A well meaning colleague slithered up to me the other day and muttered softly in my ear. Do you not want to earn a bit on the side with your blog?
I gave him a bemused look and added: "Meaning....?" Those little bits of advertisements that bloggers transplanted on their pages, my friend, said my colleague.
I gave it a 7-second thought and added: "But I didn't start off by wanting to earn money on the side." Anyway, I didn't want to sound too saintly by rejecting my kinds of material wealth, so I perked up my ears and said: "Details, please?"
For the next 45 minutes, I was an enraptured audience of one, listening to what could be an El Dorado situation for me. Frankly, I know there are more than a handful of very successful bloggers out there in the blue yonder who are happily raking in every bit of gold dust that floats onto their laps.
But I don't count myself as one of them. I don't mean I am not interested in getting rich but I actually give much weightage to my own personal satisfaction, and it is not founded on the soil of organised prosperity.
I don't know a better way of explaining this other than I prefer to just write whatever that strikes my fancy. Sometimes I actually become rather envious of those who seem to enjoy some kind of virtual world fame and benefit enormously from it all.
"How do they do it?" I ask all the time. Apparently, it begins with an enormous amount of Internet traffic that comes a blogger's way and the method he employs to cull the hits and bounce the signals off the financial wall.
If all these sounds too complicated, it's because I am a complete idiot in explaining a simple situation. For the life of me, I am really in the dark about the Get-Rich-Intelligently 101 procedure.
For one thing, I am happy that there are those who are financially secure due to their worldly wise ways. I guess not everybody is born to ride on that gravy train. To be honest though, I wish I am sitting in the coach section of that wagon right now but life apparently likes to play jokes on characters like me.
So right now, I am quite contented writing a bit of gibberish on the side and enjoying what I am writing even if nobody in this world of 6.5 billion people is interested in what I have to say.
I believe my situation has been described aptly as "spitting in the wind". Of course, everybody likes to wake up early in the morning, with nothing better to do than to logon and count the dollars pouring into some obscure bank account overseas.
I wish I could say "hey, that's me!" But I can't so I just humbly mutter (under my breath), "oh darn, back to shoveling coal down in the mine again!"
To all those who have succeed, please do not send me your secret formulas. I have enough of those, and they call come with a price tag. In case, nobody notices, block heads like me are actually not rich. Not even well off.
What we are, has been described by social behavourial scientists as drifting in the meandering tide of mediocrity. Right now, there must be about 150 million bloggers. An editor from England expounded some statistics that propounded that at last count (July 2006), there were about 50 million bloggers.
And this number doubles every six months! When I first learnt about this, I uttered: "Oh God! That's a whole lot of non-famous people." It was a very humbling revelation. At least, it was for me.
So for now, whenever I think and write I keep in mind that there are more than one hundred million bloggers out there who say and think practically the same things that crawl, slither, or slip through my mind.
Perhaps they don't say the same thing in the same way but generally the thoughts are all there. There's hardly any originality left. If anybody has any originality of thought, he would have been a millionaire yesterday.
But do not lose heart, dear chaps, we blockheads or bloggers (whichever strikes your fancy) have our own sanctuary that provides more than fresh air or money. We have the temerity to an indifferent world what we think of myriad situations. Most of the time, not based on facts or sound arguments but simply on impulse and gut feeling that we might be right during a fleeting minute in a single that of 24 hours.
There, I have said it all. Go and write and let your heart be contented.
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