Bring out the cakes and a solitary candle! This blog turned ONE a few days back!

In this one year I have written 72 posts (73 including this one). That roughly translates into a post every 5 days. Not bad! So neither have I been slothful to the extent of my keyboard gathering dust and grime, nor over-zealous to the extent of obsessive compulsive blogging!

The 37K page views work out to over 100 views a day. Considering that I always held each of his centuries against Tendulkar, I am eating crow in tom tomming this figure.

Each of the 72 posts has been seen some 520 times (average).

I have received some 322 comments in all. Which works out to 9 comments in 10 days. Or a little over 4 comments per post.

This blog has been cited by WordPress in its Top 100 Blogs of the Day listing on various occasions:

Top posts: January 16, 2007
Top posts: January 14, 2007
Top posts: January 04, 2007
Growing blogs: January 03, 2007
Top posts: January 03, 2007
Growing blogs: November 20, 2006

And then a few weeks back Amit Agarwal — the face of blogging as a profession in India — mentioned in an interview on iLeher that he liked reading Swadeshe! Dang! Why did he do that? That puts pressure of performance on my lazy shoulders!

And then he has gone ahead and mentioned Swadeshe in his compiled list of India’s top humour blogs. Wait and who do I have for company there? Jammy (perhaps the only Indian blogger who has positioned himself as a seriously funny blogger) and Greatbong (who is to blogging, what ShahRukh Khan is to recent Hindi cinema — a very bright bloke, who all other bright blokes want to be friends with! Remember SRK being the muse of Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra et al). Now this places on me the additional burden of not only writing but also writing funny things!

Before I close this post, for reasons that may not need much explaining, I have to acknowledge the contribution of my wife! Who I, in a stroke of inspired genius, co-opted as a stake-holder in my blogging activity when I sat with a sullen face & laptop deliberately kept at an angle so that she could see the screen.

“What happened?”
“I guess I’ll give up blogging.”
“Why?”
“I don’t think I am good enough.”
“Why? What is this (pointing to the WordPress dashboard stats)?”
“See I have only got some 30-odd people reading me in the recent few days. I guess that’s all I deserve.”

At this point she sees that the graph is on a downward slope — which means it did have a peak previously.

“But see, here you had more than a 100 views. It means there was something you were doing then which was helping this figure.”
“Nah! Nothing. These figures are all trash. Just beacuse I was blogging more often, they say there were more visitors.”
“But they right.”
“Hmm (barely able to conceal my glee).”

And since that day, in a manner befitting of an investor querying the business head of a unit — she expresses her disapproval every time the visitor stats graph shows a downward movement!

“I think you need to write more often.”
“But that would take a lot of our time. Remember we have to go shopping for curtains tomorrow?”
“Don’t worry, I will take care of the shopping. You must write a post this weekend.”
“You sure? It’s just a blog. I’ll update it when I am done finalizing our holiday plans.”
“That you can do next week. As it is we are not leaving tomorrow. So what’re you going to write about?”

That’s how I have been managing for the whole of last year :)

And to the folks reading this — Thanks for being such a tolerant and forgiving audience.