One month of this blog

I started this blog one month ago. I installed a sitemeter a week later. I had e-mailed and sms-ed my friends to take a look. I also started learning about blog-sphere by going through various kinds of blogs, making searches by some key terms related to my interests. I left comments on others’ blogs.

Over 1,000 visitors have come so far. On average, over 40 people visit each day, spending about 6 minutes here. The lowest no. of visitors on a day was 24, and the highest 149. The visitors so far have been from 39 countries, from the 5 continents.

A few people leave their comments. A few people are regular visitors. A few people have carried some of my posts on their blogs. A few people have put me on their blog-roll.

But most importantly, through my engagement with blog-sphere and through my blog – I have re-connected with an old college friend (after 26 years), as well as with another college friend I had lost touch with, and also found some new friends with whom I feel a close commonality of sensibility, through reading their blogs and then exchanging e-mails with.

Who is visiting? Who is reading? Why? How do they feel about what they read? How does it affect them? And is all this at all significant in any sense?

For at least 15 years now, I have wanted to be a (full-time) writer, of fiction and non-fiction, publishing book after book. Though that hasn’t happened, and nothing has been published, I have written a lot, especially over the last 9 years.

Self-publishing, through a blog – can be a writer’s ultimate dream, and shorn of all the attendant things which have nothing to do with writing per se. You write, you want people to read this and respond, people from all over the world read what you write, immediately as well as later, they respond, you share a relationship with your readers, all your writing is available for anyone to read, anywhere, at any time, for ever – what more can one ask for?!

In one of my first posts (on 27 June 2006), I wrote about the name of my blog, inspired by the book The Prince who became a Cuckoo, by Lo-Dro, one of Tibet’s most cherished tales, illustrative of Buddhist teachings. That was a split second choice, at the moment of filling up the blogger registration template. I felt as if that tale - and its elaboration of journey, enlightenment and song - was all that mattered.

A new journey has begun through this blog, something new has started in my life, and even in just one month it has been personally enriching. I hope readers have got something out of it as well. The future is pregnant with possibility.

The cuckoo looks forward to every new day, of journey, enlightenment and song!