With the Internet, the meek inherit the earth

I went to sea in the 1960s. I was 21, filled with a yearning for ships and a love for books. Life at sea used to be slow. The Oil Shock was more than a decade away. Cargo was plentiful,oil cheap, freight rates profitable, and so, there were no bean-counters managing fleets. Ships sailed leisurely, stayed in ports for long spells, crews were large enough to share work amongst, and thank God, there were no restrictions, unlike today, as to drinking on board.

I endlessly bought and read books. My favourite authors were English and country, England to which my ships took me regularly. Happily, I soon discovered and loved the long form writing in the New Yorker. That became the format and style that I still aspire to.

Reading urges you to write, but also daunts you, given the mastery of authors published in print. 

Come year 1995 and come the Internet, everything changed quite quickly. I at once saw the emerging potential, despite the slow dial-up connections that cost you dearly and crashed often, the 640MB or so  hard-disks, and frequent admonishments on a small blue screen that said “You have performed an illegal operation. Your computer will now shut down”- despite all that I was at once smitten by the Internet. 

There was a site called Angelfire, if I recall it right. You could post on it and hey, anyone in the world could see you and may even read you. That was magic. It  was then that I chanced upon a New Yorker cartoon that has since become a classic: It showed a dog at a keyboard saying, “On the Internet no one knows you are a dog.” It was that dog emboldened me. I could sneak in my words and views and not fear being rejected. But I still did not know what it was that I wanted write about, though.

The Internet was not yet a threat to book reading that it has now become. I still read as voraciously as before. I remember that particular day now: I was racing to finish ‘the River Sutra’ by Gita Mehta.  It was about Jains’ rite of perambulating the river Narmada. Soon as I finished it, I found myself restless. How little I knew India, having spent most of my younger years travelling overseas!

Within the next few days I was on a train to Amarkantak, where Narmada begins her long journey. On the train from Bilaspur to Pendra Road, I shared an empty compartment with a brother and sister - Sonu and Golu- with whom I struck a conversation in my scratchy Hindi. They were in their mid-teens, fresh faced and happy. 

I asked them what their dreams were. She closed her eyes and nearly sang to me with the dramatic air of a young girl who was aware of her good looks:”Hey Bhagwan, I pray to you… keep me right here in Chattisgarh after I get married. Please don’t send me away from here”. The boy was taciturn: “I’ll join the fauj”. I asked if his decision to join the army was because of the just concluded Kargil War in which India had thrashed Pakistan. She butted in animatedly and protectively: “No. Ever since he was a boy he has dreamed of serving the country.”

My next week, wandering about in and around Amarkantak was filled with experiences that taught me how vast millions of Indians lived close to their roots, quite content to live their lives out there, the while unconsciously nurturing our millennia old civilisation. And  I, on the other hand, had grown to be an alienated, vain and poorly informed man.

After visits to Varanasi, Sarnath and Delhi I returned to Chennai. I was determined to now travel and write about unknown, unsung Indians who were adding value to the land. Finally, I had something to write about!

Quite quickly I taught myself to design and set up my own site: I called it GoodNewsIndia. Sonu and Golu were the first I wrote about. Their spell over me drowned any fears I ever had about writing. My apprehensions about how my writing might be evaluated was gone.

Between 2000 and 2006 readership of GoodNewsIndia.com grew rapidly. A stream of flattering mails kept me inspired. I was the sole researcher, writer, web designer, financier, web master in those long ago days , when Google was yet to be born and the word blog had not been not been invented. I drove around the country alone in my car, wrote over 200 stories big and small. I had a mailing list of 6,000 when suddenly in 2006, I went snap and stopped publishing it. ‘Why?’, is another story. The site is alive online but I turned to restoring 17 acres of wasteland outside Chennai.