Yesterday morning I woke up with the realisation that it was the Blogadda event at the other end of town and that I had to hot foot it if I wanted to make it on time. I was running a bit late and had to control myself from pressing the accelerator too hard as I didn’t want to make it to the venue in an ambulance but in one piece in my own car.
As usual Google maps are different from reality and despite my own navigation skills I managed to whizz past the Metro Station below the flyover which I was not supposed to take. Luckily even though I managed to reach Goregaon, it was only a five minute overshoot and I could take the U turn back to the road I was supposed to be on.
The Courtyard Marriott was on the main road (once agin proving the Google map wildly inaccurate) and I madeit to the venue with two minutes to spare – not bad considering that I started out at 8.15. But then this was Sunday and most of Mumbai was still fast asleep.
The power of the word
After Ashwin Mushran who was the MC gamely introduced himself as the”extra from Bollywood” he welcomed on stage the first speaker of the conference well known author and banker Ravi Subramaniam who told us how a critic’s dissing of his book as a steaming pile of manure which incidentally proved to to be a popular epithet in the day’s proceedings didn’t affect him but that it could have destroyed the confidence of a lesser author. Thus it was up to us Bloggers to judiciously critique books mindful of the sensitivities of authors because words do have an exceptional reach and power which we may not be completely aware of. He gave us the following tips
Be positive
Be a blogger and not a journalist
Be unbiased and not commercial
Why the why on the tree
The next speaker popular blogger Anil P who has a photo blog showed us how effective photo blogs can be. Unfortunately his PPT had some technical glitches which detracted from an interesting a subtly humorous take on photo blogging. It was a why carved onto a
Stories make their own reality
Kavi Arasu’s equally engaging and humorous PPT on his blogging journey showed us how to weave a story because every object and every person has a story. Unfortunately it is our deep desire to make a perfect and profound story that detracts from a good post. We should let the story flow rather thn concentrate on making it perfect.
There was a much needed tea break after this but after the forenoon session the audience was looking forward to the other sessions . Sadly the forenoon session which dealt with branding and blogging was slightly heavy and technical and need I say even boring. Laxmipathi Bhat my be a giant in his field but sadly his talk went completely over my head. Manu Prasad’s presentation was less dry and more meaningful but it was Anaagh Desai’s PPT on influencers which had the whole audience realise that one shouldn’t take oneself too seriously and one should ask oneself why one is blogging.
The post lunch session had an interesting Q &A session without hours Kiran Manral and Ravi Subramaniam who made it quite clear that bloggers and writers had different skill sets and that good bloggers did not necessarily make good writers. This was quite a dampening revelation for at least 50% of the audience that harboured ambitions of becoming writers one day. They both spoke at length on e publishing , book writing and how one should write for the love of writing and not with the hope of making it a sustainable career.
The rest of the afternoon went pretty much downhill as the only interesting speaker was Shekhar Kapoor who said that Social media had sucked out the inertia from society.
The two successful bloggers who shared their stories Anil Agarwal and Anuradha Goyal had interesting and probably more useful stories to share but coming as they did at the fag end of the session couldn’t engage the audience which had by now become restless and looking forward to the tea break and subsequent workshops on food blogging and video blogging
Unfortunately by this time I had reached the end of my patience and decided to call it a day so I walked out and didn’t stay for the workshops.
Tigris event was a very well organised event and even though it didn’t run as per schedule was well worth the effort of making the trek from town. I was a bit disappointed though that it was not mo interactive and didn’t address technical issues of blogging especially the ones which I am facing.
However, I was thrilled to bits to be ale to attend such a function. I came away with many more tips on how to take my blog to the next level and hope that one day I too will become a successful blogger.
Thank you Blogadda for this wonderful opportunity! I’m sure I’m not alone when I say we look forward to many such events
Twenty- five Seven 