About
I started August-Inspiration in 2004 as a personal blog in which I could recount my experiences and feelings. Since then its primary role has not changed, but there has been much change. In 2008 I moved my blog to WordPress hosted on a private server.
With the inception of Web 2.0 came the idea of personal presences on the Internet (for the masses). Many services have since appeared offering the services of social networks and virtual communities. A common denominator of near all these websites is the small white “about me” box. It seems that when you are out to conquer the world—by gaining as large a user-base as possible—there is a limited amount of (base) information which you want to store on your users. Quantity, not quality. But, of four years of blogging, a year-and-a-half on Facebook and a year on Orkut, I have never created an “about me” which I was satisfied with. The words always seem to fall short. There is not enough room to express yourself. The goal if these boxes is of course to give a succinct summary about yourself, but this is extremely difficult for even the best versed individuals in all of creation. An inherent problem of “about me” boxes, I believe, is often the social context: it is your “advertisement space” and is often prone to self-censorship. No-one is only who they want to be.
So, understanding the problem for summarising oneself, I thought about how I would approach it. But I soon realised it would be a fickle exercise. The thing is that I want people to get to know who I am, not read an abstract and then move on. TLDR is a wide-spread problem in the new generations to which I am prone myself. But as far as a summary about myself is concerned, that is what this entire website is about. I hope that you would spend some time to get to know me and in turn I shall endeavour to limit the self-censorship.
The Name
The name August-Inspiration is derived from two sources. The first one is that I started this blog in the month of August and was feeling rather inspired, hence then name. The other is a quote by Adam Duritz, the lead singer of the Counting Crows, one of my favourite bands. I have a deep affinity for the Crow’s music, as I feel that many Adam’s lyrics are so raw of pure, naked emotion that it moves me like few others can. Despair, vulnerability… the things that most of us try to hide, this man bleeds into harmony and onto the stage.
“[The songs] are all about me; they’re absolutely all about me. Or they’re, at least, about how I feel about things. They might not be a diary cataloguing what I did yesterday, but then, I mean, if that was all there was to songwriting then everyone could do it. Its just ten years about how I feel about things. I left some of the nasty stuff out.”