There are now more than 20,000 poems on Boloji. Time and again I've thought of giving my name to Guinness Book to see if I hold the world record for editing and publishing more than 17,000 poems :-) When I joined Boloji in April 2005, there were a little over 2000 poems. It's gonna be my 10th year with Boloji next year. Till date I've edited and published on Boloji almost daily except the days when I've been really unwell or when I've been out of station on holidays. Not that I've enjoyed it every day because a daily reading & writing routine can get tedious and monotonous but those moments when I get to read some really good poems making them Ed's Choice I feel so contented. When I had joined Boloji, Rajender Ji used to picturise the poems and he kept doing it for some more years till I took over. Finding a befitting picture for a particular poem does take time but when it all beautifully matches and falls in place, the feeling is so sublime. I feel immensely pleased being able to decorate a poem with a nice picture. Moments like these keep me attracted to Boloji poetry even though all my work is voluntary. It's a non-paid role and I'm not in it for monetary remuneration. My love for good poetry and good pics from our Getty Images gallery keeps me going despite the hard work I need to put in every day juggling my familial responsibilities of taking care of my 2 children for whom I'm their primary carer as my hubby has very long working and commuting hours. Life and health permitting, I'll go on....till death comes my way. Hence with regard to Boloji, even my children keep egging me to put my name for Guinness Book :-)
But I won't do it as Name and Fame have always given me hiccups because I've always had a bad reputation ;-)
LOL
I and hubby keep joking that as a business analyst, he's donated his eyes to IT, being in front of the PC 24/7 as there's always so much of work pressure, so many deadlines to meet, so many projects to complete. Sometimes I really feel sorry for him as he has to wake up nights to finish pending work. Being a team leader, even though he delegates some tasks to his subordinates, but he is responsible for the overall performance because if anything goes wrong, he'll be held accountable. Hence, he's always on edge to see if all's working OK. I also wonder if those organ donation people will be interested in my eyes after my death, as I've already donated my eyes to Boloji and hence, the person receiving my eyes might feel dreadful opening them if all he gets to see are lines and lines of prolific poetry ;-) esp. if he's not a poetic person. Imagine his plight, thanks to me ;-)
LOL
Anyway jokes apart, just wanted to update you that not all of my 1400+ poems are on Boloji as my permanent database has always been PH because it allows me to make an E-Book of my poems which I diligently do after every 3-4 months so that I have the latest copy with myself and of course, I've circulated this E-Book amongst my trusted pals so that they can preserve it for posterity.
PH has not always been good with publishing. There have been many software bugs that have time and again made the formatting of my poems look awry and despite repeated attempts at fresh submissions, those HTML errors stay. Also, if you notice, poems with the same titles have to be always put with some kind of symbols otherwise the PH online publishing software doesn't accept it thinking those are repeats of old poems. For e.g. if I write a poem with the Title: You the next time I submit a different poem with a different content but with the same title You, I have to submit it to PH as - You - and then the next time as ~ You ~ and then as > You < and then again as < You > and so on and so forth....Many times, I keep running out of symbols and of course, all this symbolizing does make my poems look stupid but I have no way out. I've even written to them regarding this major flaw but they haven't been able to sort this out. Thankfully, on Boloji, you can see that many of my different poems with the same Titles don't have any silly symbols attached to them.
https://www.boloji.com/index.cfm?md=Content&sd=Writers&WriterID=2140
I think the online PH software is akin to the Microsoft word software wherein if we want to save 2 documents with the same names, it will tell us that the document already exists and do we need to replace the old file with the new one even though the content in both the files may be different, only the Titles are the same. Just as Microsoft doesn't recognize that the 2 same titled Files could have different content, similarly, PH cannot recognize that 2/3/4 poems with the same title can have different content. I wish PH gets rid of such online bugs and limitations so that it becomes more progressive in publishing. It is giving us an excellent service with the PDF facility and also the facility that helps us download all our poems and save those in a Text File. I wish it all success and a lot more progress in all its poetic endeavours.
That's a lot of PH analysis for now.
Wishing you all a Happy Diwali :-)
Love always,
--
Friendship consists in forgetting what one gives, and remembering what one receives. - Dumas
Image © Getty Images dot Com
