All day long yesterday and today, people have been searching online for recipes for sweets. Some of those souls have been misled by Google to my blog, and they have ended up reading my blog posts on making Gulab jamuns, rasagullas, Theratti Paal and even the one on making paneer from cottage cheese. I can only imagine how much havoc I have unknowingly caused in countless homes 
Those online searchers weren’t the only ones reading my old posts. I ended up reading my old recipe posts too – starting with the gulab jamun post, to see how I had made it last year and the mistakes I had made. Reading the post (and especially the comments that followed it) turned out to be a great idea – I could make even better gulab jamuns this year. But more than that, reading the post made me nostalgic.
We may think of a personal blog as just an online diary, but it is more than that. In terms of revealing our thoughts, it is obviously better than the other ways we keep our memories – like pictures or videos. Even if we kept diaries/ journals, we wouldn’t have as long entries as our blog posts tend to be.
But the key difference between a personal blog and all those other memory records is – the blog is interactive. So when I was re-reading my old recipe posts, I could also see others’ perception of it. In fact, I found the comments (and my responses) quite revealing.
When you throw in the Johari window concept and others like it, having a blog does seem a great way to bring about self-awareness and possibly self-improvement. I wonder why more psychiatrists don’t recommend it – shouldn’t we be seeing a slew of “therapy blogs”? Or does that category already exist?
For my part, I don’t know if my blog has helped in my self-improvement, but it has certainly brought about gulab jamun-improvement 
Happy Diwali/ Deepavali to all of you!
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Thanks for the Diwali wishes. I hope you had a ’sweet’ Diwali – well, you had one for sure.
Blogs – I look at mine and I wonder how I have grown over time. How immature I was and how it is now slightly better. Sometimes I feel so bad reading what I used to do/think, it now makes me not write coz I don’t want to look back tomorrow and call myself a fool today
[Err, ok.. whatever reason works for writers block]
If you had commenters liking your supposedly immature posts, it couldn’t have been all that bad, right?
Happy Diwali!
If the blog is the “therapy”, Psychiatrists will be out of job once every body starts blogging!
Or may be we’ll add to the problems with another mental disorder called :blogging syndrome!!
But, blogging has helped me for sure. I can now recognize the mistakes as and when I make them. The same mistakes occurred earlier and I did not know about it.
That’s definitely possible – I can see people seeking counseling because they are disturbed by the troll-y comments they get!
True too! I’ve been learning so much since I started blogging! Language, expressing opinions, showing myself in public, it’s all been a step forward, and I’m still learning. And a warm happy Deepavali to you too!
Becoming more articulate is a given, of course
Lekhni, you do know LaBeletteRouge. She writes insightfully on writing, on life, on fashion, on her dog-aughter Lily, but most importantly about her therapy sessions for which she now has a book deal “Thursdays with Igor”. Recently she thinks Igor knows about the blog but he has never asked her directly about it. No gulab jamuns though. :-/
Yes, but on reading her blog, I didn’t get the impression that even she considers blogging about her therapy sessions as part of her therapy. Or does she?
I think anyone may need therapy for dealing with the issues arising from seeing the shrink. Which is what I think the blog helps LaBelette do. I love reading her blog.