50 blog posts and I must say, I think I have a dedicated few who do read what I write. A big thank you to all of them who have read at least one post of mine so far. It has indeed been great encouragement for me. I had no intentions of getting back into writing for the longest period until the day I decided to quit my old job. Back then, Sunny suggested I take to writing. I did so and now I feel liberated all over again.

 

One of my first articles was, ‘I Quit’. After a long period of tolerance I had finally decided to quit what I was doing without any other job in hand. No remote signs of finding a new one in the near future. Slowly, I started writing about everything that I loved. This somehow connected me back to being the reporter that I was. My internships days at Deccan Herald, Vijay Times and Daijiworld started re visiting me.  Seeing my by line in the newspaper used to be very inspiring.  Now, it was all mine. No journalistic rules to govern my style of writing, no editor to tell me that one particular file story of mine would not go or no chief reporter asking me to cover what should go into the paper. I could write what I want and there was no stopping. People began to like what I wrote for obvious reasons that I chose the safer ground and picked only food and movies mostly. I did so more because I loved eating and I knew loads of eateries in the city that I could write about. The other day when I had a small tiff with someone, I was told that the only things I was interesting in were eating and jabbering. Well, you got it wrong. I also enjoy writing about what I eat!

 

Now, there has come a point in time when I have decided to get a little ambitious. Well, very ambitious. Social media has been dominating the sphere of media for a while and I think that this is going ‘my moment in my history’. I choose to use this medium to try and bring some change in and around me and my city. Tweets have made their way into news. Breaking News doesn’t really need to be broken as it’s already out on Twitter by then. That I assume is the power of Twitter.

 

27^th March has been a special day for a while now. This 27^th March, I plan to draw inspiration by the 365 day project virals that I see on Facebook and Twitter. I will begin a 365 day #Tweetforchange campaign from today. In the past, whenever I have directed my opinions to the so called opinion makers on Twitter, I have not really received a response. But 365 days seems long enough to attract at least a few people’s attention.

 

All of you know that Bangalore is very close to me. I have always loved the city and fought endlessly with people who criticize blindly about what the city has to offer. There are some points in time, where I probably decided to shut up only to avoid making things bitter. One such incident was when an ignorant acquaintance of mine wanted to flaunt their knowledge of politics by arguing with me that Deve Gowda was always a BJP man and had now moved to an already existent Janata Dal!! What could I say!

 

The state’s politics has always been of keen interest to me. I never used to vouch by any one political party until recently. I have admired politicians across parties if I thought they did do some good. I chose to ignore the greater bad that they would have done over the little yet significant good that they did. Today I declare that I am in awe of Ramakrishna Hegde. When I see how pitiful and poignant the state’s politics has become, I am only glad that a man of his stature is not alive to witness days like these. I also am an admirer of SM Krishna, simply because I think he is very appealing. I know  how much he has done and what calibre he has if  he has to be picked by the Sonia Raj to be included in the cabinet with a ranking of international importance. Among the leaders today in Karnataka, I cannot pick a single one who I would want to see taking charge of the state in future. Yes, I do like Prof. Chandrashekar, but I think he has retired from politics. I wish I could pick a name or two from those of the giants and say, ‘they need to be our leaders’. But No, I can’t. DK Shi, HDK, Ashok, BSY, Reddy Bros, Eeshwarappa, etc all fall short when I compare them to a few stalwarts. Leadership is a very tricky thing. The most dignified man might lose his integrity when power is infested in him. Power coupled with money is always the evil that fails to lose over integrity and righteousness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is what I plan to do:

Starting today, I will begin to put up one tweet everyday with a hashtag of ‘tweetforchange’ for 365 days. I will repeatedly direct them to the affluent and powerful people, despite them ignoring it in the past. This time, next year, I will only hope that I get to see some change being done.

 

 

I need your help:

Please do help me grow beyond my own campaign. Join in. Make sure you tweet at least once a week with the same hash tag about what is plaguing your surroundings. It’s a sincere request from my end towards all of you who are reading. I will also soon create a facebook page for the Tweet For Change campaign and post all the updates there, even if I have been ignored completely. Please join the group for your own sake.

Be the Change.