I Blog Because….

Guest Post By Ghazala Khan

likhtay rahay junooN ki hikayat…When I was a little girl growing up in a quite suburb of Islamabad, I vividly remember playing with dolls and asking for toffees and biscuits from my father. I also used to imagine as to what would I become, when I grow up.

At that time, many ideas regarding my future used to storm my mind which were quite narrow in their scope. This was mainly because my future ambitions were influenced by my parents, uncles and aunts. At that time, I couldn’t think beyond traditional professions of becoming a doctor, or a teacher, or becoming a bride perhaps.

At that time, I really didn’t know one could choose her career from a multitude of options. I didn’t know there existed such things as becoming a writer, a network administrator, a software developer, a marketer, a banking executive, a sales guru, and certainly not the blogger.

Now I wonder how different the my life could have been, had I known in my childhood about the possibility of becoming a blogger. Just imagine the little me telling my teacher

“Oh Miss, when I grow up, I want to become a blogger.”

I am sure my teacher would have called my parents and gravely suggested to them to take me to a physician.

In my class, I was good at Math and English, but terrible at Fine Arts and Urdu. It wasn’t totally my fault. Didn’t Daagh once say:

keh do ae Daagh, yaaroN se jaa kar
ke aati hai Urdu zubaaN aatay aatay.

My teachers and parents used to remain worried about my future. Being very conservative, they couldn’t think of me becoming an engineer or a scientist or anything like that. Becoming a doctor or a teacher was fine as far as they were concerned. Sometimes I also wonder what my father, had he been alive today, would think about my blogging career.

Despite getting overwhelmed by all this pressure from my kith and kin as to what should I become, I personally wanted to become an Archaeologist… Yes, an Archaeologist. I came to know about archaeology when we once went to Jhelum to visit an old acquaintance, and he showed us the Rohtas Fort, and told us that he was the doing research there. I didn’t know what research meant, but I got the clue that it had to something good because this guy seemed to be on job as well as on a picinc.

With the passage of time, the idea gained more and more strength in me. From reading books, I had made this mental vision that archaeology meant discovering lost cities and forts, looting ancient temples and digging for buried treasures (the shiny and glittering stuff for me, the old shards of clay for the scholarly and research-oriented guys.) I want to go there, but in day time and without spiders.

The passion remained with me throughout my teen years, and then once again I got a chance to visit the Rohtas Fort. As the whole family was approaching the fort, our car met an accident and with that tragic incident I lost my father as well as all passions and ambitions. In those moments of sadness, writing gave me the respite. I started by writing dairy, but then it was a private thing for me. I still wanted to do something for everyone.

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to write. In my teens, I wanted to be an author. I decided it was the perfect career because you can work how and when you want and you can make lots of money and fame. I became an editor of a college magazine and loved it even more, but it was very limited and paid virtually nothing.

Realizing what you love to do early on in life makes life very simple and rewarding and save you from lots of grief and disappointments. I always loved to play with words. I wanted to use them, memorize them, and just adore them. I wanted to let the whole world know about the passion I felt about wordsmithing.

Then blogging came to me, and I found then that what I always wanted to do. Discussing what you think about certain subject and what are your views about it and then getting instant feed back about it is what blogging is all about. Once at my birthday party I was asked by an uncle, what I wanted to be when I grew up. I stopped, thought a bit, looked the gent in the eye and said ‘I want to be a story writer’. I had no idea what I was saying. Now I’m sitting at my desk at home just finishing away the latest blog post for my blog.

In these testing times, our youth should divert towards the blogging, which is a boon from the greatest of the great inventions: The Internet.

If you are a blogger then it may be a great idea to share it with ATP readers below on what made you start blogging or more precisely complete this sentence. I blog because …….? (why)

The author blogs at The Pakistani Spectator

Photo Credits: Flickr.com