I started “blogging” in the early 2000s when internet was still not as ubiquitous and “intelligent” as it is today. The “blogging” community in Kathmandu was niche but thriving on the blogspot.com sphere. Those with a Tumblr or WordPress websites were perhaps a little ahead of the curb. I was a 90s kid who saw the last of the cybercafes in the city start to disappear; or most likely, shapeshifter into other computer and printing services or an actual cafe. Mostly, I used the cafes to print school projects and top-off my newly acquired Nokia flip-phone. I was still very much on the short-message-service circuit when it came to corresponding to friends; speaking to strangers online was not yet one of the liberties I enjoyed even though occasionally, I would find a stranger-who-went-to-the-same-school on MSN Messenger. I did not really grow up with AOL – perhaps, one of the first signs of dissonance creeping in with the generational-identifiers such as a “millennial” for me.
I don’t really know what “culture” I came of age with/to. Movies, music, books – everything came to me in a coordinated randomness. I read Nancy Drew, Agatha Christie, and Jane Austen all at once. It was really my brother who read Sherlock Holmes and Adventures of Tintin but I suppose I built affinities to both these fictional characters. I don’t know who introduced me to AWON Library but I spent much of my weekends in the carpeted floors of the library. I wish I could never the librarian’s names but I remember there used to be two of them. If you had a “family” membership, you could check out more books than the “individual” membership. I would browse through the Ekta Books shelfs but never buy any books until much later. The collection in the school library was – hm – wanting. My appetite for reading was whetted with loans from AWON and occasion Dashain gifts of books from my Mummy and Buwa. It has been a privilege to rediscover the bounty that is the Chicago Public Library late in my 30s now.
But somewhere down the line, I lost sight of what “writing” always meant to me. As far as I can recall, I always had a diary and I always wrote.
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