Rage Against The Tags

I have been busy doing nothing for the entire week. As a result, the blog suffered blatant neglect. Time to make amends. First, a few important acknowledgements:

1. Thank you Preeti for the card here. Preeti is a lovely lady and a gifted author with a fantastic blog and book. I am overwhelmed with the praise she has bestowed in her post and in comments.

2. Thanks Jason for the wonderful contest. My entry squeezed into the Forties club. Quite relieved to be there since I was afraid of loosing too many points over a few technical flaws, especially due to the discontinuity in the flow of the write-up. I was pretty pleased with the idea though; plus the fact that my last name begins with D, pushed the entry into the club.

3. A big thanks to Choco , Nicky & Ekta for the tags, award and wonderful words of appreciations on your blogs. Readers, please do check out their super-cool blogs (click on their names for the links). They are a treasure to have as fellow-bloggers.

However, I am not a huge fan of “Tags” when it comes to me doing them. I must justify. Reasons follow.

This (and most of the blogs I read) is a personal blog with some novice fiction thrown in once in a while. Regular readers have already been awarded with the information that I have stayed in Dewas, Kharagpur, Gurgaon and Bangalore, and hence I refuse to explicitly answer “Four places you have lived?”.

Point is that I am not willing to let anyone have the voyeuristic pleasure at my expense so easily. Not that I am a secretive person. A keen observer of the blog wouldn’t fail to notice that I have already exposed my navel and nipples on more than one occasion. You gonna have to read the blog for knowing more facts about me like the sadistic tendencies towards insects in general.

One of the tags carry the question “Nice stomach or arms?”. Well, well, well. I don’t deny having a preference (marginal though), but wouldn’t you agree that I try real hard to be subtle in my writings? Besides, isn’t there a strong co-relation between the two anatomical features? I guess, one has to morph a photo of a beautiful person twice, once with ugly arms, once with a paunch, and then present it to the world to get an honest answer. [One isn’t an economist unless one says “Ceteris paribus” in every argument.]

I am never in favor of generalizations without scrutiny. Feminists, please don’t take me to the court for claiming this: “Tagging is a girly concept”. Look at the topics : favorite colors, number of children you aspire to have, burnt by love, last text message you received, last furry thing you touched, first thought when you looked at the mirror. Yes, such questions are theoretically applicable to males too, but I advise secretly taping male conversations to investigate their inclinations towards such matters.

Some questions are totally gender dependent and needn’t be there at all. Like “Would you kiss a stranger?” is mostly answered by females in negative. Some just say “depends”. All males would be slightly more eloquent here and say “depends on the gender”.

If tags were a male phenomenon, then first thing to disappear would be “Four things about you”. Four is a big number when it comes to talking about ourselves. See what Dphat had to resort to when asked about “Four places you would rather be”. Two is the most we can handle. Easy to tell two favorite sports, drinks (Beer & Whisky), cars, ..., you get the drift. Also, you would have to replace the choices like “Eyes or Lips” with relevant ones like “Bust or Bum”.

I rest my case against (me doing) tags now.

Forthcoming weeks shall see more activity on this blog. Increased quantity would lead to a temporary slump in quality of the posts from 10 paise per dozen to 5 paise per dozen, but that drop is essential to practice and reach to the level of 15 paise per dozen. This is what I like about writing: The more you write, the more ideas you get.

I was going to end the post on that positive note, but as these last words are being typed, the fan above, for the first time in three years of its existence, is making strange noises. Spooky night on a third floor in Bangalore.