Chp 883. Starting afresh... again

This had been the longest break I've ever taken from blogging since I started blogging 19 years ago.

There were many reasons why I just lost interest in blogging for the past one year, from personal reasons, to having to use this platform's unfriendly User Interface that seems to be stuck in 2010, to having a completely screwed-up AdSense integration, to the simple fact that people just don't read blogs anymore.

But being a blogger for 19 years, it has become a part of my identity now. It is who I am, whether I like it or not. So, here is me, an old fart blogger, cracking my knuckles one more time to give blogging one more shot.

I will be doing two things very differently this time though.

#1. No more MS Word. 

I always used to write my blog on a Microsoft Word document first. Back in 2004 when I first started blogging, internet was expensive. Gen-Z may never understand this, but I used to update my blog by going to a cyber cafe, google all the info I want to know about or require as references, copy them to a floppy drive, rush back to my hostel and then copy the files to my offline computer, read them, and then open an MS word file and start writing.

Once I was done writing, I would copy the Word doc back to the floppy, run back to the internet cafe, open my Word doc from the floppy drive, copy the content and then update my blog. Phew!

Yeah, life was something else back then.:D

And as the years passed by, technology improved. Pen drives replaced Floppies, and affordable home internet connections replaced Cyber cafes. Smartphones too entered the market and suddenly we had the internet right in our pockets! Who would have thunk?

However, my habit of writing a blog post on an MS Word file never ceased. I continued doing that but I started facing a lot of issues.

Let me try to explain this as simply as I can. 

Back in the early 2000s (when Google had just acquired this blogging platform), I could just copy-paste whatever I wrote on a Word doc to my blog and that was it. Everything was fine.

Then came the change in Blogger.com's CMS (Content Management System) and suddenly everything I copied also copied the hidden MS Word unicode characters and pasted them on my blog update! It was a shitstorm of texts and strange symbols everywhere. And so I would first copy-paste what I had written on a Word doc to a Text document to remove all the formatting, and THEN copy-paste that to my blog again.

That worked for a couple of years, until Blogger.com suddenly decided to follow what Wordpress was doing back then and became a WYSIWYG editor. That is "What You See Is What You Get", meaning, whatever you type on any text editor, it will appear exactly like that online.

And so, again I had to change the steps in which I would copy-paste. The good thing about that is that if I had put a paragraph or italics on my Word document and copy-pasted that to my blog, it would also put a paragraph or italic in my blog editor, and so on.

All was well for a couple of years, until Blogger.com suddenly changed their CMS again. Now it was no longer WYSIWYG. I mean, it's still WYSIWIG to an extent, but only if you were typing on the platform's editor. Anything pasted from outside to the platform's editor was no longer WYSIWG. For example, a paragraph or a quote or a line break was no longer recognised as that after copy-pasting it. My blog post became a clusterfuck of words and sentences all joined together after copy-pasting!

After a couple of weeks of frustration, I found out the only way to tackle that was either to use this platform's editor directly, or to manually put HTML commands in my Word doc itself while writing my blog post.

I told myself I wasn't going to succumb to Google's demand. I'm a rebel, hell yeah. And so for every blog post I was writing on a Word doc, I was also including different HTML commands like breaks and paragraphs, as well as div, span, font face, size, alignment, a href, img src, etc., right in the middle of my blog content!

Yeah, you really have no idea what was going on behind the scenes of my blog updates, lolz.

And that worked well when I copy-pasted from a Word doc to here, except for the fact that I had to spend so many extra minutes writing all the HTML commands.

The reason for all these restrictions is, I guess Google's marketing execs want bloggers to write directly on their platform itself, instead of using a third-party software. After all, more time spent on their platform means higher retention, longer session duration, more engagement time, higher CTR and conversion rate etc etc, which will give these execs a nice bonus on their next Quarterly meet. 

Now that I'm finally going to start blogging again, yeah, screw my defiance. I surrender to Google. I will be writing directly on this platform for any new updates from now on, including this post. I no longer have the time or energy to do those extra things. You win, Google. You happy? 

Kima - 0, Evil Corporation - 1. :P

#2. Image hosting sites. 

This is the second big change I'm making.

For years, the biggest headache I have when it comes to my blog update is where I'm hosting my images.

To a layman, let me explain. If you want to put an image on your blog post, you have to upload it somewhere and then embed that image on your blog post. The place where you upload it is called an image hosting site. Many people use the default Google Photos or Google Drive image gallery to upload their blog images now, but back then, there were no such things as Google Photos or Drive. We had to host our blog images elsewhere.

I selected Photobucket as it was the most popular image hosting site back then, and being a bit OCD about the way I arrange my image folders, I was able to do that neatly at Photobucket.

All went well for a couple of years, until I crossed the free limit. I could no longer upload any new images unless I pay, and I really don't blame them for that, after all, they also need to earn some money right?

I became a premium member.

I think that happened around 2008'ish because I was working and had a credit card by then. Since I already had hundreds of blog posts and images, I didn't want to change my hosting service provider and so I was paying $9.99 per month with by credit card for the additional storage space and bandwidth.

And that went well for a couple of years, until 2017, when Photobucket dropped a mega bomb. They removed all free accounts, including lower-tiered premium accounts like mine that were paying $9.99 per month, and suddenly charged an exorbitant $399.99 annual fee to continue using their service!

That was such a dick move. By then I already had more than 650 blog posts with over 2000 images in my Photobucket account. My 650+ blog posts no longer displayed any images and all Photobucket accounts across the world were held at ransom. Yup, there was indeed a severe backlash. People started migrating to other service providers (we couldn't even access our accounts to download our old images).

A year later, they introduced a much lower fee but I'm sure there were hardly any takers. They had already broken our trust completely.

I shifted to AWS to host my blog images and set up my own server there.

That went well for a couple of years and I was paying around ₹ 100 a month on bandwidth usage, sometimes up to ₹ 500 if I had a series of "hit" blog posts.

Now a bandwidth usage is the amount I get charged every time people visit my blog and view the images on that post. Let me explain it this way. Suppose I write a new blog post, where I have put 10 new images. I upload those images to my AWS server. Now when you visit my new blog post, my HTML sends a message request to my AWS server to display the images embedded in that post. Every time AWS displays an image to a new user, it charges me. That is known as bandwidth usage.

And I was okay with paying ₹ 100 to ₹ 500 per month, you know, until CoVid happened and one of my blog posts went viral!

It was the Mizoram: Setting an example for India post, which had over a lakh views. Now, a lakh may not be much, but that post had more than 50 high-resolution images! My bandwidth usage charge was shooting up like crazy, in real-time! I was panicking (at the same time excited my post about Mizoram was going viral across India, with many renowned celebrities sharing it).

I watched my bill shooting up every minute! I couldn't disable the images because there were like 1000 unique visitors every hour. And so I quickly resized each image quality from 10MB to 2MB and replaced it with the same file name in my AWS folder.

That reduced my cost vastly, but it was still going up as the number of unique visitors kept increasing.

And so the next day, I created a free account at Imgur, another popular image hosting site, uploaded the same images there and then edited that viral blog post and linked the images to my new Imgur account instead.

The exponentially rising AWS cost finally stopped completely. Phew!

You know how much my AWS bill for that month came to? 

₹ 7000!!!!

Yeah, that was so sad.

I stopped using AWS after that, and continued using Imgur for all my blog image hosting.

But again, the problem with Imgur is that, even though I absolutely love it so far, who knows, one fine day, they just might go the Photobucket way and screw me all over again. After all, capitalism.

Instead, I might as well just host all my blog images here on Google Drive itself, especially since I am already paying extra for the additional 100 GB a year. Like, if Google decides to screw me one fine day, then it will be just Google screwing me and not 4-5 different companies screwing me together. The lesser of two evils, lolz.

You hear that Google? You win this round too.

The only problem is, like I said at the very beginning of this post, Blogger.com's UI is extremely outdated. Like, if I am inserting an image, whether I link the image to my Google Drive or Imgur, I only have the option of selecting which FIXED size I want the image to be displayed as here. Like seriously??? 

We're living in the age of "responsive design" where people can access blogs from all sorts of devices, from desktop computers to tablets to phones to VR headsets to even a freaking washing machine. Fixed widths cannot cater to all these different resolutions because this platform's template hasn't been designed to handle it. And so keeping a fixed-width image will display differently across different mediums.

Hence, for now, the only solution to prevent this is to add the <img width="100%"> command in the HTML section of each blog post image. Sad.

The other even sadder part is, Google Drive photos cannot be embedded directly on a blog. I mean I can see it on my browser after I embed it because I am logged in with my Google ID on my browser, but you won't be able to see it even if the image is set to public view.

So apparently, there is a different embedded link for each Google Drive image link (which begs the question, what is the point of having the privacy setting of public or private then?). I know, such a roundabout.

So, after a couple of trial and error and reading up different forums, I found the two best solutions to tackle this:

The first is this post by Temitope Ayodele who tells us to simply replace the Google Drive image link with a different link (mentioned in the link) and we just have to insert that image's ID in it. This works.

The second is an embedded link generator by Labnol who tells us to paste the Google Drive image link, click "Generate" and it generates a new link that you can paste in your <img src> link. This works too.

A big thanks to these two for helping me solve my problem. 

(Edit: One small difference I found out after publishing this post - In the first method listed above, Facebook will not fetch the image to display as a thumbnail when you post a link on FB, whereas in the second method, Facebook will display the image as a thumbnail.)

I still don't understand why there can't be an option to get the embedded link directly from our Google Drive image link itself??? Why Google why?

You know how much pain it's going to be if I write a new post with 20-30 images in it and I have to follow the above 3-4 steps procedure for every single image? :( 

By the way, Google Photos is considered to be more user-friendly and seamless than Google Drive for embedding blog images, but the problem is, you can't create sub-folders within Google Photos like you can in Google Drive (again Google, why?) As I mentioned before, I am very organised when it comes to storing my blog images. I keep all the images of a particular post in separate folders, each one numerically named and arranged alphabetically. 

That's the reason why I prefer Google Drive over Google Photos. I want a folder (for example, "BLOG") and within that, I want all the sub-folders of each blog post (for example, "001-xx post", "002-yy post" and so on). One solution is to make all these sub-folders in the primary level of Google Photos itself, but that would mean my primary level is going to be flooded with 800+ folders! If you have no qualms about where your photo goes, then by all means, use Google Photos.

Anyway let's see, maybe in the future, Google will make it easier to embed images from Google Drive or at least give us an option to create sub-folders in Google Photos. 

And I hope they also finally wake up and remember they have a blogging division, lolz. Their official Blogger.com blog is just so sad, where it's been 2 years since their last update, and before that, it was just one post a year. :D

We used to joke that maybe there is just one employee left in the whole of Google's blogging division who's overseeing everything, but I fear that is becoming more of a reality now.

So, whatever the future may hold, here is looking forward to many new blog posts in spite of all these hassles. Hope you all start visiting again. Also, yeah, I promise I won't be this technical in my next update. Cheers, everyone.

Fare thee well Sidharth Rao

Circa 2008, I had decided to apply for a job for the first time in my life, no longer depending on my parent's pocket money.

All my friends who knew me well advised me to get into advertising because of my passion for creativity. Problem was, I had never faced a job rejection before, which they told me I would surely face, especially since I was a college dropout and a fresher. And so in order to experience that, they told me to go for the best agency, face the rejection, and then start my career from a smaller agency. I did just that. 

The number 1 digital agency in India at that time was Webchutney (now Dentsu Webchutney). I googled the office address at Juhu Versova Link Road and then walked right in the office, asking for a job :D

The receptionist Rianna was shocked! Nobody had ever done that before. Rianna called up the HR Manisha, who then called up the Creative Director Nishi, who then called up the Mumbai Branch Head Poornima, who then called up the CEO in Delhi, Sidharth Rao.

Long story short, I was interviewed by HR, asked to come again and was interviewed by Nishi, and then asked to come again and was interviewed by Poornima, and then I got the job! What started as just an experience to get rejected, ended up in me getting my first-ever job.

It was many years later that I found out when Poornima had called up Sidharth to tell him about the bizarre incident of somebody just randomly walking into office and asking for a job, Sid looked at my CV and saw that I was a college dropout. He immediately told her to give me a shot at an interview instead of telling security to throw me out, as he himself was a dropout. He knew from his own experience that not all dropouts are failures.

It was that decision that changed my life forever.

I never knew Sid well for the first 2 years I was in Webchutney. He was the hotshot CEO and Co-Founder from Delhi who would occasionally visit our Mumbai office once every few months. I was just a junior copywriter then while he was in the upper echelon of management. But he would always greet me and everybody else with a "hi" and smile whenever he came down to Mumbai. And by everybody, I mean everybody, right from the top and middle management to the bottom feeders like me, all the way to the office boys, sweepers and security guards.

He was also always there at GoaFest, which is like the "Oscars" for advertising held at Goa annually, where all the top ad agencies of India would come together and prizes were awarded to the best campaigns and ideas. It was there that Sid and I first bonded well when my concept for Axe won Silver at GoaFest (Technically, we came first since there was no Gold awarded that year).

Also, the exact moment we bonded was hilarious. Sid had booked the entire beach shacks of Palolem for us to stay, and we were drinking and partying by the beach. It was quite late, maybe around 2 in the morning. I was just sitting alone at the edge of the dark beach, letting the waves gently hit me up to my chest and enjoying my high all alone, when Sid suddenly appeared out of nowhere near me and peed on the waves! I jumped out of the water like a freaking ninja on acid. He too was completely shocked to see me and apologised immediately while turning around. We still talked and laughed about that incident many years later.

As the years went by and we won more and more awards at GoaFest, Sid and I became closer. Eventually, I graduated from just brainstorming and conceptualizing ideas for clients to directly pitching those ideas to clients myself.

The one client meeting I will never forget was with Mahindra. Even though I was regularly meeting clients by then to pitch concepts and ideas, it wasn't out of the ordinary for one of my bosses like Nishi (Creative Director), Meghna (Copy Head), Saket (Tech Head) or Tarana (Client Servicing Head) to come along for the meeting, especially if it was a big or important client. But that day when Sukruta and I were about to go to Mahindra corporate office to pitch a campaign idea, Sidharth joined us!

He was visiting Mumbai right then, and decided to tag along. I was quite nervous that day when Sukruta and I were pitching to the head honchos of Mahindra because our CEO Sid was right there in the same room, silently sitting and probably judging us. We did win that pitch eventually, and years later, Sid told me he came along for that meeting because he personally wanted to see how I was interacting with clients.

As the number of accounts and pitches we won kept increasing, Sidharth too started spending more time in Mumbai than Delhi. In Mumbai office, I had the reputation for always being the first to reach the office and last to leave. But when Sid was in town, he gave me serious competition. And of course, he would show off and mock me if he reached before me :D Eventually, I became his regular drinking buddy, hitting the bottle together every night after a long day of intense work.

We found the perfect drinking partner in each other - somebody with high capacity who's still able to hold their drink. It was like a match made in Heaven. :D

As a drinking buddy, I will always keep the secrets he had shared with me locked in my heart, but there is one secret I will reveal now, which I know Shweta won't mind too because they got happily married three years ago. Back when Sid and Shweta first started dating, I was the only one who knew about it. :D Ah what a clandestine life I had to lead in office. My tiny matchbox apartment in Jogeshwari East became our regular after-drinks crash pad, where Sid and I would sleep in the bedroom and Shweta slept on the couch outside (both of them were still based out of Delhi back then).

There was this super hilarious moment when we all got back at my apartment in an auto and I collected our laptop bags from the back of the auto and when we reached my floor, we realised I had also taken the poor auto driver's spare tyre!!! In the darkness and drunken state, I didn't realise I had also grabbed his tyre. I ran downstairs but the auto was already gone. Sid took a photo of me with the tyre, and many years later on my birthday, he surprised me with a beautifully framed photo of that as a birthday gift!

Ah yes, he always made my birthdays feel special. This one time when he promoted me to head a new (but small) experimental business division in Delhi directly under the COO Rahul Nanda, I moved out of my Jogeshwari East apartment and was temporarily staying as a guest in his rented duplex apartment in Bandra before I was supposed to move to Delhi permanently. I had just returned to Mumbai from a long meeting in Delhi with Kavin Mittal regarding the new venture. That day was my birthday. As I stepped into Sid's duplex from the airport quite exhausted and ready to crash, he told me, "Fucker, it's your birthday, freshen up and wear something nice, I'm taking you out somewhere fancy".

And so he took me to AER, which was like the top-class lounge in Mumbai back then. It was the kind of place a person like me would never afford to go to. He even got Shenaz Treasurywala to join my birthday party and we had such a blast together! I will never forget that birthday.

Unfortunately, yesterday was another birthday I will never forget again either. As I was just about to sleep after celebrating my birthday with a few friends here at my home in Aizawl, Sumeet and Amit called me up to deliver the sad news that Sid had just passed away.

Fuck. Till now it feels so unreal. I was beyond remorse. I wish I could be there for his cremation which was held at his farm in Kharjar today. I wish I could be there to console dear Shweta. I wish I could be there to be with dear uncle and aunty, with sweet Nat. All the fun times we spent together, all the memories.

After the Delhi experimental business plan didn't work out, Sidharth quickly pivoted and helped me start our own games dev company, guiding me all the way. I switched my role completely from a copywriter to a game designer! A radical change like that was possible only through Sidharth's vision because he believed in me.

Since I had already moved out of my Jogeshwari apartment, I was about to look for a new place in Mumbai again, but instead of getting a new place of my own, Sid suggested we rent a place together! We went house hunting and finally moved into this posh 3BHK at Sea Hill Apartment, right opposite Olives on Khar West.

Of course I couldn't afford the bloody 3 lakhs per month rent, lolz, even if split halfway or four ways :D But Sid made me pay only a very small amount, like the newspaper and other service bills, and the salaries of our two maids and one domestic help. That was it. I will never forget his generosity.

What a rise it had been for me. From idolizing the man who had created the premier digital ad agency in India and somebody I thought I'll never get to hang out with, to being flatmates with him.

Sid had taught me so many things in the years that we were flatmates. He mentored and groomed me into what I am today. I started watching completely different types of shows and docus I had never watched before. I had a front-row seat into the world of VC funding and Capital raising. He had daily meetings with powerful people at Toto's and sometimes he would call me and I would just drop everything and go sit among them and listen to their powerful conversations.

He shaped my character too. This one time, we found out one of our maids had ripped us off. She had asked me for her salary and I gave it to her. The next day, she also asked Shweta for her salary again and she gave it to her as well, not knowing I had already paid her.

That night we found out about her deception, and it wasn't the first time either. Sid was infuriated. However, he told me, "Kima, you're such a nice guy and everybody loves you, but people take advantage of nice guys in this industry. You have to be tough and ruthless if you are running your own company. You must fire the maid immediately tomorrow, I'm not going to get involved in this shit".

That was the first time in my life I had ever fired anybody. Yes, it was hard for me to do so, especially with the maid crying and begging for forgiveness, but she had betrayed the trust we had in her. I did it and felt terrible about it, but Sid later patted me on the back and told me it was hard but necessary to do such things if I wanted to be successful.

Just recently, I had fired two of my chowkidars at my farm here in Mizoram. The reasons were justified of course, but I seriously don't think I could have done that had Sid never moulded me into what I am today.

Of course, being ruthless wasn't Sid's only trait, he was also gentle, funny, caring and understanding. After all, you can't run the top digital agency in India and various successful startups by being a stuck-up dictator. One of the ways in which I judge people is by drinking with them and watching them get drunk. A person's true colour comes out when under the influence. With Sid, the drunker he gets, the nicer he becomes. That's when you know a person is truly good inside.

Our nightly drinking sessions were very different too. Most people would talk about, you know, sex or politics or sports when they're inebriated. We on the other hand spoke only about our industry, new start-up ideas, new business opportunities, incubators, mergers and acquisitions etc. It was like, work never sleeps in Sidharth's environment. On the very few occasions we didn't talk shop, Sid would play Foster The People's "Pumped up kicks" on repeat. Sigh, those days.

And speaking of getting drunk, another lesson I've learnt from Sid is to never handle anything financial when drunk. Sid would never sign even a simple cheque, even if it was 100% legit and safe, when he was drinking. He would do so the next morning. I have followed that mantra till today and I believe I have avoided many costly mistakes because of it.

But no matter how wasted we got the previous night, when I woke up the next day (and believe me, I always wake up early every day, much to the irritation of my friends), Sid would already be up, reading yet another new book. The amount of books he used to order and consume was truly mindblowing.

In all the years that I had spent with Sid, there had been only one time he was angry with me. After Sumeet and I started our own mobile gaming startup, we were in Delhi with our team there, working on a few projects, when we suddenly received the mail that our application for the prestigious "Start-Up Chile incubator" had been approved!

We were ecstatic! Out of thousands of applications worldwide, only 100 were selected every year, and we were one of them! We were so happy that we partied immediately, getting drunk right there itself. It was much later that a very angry Sidharth called me up as he had just heard about the news from some other source. He was our main investor and company director, and we had completely forgotten to tell him about the news! :D Oh he was soooo angry with me, and at the same time extremely excited and happy too. :D 

I'll never forget all the random gadgets he used to purchase, like our own personal fancy bar stand, or tetris blocks with lighting system, or party hats with lights, or vintage posters and Tintin comics, etc etc. He sure loved his toys, and deep inside he was but a mere boy. We also adopted a couple of puppies and kittens, and when some of them passed away, he would cancel all his plans and meetings so that we could go to the crematorium. He would wear dark sunglasses to hide his pain and tears.

But he was always funny otherwise. He never stopped making fun of my tattoos (because we both have fucked up tattoos that we got when we were stupid). And he would never stop reminding me about the time I came home late at night from a business trip in Delhi and ate our dog's food from the fridge by mistake, and ended up with food poisoning the next day. How that never failed to make him laugh.

I have hundreds of photos and videos of Sid, and looking through them now breaks my heart again. All the great moments we spent together, both on and off work. But he was a fiercely private person, so even though he is gone now, I will respect his wishes and not put any of our photos here. However, he had always encouraged me to keep writing, especially about social issues. In fact, that incident about me and Mumbai police where I had invited them for tea (the one that went viral) was written because he encouraged me not to be afraid, in spite of the negative backlash it could have caused me.

There are two things I have achieved and feel proud of when it comes to Sidharth. 

One was when I had finally succeeded in convincing him to try Android (those were the days when most upper management were extremely loyal to iOS and Blackberry, and us Android fans were treated as outcasts, lolz). He even bought the OnePlus One phone when it first launched in the US, tried it out for a week, liked it, and then resold the phone to me with a huge discount. And so I was one of the few people in India to use the OnePlus One phone back then, because it wasn't available in India yet, all thanks to Sid.

The second was when I finally convinced him to try out our Mizo delicacy made from fermented soybeans and shrimp paste. I used to cook occasionally because he loved my special fried potatoes (Bareja too would come over immediately when I cooked that). One day, since I was alone at home, I decided to make fermented soybeans and shrimp paste chutney. Sidharth came home earlier than usual and suddenly started sniffing around everywhere, peeping out of each window. I asked from the kitchen, "Wassup", and he replied while still looking everywhere, "Hey man, something died out here, I think it's a pigeon, the smell is everywhere". God I was so embarrassed :D 

I told him that it was the dish I was making and we had a great laugh. That night I made him have it and he absolutely loved it. Believe me, I don't think there are that many people who initially thought it was the stench of decaying flesh to still try it out with no hesitation. He was never afraid to try out new things, be it food or business ventures.

The day our start-up was acquired by Jetsynthesis and our team had to move to Pune to our new office was probably the saddest moment for me in Mumbai. I bid a tearful goodbye to Sid and Shweta. Sid had groomed me so much, from a clueless copywriter trainee to a senior copywriter to a start-up founder to a game designer. I owe him my entire career. Words will never be enough to express how much he will be missed by his family and close friends, but writing this eulogy gives me a small amount of solace.

Goodbye my boss, my friend, my mentor, my sensei, my flatmate, my brother. Hope you have an endless jolly time with Anant Rangaswami across the rainbow.