You scratch my back...

...and is it always necessary that I should scratch back in return? I am talking about blogs here...There seems to be an unwritten rule that you comment to receive comments...not to express your opinion on what is written...but just to increase your own blogs' popularity...I find that quite repulsive...I believe that a writer, a genuine one, does not need any kind of encouragement to come up with excellent pearls...It's jus incubated within him...And he has to write...Being regular is not the mandate...Being exquisite is...The price and the attention the world pays is not what matters...There are absolutely irregular blogs out there which I visit regularly in the hope that there would be some piece today...'cos its worth the wait...and I never tire of waiting...On the other hand there are blogs which are fairly regular which churn out stuff which can easily be given a miss !
Same goes for design...I'd any day rather strain my eyes and read an original blog than a plain black and white one...and if you are not a great designer, then stick to black and white....I'll still like it...'cos u've done it for your own reasons....not for my reading pleasure....
When blogs started, they started off as personal spaces which people wanted to share with the world...then came competitive measures such as how many comments do I recieve and how many readers do I recieve...and thus the ugly head of competition reared its head...in the pseudoname of networking... and like-mindedness bloggers started forming groups....emotions like jealousy, and envy slowly but surely entered...and sadly some of them even went to the extent to trying to blacklist others who had more readership than them...
I wonder why the sheer pleasure of writing is not sufficient to keep your blog going ! And why keep it going when the pleasure is no longer there? Why twist a hobby to a job? Beats me !

There are upteen articles out there which tell you how to increase readership for your blog...But this post is inspired by my utter shock on reading a blog article on the same topic...I was shocked because I thought the writer wrote for the sheer love of writing and that the no. of visitors didn't matter to him...i was quite aghast to realise I was wrong...No, I am not linking him here and thus "watching out" for him...