky was overcast and there was a sinister darkness all around. To add to the gloomy mood was the heavy wind, raising the dust, waiting to make me a part of it. For some lost moments in my history, I did not know what happened. When the senses came back with the urgency of a kolkata tram, I uttered "so-did-i" survive that?

Hold on! that is not the story behind this blog and me. Why this interest to tell about the story behind this blog? I was lazy all this while not to tell this. Though it is not as dramatic as the narration above, it has some elements to it which might interest you to probe things further.

Past
I used to have and still have about three - four more blogs, which have no posts for ages. That is not to say that they lack good content. Those of you interested might read my Israeli journal at The Haifa Post, Stories from the Nether is a where I write my short stories, you can find some timeless stuff in the technology domain at Techno Whizz. This blog so-did-i used to have a different url, and I don't remember it any longer.

The Story
It was some time in the spring of 2006 that, I an incorrigible optimist found myself at the abyss of despair and disillusion. It was around this time that the titanic of relationship hit the iceberg.Aound this time, I came across this small simple book Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. The book talks about the usage of punctuation and how it effects the meaning. The following is what Wikipedia entry says about the title.
"

The title of the book is an amphibology, a verbal fallacy arising from an ambiguous grammatical construction, and derived from a joke on bad punctuation:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

“Why?” asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

“Well, I’m a panda,” he says at the door. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

"
It was amusing and thought provoking at the same time.

I was not interested in anything at that time, was just moving through my work mechanically. It was at this juncture that I hit upon this book and was immensely drawn towards the spirit of the content. A few days later, I felt better and started blogging again.

I felt an urge to change the blog url. Inspired from the book sighted earlier, it became so- did- i. The thing in my mind was "so, did i come out of the depression?". And suddenly it struck me that the words "so did i" meant different things, depending on where I position the punctuation. And thus was born this blog christened.

Growing pangs
The title of the blog during those days was "i Think, i Wait, i Fast" my favorite quote from the book titled Siddhartha written by Hermann Hesse. My life also took a different note about this time, I decided to quit a well paying job at Intel to tread the path of entrepreneurship. The focus of the posts shifted to technology and a few random things that I wanted to write about. I was brimming with enthusiasm and the title of changed to "iDeas gAlore", an inspiration from pluggd.in when it was called "idea Labs".

I left the entrepreneurship path in the month of February 2007 and a little after I got my current job, i started blogging about startups in India, entrepreneurship, and lot of other things. It was around this time that I got interested in design, usability and user experience. A lot of layout changes and design changes later, you see the blog in its current form. It is a very tough job to maintain posting regularly, but I believe I did a decent job till now. The learning I got from blogging is immense, I also got to meet some amazing people through it. There is nothing in this world for which I would give away my blogging.

The Future
As mentioned earlier, it is increasingly difficult to maintain the expectations that this blog has raised. I am very happy that people know me my by the blog name rather than my given name. This blog now has become a center for usability and design. I will keep writing on those topics for some time to come with occasional drifts to startups, entrepreneurship, and all other things that interest me.

Thanks to all of you for reading this blog. Would love to hear from you on what you feel about this blog.

Related Posts:
Entrepreneurship Presentation at NirmaLabs
To My First Love
Weaving Magic
The Girl at Night

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