I am Versatile

The rules of the nomination are, apparently,

1. Thank the blogger who nominated you.

2. Paste the image as above.

3. Share 7 random thoughts about yourself.

4. Nominate 10-15 bloggers for the award.

5. Inform them of the nomination.

I am versatile and, now, I have the license to say so. What is more I am twice as versatile as I thought I was. Two lovely people have nominated for the ‘Versatile Blogger’ award – Indu Chibber and Cynthia Vincent – and, thanks to them, I can wave their nominations in the face of people who refuse to admit that I am versatile in anything other than the various postures of sleep.

After starting blogging in 2009 I found myself with a total readership of about four, including me, and the other three members of my family had to be coaxed, blackmailed or otherwise intimidated into reading my blog. There were other visitors, of course. People, who strayed into my blog by mistake and left with all the speed of a scalded cat. With so much encouragement, it was but understandable that I stopped blogging for more than a year. A couple of months back I joined Indiblogger and, presto, it is raining awards now!

But wait! If I am twice as versatile do I need to tell 14 things about myself and nominate 20-30 bloggers? The former would test your patience and the latter would test mine. I mean, just imagine reading through pages of prose about an uninteresting person and, imagine me having to copy some 20-30 hyperlinks. Not to mention the fact that I could well be lost in the interesting pieces available to read on blogosphere and forget to even collect the links. So, I will beg your indulgence for submitting only 7 bits of information about myself and only 15 nominations.

Random facts about me:

1. I hate the very idea of man-management. Like dealing with people as people and not as employees, subordinates, bosses, customers and suppliers. With this attitude, I probably should have taken up pottery but became a management graduate for my sins! So, I decided to quit as early as possible and did so about 5 years back.
2. I can be quite content doing absolutely nothing. A rare trait, even if I do say so myself, and absolutely necessary when you decide to quit working early in life.
3. Punctuality, they say, is the politeness of princes. Now that we have dispensed with Royalty, we seem to have dispensed with punctuality as well. I am a fanatic about punctuality and that means that I get ample opportunities to get worked up every day of my life.
4. Books have always been my major addiction. If every man needs an ambition mine was to have a library at home. With about 3000 books at home, I think that I can consider myself as having achieved my ambition to an extent.
5. I am interested in old Tamil and Hindi film songs (Well! Some people would call them ancient). I have recently taken up listening to Carnatic Music. Thank God, it is possible to appreciate music even if you cannot understand it.
6. I took up trekking after quitting my job at 44 and started off with a Himalayan trek to Tapovan/Nandanvan. Now it is almost an addiction and I invariably do one Himalayan trek a year.
7. I hate people judging me and I hate judging people. So, you can understand how much I hated having to do the next part of this post.

Bloggers I nominate for the Award:

It is a difficult ask to nominate bloggers. There are a lot of talented people out there and it is impossible for anyone to actually read all available blogs. Then, there are the personal lacks. For example, I have no real aptitude to read poetry nor do I have much of an eye for visuals. This, in effect, means that poetry and photo-blogs, no matter how excellent they are, fall outside my purview.

The next problem is that some of my natural choices for the award have already been awarded (right along my nomination in some cases) – to my knowledge – and there is scarcely a point in my also joining the chorus. So Debajyoti, Bhavana, Kajal, Arti and other such much-awarded bloggers are not in my list much as I would have loved to put them in.

The bloggers that I have chosen are not unknown either and they may already be sated with a galaxy of awards. Nonetheless they figure here - in the order in which I found them - and they will have to lump itJ.

1.      Deepa

2.      Rajagopalan Ratnaraj

3.      DS

4.      Pooja Pradeep

5.      Ajesh banerjee

6.      Poorvi Shrivastav

7.      Dhiraj Shenoy

8.      The Fool

9.      Umashankar Pandey

10.    CaptainAwesome

11.    JasmeetKukreja

12.    Akshara

13.    SudhaGanapathi

14.    KayEm

15.    Zephyr

Once again, I express my thanks to the two (possibly misguided) people who nominated me for this award.