Origin and Configuration of ‘Guftagu’

The earliest pieces on this site were written nearly five years ago. They were sent as mail messages to a few friends, and their comments were circulated, as often as I was able to muster the effort. The response was encouraging. In some cases, our friends ‘forwarded’ the mails to their links and associates, and so the circle began to expand.

Then, one day, disaster struck. My mail ID was hacked on 17 April 2010. I lost everything I had written and sent to my friends. The experience was traumatic. But I got some advice from my life-long friend, KD Singh. He told me to retain the “charhhdi kala” (the art of maintaining one’s spirits in a state of ascent) and another friend Joseph Thomas sent me some messages which he had not deleted on his computer.

Be that as it may, I began to maintain a backup from then on. In fact, I divided all that I sent out into a few topics and retained the comments and replies which I received from my friends. When the thought of creating this website took a practical shape, I gathered these pieces and with the help of my team members, I have brought these tidbits under one single platform.

The website is now divided into two parts:

• All the pieces which I had sent before hosting this website on 28 June 2012 are recovered from my archives, and therefore, the dates are retrospective. Consequently, the replies which I received are not given in the sequence in which I received them. In fact, since I had to transcribe them manually, I have not been able to key in all of them, and the dates mentioned in each case are not correct, in most cases.

• Articles and pieces which are hosted after the above date are in the new format, in which the responses are posted in real-time. Thus what the readers say, will become available to everyone as soon as it is received, after being seen by the editorial team.