Fourteen Years

How long is fourteen years?

When I was a child and my mother used to tell me stories from the Ramayana, fourteen years always seemed an interminably long period for an exile. Later, when I read the Mahabharata, I realized that the Pandavas spent about fourteen years in exile as well - twelve years in the forest, one more year anonymously, and then about another year preparing for the battle (which lasted eighteen days). Again, a huge chunk out of the lives of our heroes.

And yet, when I look back at that night fourteen years ago when I started writing my blog, it seems just like yesterday. It will be an exaggeration to call this my "exile", but it does mark my time away from home. First in Hyderabad, then in Kolkata and finally in the suburbs of three cities across the USA - New York City, Washington, D.C. and Chicago.

While it doesn't feel like a lot of time has passed, a lot has changed in these fourteen years. I left my IT job, started and finished a PhD, did a post-doc and then became a professor at a college. I got married. I became a father. And fatter. In the world of social networks, Orkut died off, Facebook came to rule the world. Blogging went out of fashion, microblogging caught the fancy of the world with the introduction of Twitter. Cellphones became smart. Tablets and e-book readers came into existence.

I bought a DSLR. Two DSLRs actually, and started calling myself a photographer.

And in between all this, I started a second blog. In Bengali. While I hardly write in either one anymore, I definitely enjoy writing when I do. Nobody reads my blogs anymore, of course. Nobody reads blogs as much as they used to do fourteen years ago.

Still, it seemed like a nice occasion to commemorate by writing a post here on my first blog. I missed the actual date by a day, but what difference does a day make in fourteen years?