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India: Sunayana Roy

Shaimaa Khalil Shaimaa Khalil | 17:40 UK time, Tuesday, 9 March 2010

We featured Sunayana's blog a couple of weeks ago. Since then we got in contact with her to write a guest post for us and do a webcam video. Stay tuned for her video tomorrow.

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I wandered into blogging in 2003 - simply signed up because it was free. As I started reading other blogs, suddenly my world expanded with a bang. The journey has been that unplanned ever since. Along the way I finished my formal education, acquired a husband and child and in-laws and lost my best friends to foreign lands.

As I tried to make sense of my increasingly bewildering life, blogging helped. The mommy bloggers came out in full force when I needed help figuring out this mothering business - the village that's raising my kid? Half of them do it online - and I got unexpected empathy and kindly advice from blogging friends when my husband and I went through rough times. I think my support group really fell into place during our big . 70 odd bloggers from across the globe bonded hugely while organising an online surprise party (complete with a treasure hunt) for some expectant friends.

I don't know why I blog. I shifted seamlessly from my leather-bound journal to my online blog and I've tried to maintain the honesty that I gave my diary. It's not easy, especially when large sections of my family and almost all my friends began reading Sunny Days. Suddenly I was no longer writing to a void. Suddenly I was writing for people I knew and people who I knew I was to know soon, given Facebook and the small circles bloggers move in. I promptly dealt with this by imposing a ban on blog-related conversation offline.

Mostly, I write because I enjoy the interaction. But I also write posts that are only for me and get no comments. Mostly, I write because I want to record these years of my life. Yet I jot down bare outlines rather than full details. Mostly, I write about my husband and son. Yet I'm not a mommy blogger or indeed any other kind of specialist. If anything I'm the simplest kind of blogger there is, posting about what interests me, interspersed with accounts of my life, just like the diarists/scrapbook keepers of yore.

What I love about blogging is its ability to multi-task - I'm simultaneously reaching out to my family and friends scattered across the globe, striking up conversations with interesting strangers and also recording memorable moments. As far as I'm concerned Twitter doesn't begin to scratch the surface of all that blogging can do.

I don't know whether blogging has been good for my society in general but it has certainly been good for me. I'm what would be classified as your average Indian middle class urban working mother and I like showing how fragile these stereotypes are, through my blog. Now, like six years ago, I'm still figuring the rules as I go, but the journey's never bored me yet.

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