It all began…

…when I googled Sudhish Kamath a couple of years ago. I loved his humour and wanted to see how he looked. My curiosity was piqued even more when one of my classmates in Alliance Française was his colleague at The Hindu! To see her answer his calls and talk to him led me to imagine him to be some kind of a Chandler Bing. So yeah, I googled him. Only to find his blog. And the “He says, She says” column. And I was hooked. I meticulously stalked Textual Overtones. Read many of his reviews over and over. As apparent as it seems, I had a major crush on him. This went on for quite a few months by which time he started making That Four Letter Word. His blog was not updated for a long time and his reviews only occasionally appeared in The Cinema Plus. It was natural that I lost interest and gave up stalking his blog.

Fast forward to when Google Buzz was introduced. I was interning in IIT that summer, along with a few guys from NIT-Trichy. I always had Gmail open along with MATLAB. It so happened that a classmate had posted the famous Deviance post from Chutneycase on gBuzz. I warily opened it to get rid of the unread count. I ended up reading Coconut Chutney for the next few hours. And again, my curiosity was piqued. Who was this girl? She must be 20-ish. She wrote smart. She did not sound wannabe. And importantly, her writing had an earnest feel to it. After a few google searches, I got to know more about her identity. From then on, Chutneycase was placed beside Sudhish’s blog in the Lady Kedi hall of fame. I showed the NIT guys the blog. In return, one of them said he had come across a better blog. Better than Chutneycase? Bah! I scoffed. What’s it called, I asked him. “It’s called…umm…wait, I’d rather send you the link.” It turned out to be Krish Ashok.

Unlike what you may expect, I was not much impressed by what he wrote when I first saw his blog. I did not like its name. For me jalsa and jilpa were words used by KD boys. Add gilma and matter to it and you could remotely empathize why I did not like what I saw. Moreover, his latest post then was “Kentucky Fried Creation”, which I thought was too long, too sarcastic and too full of pictures. I made the mistake of judging him by that one post. After a few months, I came across Jalscifi on Facebook. And after that, I almost deified Krish Ashok. I suggested anyone who’d listen to me to read his blog. I even showed my Mom what he wrote about his wedding (and she was not pleased). What started out as adulation morphed into a full fledged crush once he started Parodesy Noise. I know he is over 30. I know he is happily married. I know that he doesn’t even know that I exist. But then, a crush is a crush. Happens a lot when you have never had a boyfriend.

Before I digress further, I should probably account for why I took up blogging. It’s simply because I got bored of stalking other people’s blogs. Partly because I don’t know how good, or how bad I am at doing this. Maybe Lady Kedi will be read a lot. Maybe she’ll give up later. Hypothetical thoughts apart, there are three people behind the screens who have convinced me that I should blog all the time I kept vacillating. Firstly, low-funda-boy for hyperbolizing my writing skills enough to get me started. And to Karthik, to have always given me the much needed push every time I had a block (which was almost always). The blog name was his suggestion and I would have never named it anything else. Then thanks to Scarecrow, for listening to all my stupid ideas, helping out with the design and for believing I’ll be good at this. Now, just watch this space and wait for KD posts. Lady Kedi will tend to disappoint. Up to you to put up with her!