So yeah, finally a substack, but why? To be honest the pandemic has brought a lot of changes in our lives, the new normal largely relies on online interaction and will remain the same for a while. An unfortunate result of this is that you can no longer shove your opinion down people’s throats. The people who were bound to listen to you earlier now have an option to simply ghost your texts.
The solution? Start a blog and blabber on the web.
I have been reading a lot of newsletters and articles lately. So much that I have appended a ‘+’ to my Gmail address and used some filters to sort out all the subscriptions in one tab instead of having them pop up in my ‘formal’ Gmail tabs. This is a quite simple thing to do and I find it convenient when I know which tab will contain what.
Going through all the various subscriptions daily has made me feel like a connoisseur of long-form articles and I thought of having a stint in the same. And so finally ✨Sagar Opines✨ on the net.
The topics of the articles/observations that I hope to write will largely revolve around economics, business, and technology. I might also talk somewhat about urbanism, transportation and general musings about life. Nonetheless, most of it will be centred around India or the South Asian community at large.
Initially, I thought of creating a portfolio-cum-blog website where I can showcase some projects apart from writings. You can check out this if you would like to see a use case of what exactly I’m talking about. However, I decided against it because I have had similar websites earlier as well and while I did spend a lot of time on them, they ended up being abandoned in the end. My most recent attempt was using NetlifyCMS over Hugo and hosting it on Netlify using a free .tk domain. Before that static blog, I had created a dynamic blog as well but alas.
There are tons of options to run a blog now and I have been through the prolific peak of tools-don’t-matter to the static gen basin. I just wanted something which balances between me having my choice while not asking for too much effort. I didn’t want to juggle with inserting head injections and tracking codes huddling with cookies policies. I desired simplicity.
Not to mention that my maiden attempt at blogging started back in 2014 and peaked out at around 20k views/day. However, views are not the prime goal this time. I just want to post about my interests irrespective of the viewership. If you are still reading this, don’t take the previous sentence too seriously and please subscribe, I need it.
The two platforms that I zeroed down on this time were Medium and Substack. I do have a Medium account back from 2018 but I hate it now. The goddamn paywalls, I hate them like anything. Most of the substack content that I enjoy is not behind paywalls as of now so I decided to go ahead with substack and hence this.
Noone just thinks of doing something and does it right away. I too thought about this substack for some time (read: several months) and finally called poggers when I discovered this month that Paul Krugman began wonking out in February with a pretty good post on stagflation.
Quoting directly from his post,
I’m looking for a place to wonk out, not an extra flow of income. I also don’t know how often I’ll post; certainly not every day, and maybe not even every week. But I do hope that people with an interest in the wonkier aspects of life will subscribe. Please clap.
That summarizes why and what I intend to do. Trying to lie somewhere between cringe and irony, I wrote the first post for this blog before even starting it. I’ll be publishing it soon. Till then, hype up(?).