Thank You BongMom #writebravely #WTFOW2018

Dear Bong Mom,

As you are also a blogger you would know how tedious blogging challenges are. My initial plan was to write on the prompt-“No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true.” – Cinderella- however, I changed my mind and started writing a letter to you.

Bong Mom, you have no idea what a huge influence you have been in my blogging career. Back in 2008, I had no idea what blogging was-Thankfully those were the happy days of blogging when it was all about creativity and expressing oneself and not selling baby products – One day, I accidentally bumped into your blog. Ever since there have been no looking back. You came like a baton of light and initiated me to the mystical world of blogging.

I met you while looking for a recipe. As I grew up motherless and my dad never insisted to learn cooking, I never mastered the art of cooking. However, after marriage, I started feeling inadequate. The women in the new family were super-efficient in terms of cooking and domestic activities. They could cook for 30 people in a wink whereas I was struggling to make one omelette. A sense of inadequacy and inferiority started gripping me.

The worst day was when I invited few relatives for dinner. I toiled the whole day and cooked managing a baby on my lap yet in the evening when they sat down for dinner I heard not a single word of appreciation. In fact, one of them said: “We had made such an amazing chicken last week, it was A-plus.” I understood it was a polite way of telling me that my food was not good enough. That night I locked myself in the bathroom and cried a lot.

I called my dad, and he in his usual nonchalant tone said that cooking is not a difficult job and any Ina, Meena, Dika (Female version of Tom, Dick, Harry) can do it and I should not lose my heart. Energised by his pep talk, I started Googling for various Bengali recipes, I was determined to show the world that I can cook. While searching, I came across your blog Bong Mom’s CookBook. Any Bengali man or woman who has ever looked for Bengali recipes online would be familiar with your blog. This is so far the best Bengali recipe blog that I have come across in last 10 years.

Let me confess I learnt most of my recipes from you, however, what I also learnt was the art of storytelling. The way you narrated stories from your childhood, or the way you used humour to express yourself always kept me hooked till the end. Your stories inspired me to tell my own stories.

Encouraged by you, I took a baby step and started my first blog. It was a recipe blog (ROFL!!!). When I look back at that blog I often feel like spanking myself. Why on earth did I start a recipe blog? It was almost like Mamata Banerjee starting a Spoken Hindi class or Rahul Gandhi starting a class on ‘how to improve IQ’.

Thankfully, I got bored and stopped posting. However, I was still itching to blog but was not sure what or how to. Finally, I realised that I want to do blogging but that need not be a food blog. There are other genres too. Thus my first blog Wanderful was born. I successfully blogged there for 6 years and then shifted to WordPress, as I was having issues with Blogger.

Today, after successfully and consistently blogging for 8 years I think I deserve to give you a Guru Dakshina. You are my Dronacharya and I am your Ekalavya. You couldn’t teach me cooking but you taught me blogging and I shall always remain grateful. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You gave me a dream, and even though I was grieving I kept believing in my dream and my wish to become a blogger came true.

Regards

Trina

Write Tribe

Prompt 1: Write a letter to a person who supported your writing career, whether that be a friend, a family member, a teacher (even one that supported you at a very young age before you knew that it would blossom into a writing career), an author you’ve never met but have been inspired…

Prompt 2:“No matter how your heart is grieving, if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true.” – Cinderella

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