The debate on comments in blogs is never-ending. Me personally, commento ergo bloggum (Latin makes me sound so cool – and clueless)… Which roughly means, I keep blogging because you in your nice and naive way keep leaving comments, thereby egging me on. You may or may not have noticed but I need little encouragement to go on and on. Anyway, I am all in agreement with this old jungle saying – “For all sad words of pen, tongue or keyboard, the saddest are these: 0 comments†(very wise words for an anonymous blogger except I am not admitting here I think he is wise).
Comments or no comments, it is never easy. Turn off your comments (it is your blog afer all) and you will have the readers up on their hind legs baying for your blood. And all this advice about what makes a blog a blog from perfect strangers. Trust your fellow men – or women or aliens from outer space – to be normal and polite and leave your comments section open. And you are asking for trouble. The world’s unheard voices pipe up as one voice on your comments section with gems ranging from the mildly rebuking you have no clue what you are talking about, you numb-skulled moron, to the nasty personal, I know your dad used to eat fourteen dodo eggs for breakfast every day, so don’t get all sanctimonious about the bird flu kinds.
And if you are still reading this, you will be familiar with the other kind of commentor. No, not the overwhelmingly nice stranger who says I love your blog. Very interesting site. Please visit my site on teenage acne sex or tries to sell extremely intresting and useful products such as penis enlargement pills to you on your blog. No, not those.
I mean those commentors who leave completely irrelevant and touching comments on your blog based on one quick word they caught in your entire page long post. Much like google ads which say, “reads” my rant against the fairness creams market and promptly puts up ads for fariness products right on top of my blog, thus destroying any little credibility I may have among readers.
Comments which scream out – I am a nutcase, laugh at me. I find myself loaded wth these especially when I write on education or employment (or what can be loosely construed as employment related posts) – then I find that I have suddenly turned into an agony-aunt-meets-financial-shark types blogger and people are writing in asking for advice on finding similar jobs or admission to such courses.
For instance, recently Eien Nunez wrote to me, I am interesting in having a business in Spain Barcelona selling doctorate degrees to people it would be posible to do business with you? if so, how much the degrees will cost me, time of delivery, also any delivery charges?
Could you send me the different degrees you have available a pic of some of them will help to show people what they will get.
And why? Because I had written about this kind stranger from the yonder who had written to me offering genuine degrees for sale.
Alright Eien, I am interesting in having business in Spain too, degree or no degree. Heck, I am interesting anyways, Spain or no Spain. And no, I don’t have pictures of the different degrees I have – they are the shy and retiring types and prefer not to be photographed.
And then the one about outsourcing tuition from India – Hello, I am a post graduate in chemistry. i have excellant communication skill with knowledge of computers.I wish to give on line tuitions for the students. Can you please whom to contact for the assignment.
To be fair, he only said his communication skill was excellant not his English. But I never know what to do with such comments. So I keep them and think about poor Satya who writes regularly about education and receives such notes all the time… Check this out if you don’t believe me…No really, check it out.
Have you been on the receiving end of crank comments (not the nasty ones). Then please share them here.
Let us all be interesting together…
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update : birth of a coconut : and just for the record, I can’t decide which I enjoyed more – Vik’s post on the abnormal coconuts and goats of tamilnadu. Or this comment “the goat was born like thatt .. and the coconut was also born the same way”. Or Vik’s response to that – “Also, thanks for your insights that the animals were born that way”.
I get queries from young Iyer men who want to marry Iyer “modern” Iyer women. I don’t even know HOW to respond to that!
Looks like the Nigerians have spared you….will direct some of them your way.
I see that you have also caught onto the longest ever — and the most enduring — comment spree on Satya’s blog. It’s amazing, isn’t it — he made the post in September of 2003, and the most recent comment is from … today!
For the record: It’s not a blog if comments are disabled!
And, I am interesting too in Spain …
neha, I wonder what exactly iyer women have to do to qualify for “modern”? in any case, you don’t qualify – you dont even respond to these queries from strangers…
Kaps, the Nigerians have been kind to me too, offering to share their wealth (?) with me – except they prefer the more intimate form of communicatin – the email. just so others reading a public comment dont start clamouring for some of the loot…
Abi, I remember Satya and I discussed that very post a long time ago… I didn’t see today’s comment though…
And I am sure you are interesting in Bangalore too 🙂
Hi Charu
This is an interesting topic. I love it when I can give a clever response to a silly comment. Months ago I posted something about the invation of the “bread people” (proto-indo-europeans) and someone commented that the dravidians had no language before Sanskrit came. I replied:
Anon3: Indeed perhaps people in India had no language before the bread people came. Perhaps they just pointed and grunted. This could be an alternative explanation for the spread of language as opposed to the invasion theory. But this still begs the question of where Tamil came from.
HaHa hilarious. How come I don’t get any funny ones like this? Plenty of nasty ones but not funny ones 🙁
“teenage acne sex”. Heehee.
The only crank comment I got was an anonymous one that said I am a complete and utter bastard. Turned out it was a friend attempting to play a joke.
I get the online tuition folks all the time (thanks to my erstwhile blog on education)but I think they are genuine people googling for opportunities for offering their skills and sadly end up at place where we cannot help them. I responded to the first couple of them saying I cannot help them but the requests keep coming. Sad as it might be, I have to delete them.
On a related note, I have observed the declining rate of comments on my blog. Earlier the ‘serious’ issues got fewer comments but the ‘fun’ ones got tons. But now any post I make gets few or even the dreaded ‘0 comments’. Guess, I have ceased to be an attractive blog and people rather prefer my DesiPundit avataar.
Michael 🙂 I usually ignore these silly comments but yes, there are times when a comment seems to be just crying out for a response…
WA, the nasty ones just won’t go away 🙁
Aditya, your friends actually think that about you…? hmmm 🙂
Patrix, I think more and more people are reading blogs through feeds and aggregators. grrrr. I think it is an eefort now to vist someone’s blog just to leave a comment – I try to do that as much as I can but sometimes it is just easier to nod or smile or scowl after reading the post! and yes, that bit about the fun and serious posts – always annoys me when people ignore seriosu things one writes about… and then a silly post gets loads of responses…
I have always been curious about the nasty/ cranky/ silly commenters. Across all the Blogs, if one were to add them up it makes up a fairly substantial number. And extrapolating that to the universe of the real world, it must be a substantial number! Scary almost.
My friend Chinmayee introduced me to Blank Noise a couple of months ago and I have been reading the blogs and comments regularly…Now I felt I should say something…Eve teasing is too nice a phrase for the act which it depicts. I am originally from Trivandrum, Kerala and now I am working in Ottawa, Canada. I did my schooling and college in Trivandrum and moved to Bangalore for post grad and work only in 2002. So my life till 2002 has been entirely in Trivandrum and other cities in Kerala. Kerala is a very peculiar place…almost 100% literacy and absolute 100% hypocrisy. My state can be proud of the most illuminant writers, film-makers, philosophers etc etc…but there lies a society underneath which seggregates women and men as if they are from two different planet. I remember every time I spoke to a male friend, people would take a second glance at you…I remember that I used to wear salwar with dupatta pinned up on both side (supposedly it hides the bosom from the eyes of the men who “might” get aroused)…and any time I wore jeans and a long and loose t-shirt (It was never my size T-shirt, always a large size when I needed only a small size…even then the looks I got from both men and women were…oh my god!)
Well forget the dress, I remember getting on the bus and men of all ages would be thronging to lean on the back side of the bus, because the bus had a seating arrangement – men in the front half and women in the back half…even then men would get on the bus from the back side and lean on the women who were sitting and standing their way to work or school or college. I remember one incident, which changed my attitude towards eve-teasing…
One day I was on a bus to school, I must be around 15 yrs old, and I was seated on an aisle seat. A man in his early 40s gets on the bus. The bus is not crowded, yet he chooses to lean against me, as if he thinks he is leaning agaisnt a tree. His whole body weight is on me…So I turn and ask him…there is so much space, can you please move and not lean on me…I was very courteous…my mistake! He didnt move, and he pretended to ignore me…all the women on the bus understood what I felt…the bus conductor he came along and looked at me, as if I did something wrong…Now I feel very uncomfortable…so I wait for a few minutes, and still hen doesnt move away…so I get up and he kind of tumbles, as his major support (thats my shoulder) has moves away!!! I aske him to excuse me, which he doesnt, so I pushed him to the side, which partially worked, because he was a tall man, and I was all of 5 feet and 2 inches!!! But he moved a few steps back, as he didnt expect me to react…so I moved him and I walked towards another seat at the back. I sat there are glared at him…while all the women had half-smiles…almost like a victory smile on their face.
He didnt exactly touch me, but he violated my personal space and I didnt want to be the VICTIM…Thats the problem I feel…Most women do not react, and I understand that sometimes they are too scared or they are not sure what to do. But now its high time women stood up agains any kind of demoralisation or teasing or molestation. I remember another incident, which I didnt understand completely until I was older…I used to go for Summer ART camps, where noted painters and artists would teach you how to paint and use colours and stuff like that…
One summer when I was maybe 10 yrs old…I went for an afternoon art camp…there were more than 50 kids of different ages and it was a whole lot of fun…but the non-fun part was taking your paintings and stuff to the art master who is a little dingy office at the corner of the building…and he would look at the pictures you drew and give you tips and advice about things to change about it…Well this master was so creepy that I still remember feeling a cold chill and the hair on my back standing up when I walked into his room…He was seated behind a big table and he would ask you to stand beside him while he looked at pictures and gave his opinion…the first time all he did was hold my hand and told me that the picture was very good…the next time his hands went up to my arm and he kind of squeezed my shoulder…which I thought was very strange, because I didnt know why he was doing that!!! I was a skinny teenager and I hadnt even attained puberty…so I was as flat as a boy…yet, the next time the master tried to run his fingers over my chest…this annoyed me and even at that young age, I knew something was wrong about what he was doing…so I pushed him away and told him, please dont touch me or I will tell my mom…and I left the room…The next day onwards I dreaded going for the camp and I was too scared to tell my mom…But that day onwards, the master never touched me or even look at me in a bad way…becoz after that I would go to his room and he would look at the pictures in 10 mins and ask me to leave…I was thrilled and happy that he had let me go! Years after this incident…Iand surprisingly I hadnt told anyone in almost 10 yrs…and when I told my friend about it, she was stunned…she said I was lucky that nothing happened to me…and that she wished women were brave enough to stand up and react…I felt good that day…but before that it didnt cross my mind that I might have donesomething remarkable, which most women might not…not becoz they arent brave, but they are insecure of the consequences…
I am glad that at least now women do react and try to fight the injustice and now this BLOG-A-THON will create a lot of awareness, so that more women and men will stand up against this kind of chauvnistic behaviour…I have a few guy friends who didnt know anything about what women go through and after they went through this blog site, they told me how ignorant they felt becoz they never knew that this was happening and would make an effort to keep their eyes open for anything around them…I felt so good that at least a few could be enlightened arpund me…keep writing and you will hear from me soon…hail woman power!