A Hundred Posts Ago

I remembered what it was like.

It was early afternoon in late August of last year and my internet connection was just over a week old. Lianga was sweltering hot and the local people were desperate for even the touch of rain.

From my bedroom window on the second floor of the family house, I could see the deserted streets and the heat haze shimmering as the relentless sun baked the roof of the houses and the concrete pavements.

I remember staring at my computer monitor and doing a web search on Google for anything about Lianga. After a quarter of an hour of restless browsing and finding very little to be relevant let alone interesting, a wild idea in my mind began to take wing.

I could do a blog about Lianga and my life here. It was on my part, a decision that would take a huge leap of faith and plenty of hard work. For I did not know anything about internet blogging and, more so, I am largely an indifferent and undisciplined writer. But I wanted to try and making a go at it became an obsession with me.

An English literature professor in college once told me that writing was, in essence, therapy for him. It enabled him, by jotting down his thoughts on paper, to reflect on the things happening in his life and put them in the proper perspective. Confessions on paper, that was what he called his scribblings which he never intended for publication anyway.

I decided that my blogging was going to be my therapy, my way of making sense of my life here in Lianga. They will also be confessions of a sort, the written ruminations and reflections of a one whose life has become, in one sense, intertwined with the fate and destiny of this town and its people.

The past 100 posts have not been easy for me. They are crafted at great cost and with much effort and toil. In the real sense, they are the often confused and distracted offspring of a disorderly and rambling mind trying to tell the stories and impressions it has had of life in this small corner of the universe.

That the posts and the stories will continue is clear, for this blog is, in the very sense of it, a diary of life. And as my life in Lianga continues, so will the events, stories and reflections that have to be recorded and then told.

After all, as mentioned here before, life in Lianga can be boring as hell. But it can also be occasionally meaningful, beautiful and profound. It is for those occasions, and the boring times as well, that this blog is dedicated to.

Who cares what happens in Lianga? I was once asked this by local resident who had come across this blog while surfing the Web. The answer was clear in my head then as it is now and I told it to him straight.

I did and I still do.