Kahaniyaan...

Before I decided to rant here under the name of Ms Taggart, I used to rant at couple of places, all of which I had left blogging at after I felt that I have outgrown the place and the blogger name.
Each of them was a symbol of what I was at that time, the blogger username depicting what I believed in at that point in time!
These were where I used to blog before.

1. Smiles n Smiles! - This was my first blog, the place where I blogged the most, and which has some of the best blogging moments I ever felt!
I had been honest, romantic, mushy, immature, naive enough to actually blog with my real name and childishly funny on this blog, and that was the real me then. I felt all my feelings on the blog and I grew up along with the blog. I had quite a few readers, couple of good DesiPundited posts, and an emotional attachment to this blog!
One fine day, after couple of years of posting here, I suddenly felt that the blog and its content was juvenile, everything right from the layout to the blogname irritated me, and I decided that even I would not read this blog! I also wanted to test myself if I could actually practice what I preach about detachment. I wanted to be detached from this first blog of mine. And I could! For years I did not even remember that I had this blog, and I had totally forgotten the password to this account! :)
Right now, I have restricted permission to this blog. But if you ever find yourselves bored and want something to read, please drop me a line, and I will give you permission to read this!

2. The Chocolate Cafe! - There is a nice cafe here in Hyderabad with the name - Le Cafe De Art. After I had closed my first blog, I started feeling an ennui and words started building up in my head. When I was eating a heavenly dark chocolate cake in this cafe, I realized how much I loved blogging, and dark chocolate. I was in love with dark chocolate, was having loads of it, and was going through a phase in my life where I thought chocolate had the answers to all my problems. That was the exact minute when this blog was born. So was my current email id.
Yet again, I could not sustain writing in this place for long. I hated the template, because it did not go with my blogger name, and I had no readers!
All my prior blogging life, I had maintained that I do not write for the sake of comments and readers, but it was now that I knew that I had been wrong all along. Though comments and brickbats made no difference as long as I felt that I was being read by, I realized I liked it. And with this blog I had lost all my earlier readership, without which I had no interest to blog.
Thus came my second break to blogging!

3. AynRants@WordPress - After joining this current workplace, life had become so hectic and busy that I had not thought of blogging for a long time. After I realized that there is a Bloggers DL at my workplace, I subscribed to it to find out what was new in the Blogging world, and also realized that the blogging these people did, was not my cup of tea. They were all technical blogs which was alien to me(not technical stuff, but technical blogging. I would like to call myself a geek, but not a nerd!:)) but it made me nostalgic about blogging.
Around the same time, I was in a conversation with one of my colleagues where we both bumped into a discussion on Ayn Rand. He went on to tell how and why he fell in love Ayn Rand and John Galt and thus reminded me of the then-me who loved them both equally. During a passionate exchange of emails about Ayn Rand, her books, John Galt and his philosophy, he reminded me of those lines which are now the tag line for my blog -
I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
In those emails when I was writing about my love for Ayn Rand and her books, I also realized that I still had not lost that zeal to write, and that I was actually itching to write.
So I had to start a blog, this time on Wordpress, because my blogger friends had all moved to Wordpress and mentioned in passing that its an awesome place! I had to blog, and I wanted a new place and I wanted to try something new, and I was in love all over again with Ayn Rand! Thats the moment this blog was conceptualized!

The blog title, its description, my profile description - all these stood for what I had become. I grew up a bit more, saw life a bit more closely, became a bit more practical and had grew a bit more cynical too!

4. AynRants@Blogger - Well... after a couple of posts on Wordpress, I realized how much I hated that place, and how tough it was getting for me to make a collage of my fave photos as the blogger header layout on WordPress, which was the first reason why I moved there. I thought I had to move back to good old Blogger, and here I am.
5. Amidst all this blogging, I realized that I had made couple of friends in blog-world. None of my real life friends ever read my blogs, but I suddenly felt a need for a place where none of blog friends ever went to, too. No one, including my best friend, my husband knows the url to this blog. No one, including me read this blog. The feelings there are as-is, unfiltered, and not ready for the world to read them! I post on this blog when I want to vent away from the prying eyes of this world, and thankfully, I do it very rarely!

6. During all these years of blogging and blog-hopping I realized that there are obviously much better bloggers out there, who have a great potential of publishing their own books someday. But like everyone, well almost everyone, who ever gets to blogging, I also had a dream to write. And writing, however good or bad it has been, had come to me effortlessly whenever I sat to write down some. Since the dream to publish a book is still as far as my dream to backpack Europe, I resorted to writing skits for office meetings, providing inputs to office newsletters and the likes to satisfy the itch to write.

7. After all these years in this company, I had grown to know that most of the people who are serious about technology and writing have their own blogs on the company network. And so I started mine there too.. That's where I write about technology, be diplomatic and write about the artificial world with my real name, this is where I think, feel and speak what's on my head, with a name which could as well be my real one!

Yes, I was the girl who thought smiles would cure everything once, then I was a chocolate addict, and now I am or rather, I want to be as practical, mentally strong and socially respected for that as Dagny Taggart is!