A certain ‘she’ wrote a seemingly simple mail sometime back. Articulate and without much extravagance, she said that she could ‘sense’ that I was an ‘interesting’ person from whatever she read, but the blog ‘looked dated’. I went over her mail a couple of times. ‘Looks dated’ appeared six times in three paragraphs.
That was setting one energetic cat amidst all the sedentary pigeons. That something needed to be done was becoming evident. Given that this ‘she’ was a regular on the blog and generally had good intentions. Plus this wasn’t exactly the first time I was hearing this. Numerous friends had mentioned it. Many times over. Yet, this time, for some unknown reason, it was action time !
Furtive thought trains lead to ideas that were vacuously vapid or those that required an extravagance of time and money. (Both of which were are in perpetual short supply). If not any of those, whatever emerged from convoluted whorls of the brain, were ‘already taken’ !
Over time, laziness set in. The blog looked the way it always looked, while several attempts at ‘good posts’ came alive as temporal eccentricities! Readers kept coming and going. Ofcourse, some of you have stayed on, which I would like to believe is a function of arrangement of words here, although, I have a lurking feeling that it perhaps a consequence of alignment of my stars.
Either way, thank you!
Many other readers left comments like ‘ I read your blog, the pictures were nice’ which said quite a heapful on the quality of the writing. But life went on. The sun rose in the East and religiously went to the west. The Chinese were conquering the world. Scandal birth rate competed with rabbits’. The milk man was regular and late. Rentals were up. Work kept me occupied. Life was normal.
It was then, that yet another ‘he’ wrote rather plainly, that no matter what I thought of myself, I was no Scott Adams. To dramatise that further, quipped that having Dilbert as a profile picture was akin to having ‘your neighbours kid as your facebook picture’. That dramatisation hit the nail far and deep, not only for the muscle to quake but also the bone to ache.
My erstwhile profile picture
The silver lining though, was that he had presented a seemingly simple solution : Just change the profile picture. ok. First step to the solution. Ok ?
Voila !
Immediately ( a.k.a few weeks) a few precocious folks that are in the know of such cerebral matters were asked. Several ideas were tossed at a speed that was impossible to catch. Many went over the head and some went overboard.
‘If your blog carries your name, your photograph must be the mascot’ insisted most of them. I had to politely explain to them that the attempt was at reader ‘excitement’ and not readership extinction.
Blessed with a plain and forgettable face, bulges in wrong areas and recessionary trends in the rest, I could make a pretty picture in an ad for ‘this man transformed himself using our product’ with a before and after picture.
To spare you a long and laborious story, a new logo was to be created. That stood for ‘Kavis Musings’. Amongst the few options that came up, the missus rooted for this.
“It represents you. Your pictures. And your writing”.
It was stated differently though. Something along the lines of ‘Somekind of a loud mouth with an air of self anointed importance, and a wide eyed grin, waxing eloquence over seminal topics of global importance, that range from the way Trash Cans are designed to spelling mistakes in hoardings’. (And so on. You get the drift. Don’t you?)
Which when politely asked to explain, was eventually translated to : “It represents you. Your pictures. And your writing”. I quite agreed.
So there. That’s my new digital identity. Hopefully, you will like it. And continue to shower your tolerance and genorisity by coming back here.
Quite obviously you will see huge hoardings in your hometown announcing the change. Incase you don’t see those hoardings, please keep looking.
Ohh! I almost forgot. That was blog post number 500.
