Ageing Gracefully
1948 - Age 2
1965 - Age 19
1975 - Age 29
1977- Age 31 in Sydney
1980
1980
1983
1984
1984
1988
1988
1996 - 50 Year Old Already
1966 - OMG the Big 60 Now
2000 - Three Precious Lives
2001
2008 - My Only Publication
2009
2010
2012
2012
2013
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9th August 2020.
I started using Google Blog Spot as soon as it was made available as early as 2004 as I found it was cumbersome to maintain websites as I had to depend on IT people to do the coding plus you had to pay annually subscriptions for Domain names.
It was in 2010, I started my Blog for Aadhaar. Today I am proud to say it contains about 14,500 posts and has received over 1.5 million hits. This has made me a prolific Blogger as I had to update the blog daily as it was being used by many people who opposed it. Initially it was activism to block Aadhaar but after the Supreme Court Verdict in 2018 the issue was water under the bridge and has become an archive of daily news.
The Spin off from this Experience hosting the Aadhaar Blog meant, I could create and maintain a Blog on any topic of Interest with ease.
I created this blog sometime in 2019 to serve as a Search Engine for all my Blogs but had not updated it regularly.
This was not part of my plan for today but something dragged me to this blog for updation, your guess is as good as mine.
Not only that until March 2020, Covid infected people we did not know in far off lands. Not so in August 2020. It is getting closer and closer. My physiotherapist called to say her Daughters school had one infected student so the school is closed and families of all students have been asked to test for Covid..
Covid is getting closer every day. God Forbid if I get Covid 19 I will be " A Sitting Duck" as I have too many coMorbidities and all my specialist doctors have warned me to be extremely careful. But we never know as this virus can sneak in, any which way possible.
So I thought better consolidate all blogs and share with my network in case Covid 19 got me...
The Following was what I had written in 2019
After receiving my Millenium Gift, on 13th April 2000, a "Brain Stem Stroke" the umpire gave me out Plumb LBW. I appealed to the third umpire who had to review the TV footage several times to decide I was not out as the ball was not going to hit the stumps.
Not Out, may be, yet this marked the end of my first innings in this life. It ended my 30 years career overnight. Never did I think I would never ever work again in this life, even though a friend had predicted this after reading my palm.
In 2019 on Reflection I can say that the second stint at the crease, virtually my second innings, my game changed totally. It was not about scoring but all about staying and the crease and hanging in there as an anchor for the rest of the tribe.
Brain stem stroke could have sent me into deep depression and I could have hit the bottle and become an Alcoholic; yet that is not what happened. With Mithu going to work and Anand going to school, I was all by myself at home doing everything to remain sane.
I had my beloved Rajah who sat by my bedside all day and kept me company but Pity he could not talk. Every day we went for walks round the block all the way to Strathfield Railway Station and back which was about 6.5 kilometres and took me about 90 minutes. Not at all bad for a Stroke survivor. But that was at 5.00 in the evenings.
I had just one constant companion in 2000. it was my super duper Windows XT Computer with a mono chrome Monitor. Slow as a snail but to me was super fast considering I had lost control of my right hand and I could not keep pace. Oh Yes it had floppy disc and a 40Meg Memory.
In 2000 there was talk of search engines and I have tried many . My favourites then were Alta Vista, Yahoo and Copernicus. Google did not exist.
So my Partner at the other end of the pitch was my PC and I became a PeeSeeHolic or PC-Holic.
Two major things happened, Yahoo created the Yahoo groups and over night I took to this and connected with family and friends I had lost touch with for 25 years after moving to Sydney. Snail Mail meaning letters that we mailed were just that, slow as snail
At one stage I belonged to as many as Seventy Yahoo groups many of which I created and hosted for different interest group of IIT Alumni. Many still exist but I made an exit in 2017 after my Computer got hacked and ID Theft was a major concern. The crooks had the correct password to my ANZ Bank Account. I dumped my email id and quit Yahoo groups, face Book, twitter etc etc. On hindsight iot appeared for a reason. Took up too much of my time. Now that I have quit I realise no one really cares shit about your existence in social media. If you write some tging then they are all there to agree or pounce on you to say you are wrong and explain why...
I more than anything in 2000 wanted to understand my Brain stem stroke inside out and relied on my PC.
One day good fortune led me to the Massachusetts Neurology Forum which even then had about 56K members with many many sub interest groups for Migraine, Alzeimers, Parkinsons, Dementia etc. I honed in on the STROKE Group.
There were many many Stroke survivors but majority had suffered hemorrhagic strokes meaning bleeds in the brain caused mostly by high blood pressures. Mine was exactly the opposite, Blood flow to a part of my Brain stem got cut off, and as the brain stem controls the autonomous system very very few survive and I happen to be the odd one.
I came across an old post from a lady named Sheila who described all my pre-stroke symptoms but never posted again suggesting she had died But two people had responded to her appeal. One was Andrea Conway a young speech pathologist who went on a roller coaster ride. by the time the ride was over she had suffered a brainstem stroke caused by two blocked vertebral arteries as a result of her head being tossed around in the roller coaster. With time one by one others were turning up in the Neuro forum.
It was then that I decided to Create a Yahoo Group that I called the "VAD CLUB" there were about 50 members mostly from US and this was an inspirational ride as I was connecting with people with same condition and similar disabilities and worries. I recent years I created the VAD CLUB Blog that sort chronicles what transpired in our VAD Club Yahoo Groups.
If I was not on the computer, I was watching DVDs. It was then I started my DVD Collection and today I have 930 Orginal English Titles not including Western and War Movies or Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Chinese and Korean Movies :-)
As for Blogging, I must confess I do not remember when I created my first Blog. Blog history says " On August 23, 1999, Blogger was launched by Pyra Labs. As one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools, it is credited for helping popularise the format. ... In 2004, Google purchased Picasa; it integrated Picasa and its photo sharing utility Hello into Blogger, allowing users to post photos to their blogs.
I did use Picassa for my Photos and believe I created my first ever blog around 2006 for IIT Madras Alumni Association, after I got elected as an Executive Committee member having changed the bylaws of the association to allow Global Participation.
Today, I surprised my self to find that I have 77 Blogs still on line. there were many others that I deleted over time as they served no purpose.
My niece Kavitha, who helped me create the IIT Global Yahoo Groups in 2002 when I was in London has been pleading with me to put them all together so the rest of the world could read and benefit from my writings and personal experiences.
