Thank you readers

 I restarted blogging after the last visit to the rehabilitation centre put me in touch with an occupationalist therapist.

I told her my problem of using my laptopo was the distance of the screen from my eyes and my poor eysesight. 

During the day I can use a large screen but using the laptop on my lap at night was very unsteady.

She brought me a pillow type laptop stand which was quite effective. It was a model from IKEA.

I tried IKEA and found this model was obsolete. But I found a better one from Amazon.com which also had a wooden flat base to the pillow underside, a wrist support and a cut out for the mobile phone and one for a tablet

I ordered it and it was with me in just a week.

I found it comfortable and I could use it conveniently sitting up on the bed and it was of course especially comfortable to use it when I was in the wheelchair.

This has made my night computer usage a great possibility

So I started my blogging which had virtually come to a standstill for the last two years after the amputation of my foot and then the amputation of my right leg.

I may have had writer's block but the comfort of the position sort of removed my writer's block.

I have over 2000  blog entries created over the last 30 years and I did get about a hundred to a couple of hundred people who would find blog entries of interesst through the various search engines.

Yesterday I found that over 1200 visits to my blogs and by midday today I had over 600  visitors

This makes me feel great as it means that my writing style and the subjects I write about still haver relevance.

In three blog entries I put out our contribution to the Findian cilture over the last 60 years.

I blogged about Annikki's 79th birthday. I blogged about  a Killer Smart Watch on the loose. I blogged about my late sister who passed away 63 years ago. I blogged about the reason why we quit the Association of Indians in Oulu.

I bloggedd about leading personalities in my life as the late Ms. Anna Mani and Dr. M. V. Kurian and 

Tan Sri B. C. Shekhar. And I blogged about a humble management trainee who taught me more than most people and whom I considered as a great mentor.

These three blogs highlight our life as Findians:

https://jmatthan.blogspot.com/2023/08/findians-association-with-finland-1943.html 

https://jmatthan.blogspot.com/2023/08/findians-association-with-finland-1943_13.html 

https://jmatthan.blogspot.com/2023/08/findians-association-with-finland-1984.html

And our first in the series was how we are very proud parents.

Now I have a whole host of subjects lined up and the excitement of writing to satisfy my audience is a new thrill.

At the same time I am now getting more active in writing my memoirs. 

I am starting to write a new version of our book "Handbook for Survival in Finland".

There is excitement in the air.

The only sadness is that my partner for all these years has been Annikki. Now dementia has set in so I only tell her what I am doing. I

t excites her but her valuable contribution that I depended on all these years is no longer forthcoming.

My "Laughing Goddess" is still my inspiration.

Do let me know of any subjects you would be interested in. 

I am reasearching in depth the highly topical subject of the name of the country India or Bharat. 

Finland has two names Finland and Suomi. So this is not an unique situation for India.

I hope to study this subject from a historical, economical and political viewpoint and hope to tinge it with some degree of humour and sarcasam.

This subject was already started by us in 2015 when we wrote the book "The Titanic Called India”. So it is something that has not popped up yesterday.

Thank you reader readers for showing trust in us and keeping us in your  minds all these years. I hope I do not disappoint you.

Disappointing picture about BLOGS

With so many ways to connect with friends on the internet today, such as Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn, Plaxo, SiliconIndia, Twitter, Geni, as well as the Yahoo and Google Groups, and now the new Buzz, it appears that blogging has taken a toll.

(There are so many new invitations I am receiving from many relatives and friends to join new social networking sites, that unfortunately I am declining any more! I already am on too many for my comfort.)

Now, some of the social networking sites have also adopted the Group thrust (such as the Stephanian "The Rez" on Facebook devoted to those who lived in the college premises), so the playing field of Blogs, Groups and social networking sites is undergoing a rapid transformation.

It is like the personal web pages transformation in 2002.

I was looking through the links to blogs on my web pages of several people who used to write nice blogs.

I found some have vanished into thin air, others have not updated their blogs, some for a year, some for two, and some of the best bloggers, have not been active for a month or more.

Yesterday, I visited a good friend who has been posted to Oulu from Bangalore. Rajesh told me that although I could not meet him in Bangalore when we passed through, he understood my dilemma as he had been reading our blogs all the while we were traversing that great country.

In my opinion, blogging is the best way to keep in touch with a widespread audience. I have about a dozen blogs, and I update the most important ones either daily, biweekly, weekly, fortnightly or the less active ones, monthly or bimonthly. There are some which I hardly update.

As I recently wrote to a friend, our fortnightly Findians Briefings and our monthly Kooler Talk and Seventh Heaven, web pages which served their purpose from 1996 to 2003, just had to be converted to blogs in 2002 - 2003. The audience demanded it.

But my diverse readers are faithful in that they visit all the active blogs regularly and the readership has been either static or climbing. I did get a bollicking from one of my closest advisors, who did not like me mixing my blogs when I was on the Bharat Darshan, as he felt that he was not really interested in my personal diaries as he was interested only in his focus.

Although I appreciated his point of view, the mixing of blogs was purely for convenience as the link speeds in India to the internet were so slow, I would have been seated in front of the computer for hours on end, trying to upload all my blogs.

The readership blip which I got has also not faded after I reverted to my old model of focus only blogs. People do check whether I am around and about if their focus blog has not been updated!

Last week, the overall readership of all my blogs had shown another jump from 135000 to 142000, and the number who reverted back to reading only their focus blogs had hardly shown a decline - just about 10 to 15 readers!

So I have 142000 on my main blog, about 3500 on the Seventh Heaven Blog, about 2300 on my Kooler Talk blog, and a smattering of people to my other blogs.

A few of you have started to follow my blogs, very much like you follow people on Twitter. That is an interesting new development, but I do not know whether it will last. It is only good and varied content that will draw a reader back to visit a blog! If one puts a series of postings on one fad continuously on a blog, the readership whi are not interested in your own pet perversion, will quickly drop away.

Although social networking is exciting and keeps you in touch, a blog has much more to it than these quick-fix sites. I am not complaining as I do keep up with my family and friends through the social networking sites, but I prefer the art of writing.

I am glad that Facebook and some other social networking sites do display my blog entries, although I do not know where and when they come up. But I do get comments about my blog entries through some of the sites.

I wish my many good friends as Ville (Oulu, Finland), Ilari (Laos), Kasia (Poland), Balu (Bangalore, India), Abe (Chennai, India), Esa (Helsinki, Finland), will step back and think again about keeping their blog sites up and running.

(I especially like Abe's Blog, which is known as "Song of the Waves" as he has a great writing style, is a wonderful photographer and you come away educated after reading his blog!)

It is also very interesting that just one blog entry can get you a whole bunch of devoted readers, who continue to read the blog, even though it is not focused on that subject. An example would be my entry about wrestling and my coverage of Dara Singh, the wrestling giant of the 50s when I was a boy. That one entry has got me a huge readership who consider me to be a guru about wrestling, which I am not. I watched wrestling as a child from the best seats in Bangalore when Dara Singh and King Kong (and the Masked Angel, Flash Gordon and his drop kick, etc.) and a few others dominated the wrestling circuit.

A huge controversy has arisen as a result of my entry with many claiming that there had been two Dara Singhs, one even 7 foot tall! If there was, I never saw him, as the Dara Singh I saw was the one who was just 6' 2", but would have looked 7' because of his dominating stature in the ring.

As I realised, it is only perseverance which builds your readership. And my experience has been that a blog reader is far more interested and interesting than those that use only the social networking sites!