Dear Reader,
I had planned a sparkling anniversary post but I must have blinked because I missed the 2-year mark for this blog in April!
Time definitely flies. It seems like just last month when I was trying to come up with a name. Only after publishing my 10th post, I realized what a cliché ‘where is someone’ site name is in the blogsphere! But then, two years ago I wasn’t really interested in becoming a ‘blogger’. All I wanted to do was to find…Shyamni. I was working 60-hour weeks, leaving work at 7.30pm every night and was always too overworked to do anything else. To find her, I packed my bags and moved to live in Istanbul. And I haven’t stopped moving since then.
In a filmy Bollywood one-liner if I had to sum up the last 2 years, I’d say that if I had to die tomorrow, I’d die happy with no complains about life. Though Suruj reckons I need to fall in love before I can declare such statements!
But I’ve fallen in love with this wandering life. You see when I pass through some foreign galliya with just a backpack on my shoulders, I am just another person passing through. I’m really nobody then. I am nobody’s daughter, nobody’s older sibling, nobody’s boss, nobody’s employee nor anybody’s companion. I am just another face in the crowd. After my whole life being accountable to relationships, it’s liberating to be nobody – to not mould into any expectations. I never had this kind of freedom in my entire existence. It was school, university and straight into work for the first 3 decades, which could loosely equate to half of my life. And now it hardly makes sense to waste the remaining half trying to fit into a life that doesn’t make me happy. Travel has given me such a sense of freedom, I wouldn’t have imagined ever possible.
Today I don’t earn that much money as I used to. My entire possessions can literally fill in a suitcase and a backpack. I freelance which means I hire my time out. I still work in construction. I still take IELTS tuitions. But I have more time for myself. I haven’t hated a Monday since 2013! I have the luxury to pack and leave for the other side of the world within 3 hours if I felt like it (visa permitting of course. Bitch).
When I think about the past two years, a kaleidoscope of vibrant colors rush in. Towns, busy airports, bustling bus stations, silence of the mountains, snippets of different languages, bazaars, the smells, the sounds, the brief encounters with so many people and their stories fill the air around me.
And I am more than grateful to you, dear Reader for being a part of this journey so far.
I am always forever humbled whenever I get an email or a message asking if I am okay when I’m on the road or when you write back to me about your own story after reading something I have written.
I started this blog to just keep me company but over the last 2 years, it has just grown. I have started writing for some online desi publications, I began writing about my Indian heritage, sharing my political views. I mean seriously mine? But somehow people started reading me. There are regular subscribers who email me to banter (sometimes passionately argue) after I post an opinionated piece. In the beginning, I used to be petrified that I had written something incorrect or I shouldn’t have said that out loud but this blog has slowly taught me to own…me.
Though you would’ve noticed in the past few months, my posts have been dwindling down. It’s not that I don’t have much to write about these days, it’s just with all this growth and change, the real reason I started this blog has gotten sidetracked. As I gained more readers, I began writing to cater for that readership who had later discovered the blog when I began writing on Fijian issues. Finding Shyamni kinda became a backstory. And I want to go back to finding her again, writing more personal stuff but I also want to continue writing ranting about all the other things. At times when I meet someone in a professional capacity and they tell me they liked my post on the Fiji elections, I cringe. Along with that post, they must be also reading my other girly shit! *cringe again* So I guess I kind of became conscious about what I was writing. Suruj definitely wasn’t happy when I wrote that things in her house were breaking “uh koun baat duniya ke batao??” 😀
So it’s time, I separated some categories from this blog. I have recently established a new blog site called shyamni.com where I have transferred those categories. I do hope to hear from you on that platform very soon. Please be patient as I iron out that website.
However it would always be here where you would hear my quietly beating heart. Please do hang around. More adventures are around the corner.
It’s been an incredible 2 years and my utmost gratitude to you for giving meaning to my words, dear reader. “I can no other answer make, but, thanks, and thanks and ever thanks.”
Shyamni. x
“I can no other answer make, but, thanks, and thanks and ever thanks.” – Shakespeare
Where is Shyamni? 