From my misc-pics-box here is a photo from the highest mountain in Germany, Zugspitze, in the Alps. Up there you can also cross into Austria. The top of the mountain can be reached by a new direct modern ropeway or by an old traditional train functioning since the early 1900s. One could also hike. But the one way trip is minimum 8 hours, so the other side would have to be by one of the quicker means. We were interested to hike up but due to snow, some portions of the trail were closed and some required advanced gear and training.
Welcome to Bloganuary, a WordPress Challenge I am participating in this month, that provides a daily writing prompt throughout January.
Day 6 prompt is: Why do you write?
Some days I feel my writing is like white noise – a random signal having equal intensity at different frequencies.
I wouldn’t call myself an extrovert but ever since I was a kid, I used to participate in a lot of debates, essay, story writing competitions etc. so I guess, I had always been fond of expressing my views and thoughts whether it was in the written or the oral form.
The first time I started writing about travel was in 2012 I think. I was new to adulting and was just discovering myself when I came across this website called Tripoto, where I started sharing short posts about the various trips I undertook. As a traveler who happened to love writing, this was truly a bonus for me, because the process of writing about my trip kind of made me revise and relive it. I used to share my itinerary, where I was going, why l would go to a certain place, how to reach there, what I loved about that place, what wasn’t worth it, how much I spent on the trip, what to eat etc. etc. I really enjoyed that whole drill. In fact that was the first time I was actually following a process. Writing a beginning, a middle an end, formulating my articles, presenting information that people could read and understand. It really helped me grow as an amateur writer.
Talking about space, on a non-professional level I had never formally written anything about it till 2016 when I first started my blog. But as I’ve told, satellites and space are my bread and butter, and also something I am passionate about. My full-time job revolved around satellites (I am happy that it still does!) and I also used to engage in interesting discussions about space with my colleagues, chatting about what’s happening in our field. In addition to that, I thoroughly used to enjoy satellite discussions with non-space people as well. My family and friends used to curiously ask me about stuff and I would always get excited and try to explain whatever I knew. Even my 90 year old grandfather was always very inquisitive about the outer space stuff. So I thought that it would be great if I could share concepts in an easily understandable way.
As I told earlier, I am a spacecraft engineer by profession and a wishful wanderer at heart. So in my mind I had this criteria that the name I picked for my blog had to do justice at least to these two passions of mine, if not more. In other words, I wanted the blog name to be vague enough to allow me to include both travel and space in the scope and also vast enough to allow room for more randomness. So, The Drifting Satellite it was. I was so happy to come up with this name because not only was it vast, vague and random like I wanted, but to me it felt very apt for my personality!
When I started the blog, I was very sure that I don’t want it to be a space only or travel only blog. I loved writing and I did not want to limit myself and my focus by making this a thematic blog. With travel, I knew that a thousand other people were exploring a million other places . And with space I wasn’t interested in deriving mathematical formulae or explaining complex physics. My primary aim with this blog was and is to write about my insights on these and many other topics. The highlight of this name is that it’s very relevant for the different facets of my life. In fact, in the last 5 years, very few of the posts I wrote were solely about travel or about space. I’ve got a random mix of family, work, home, about my move from India to Germany, about expat life here, about language learning, personal finance, music, and a lot more. Mainly I write about life, my life, which is a tiny drop in the vast ocean of this universe. And maybe someone else can relate to it, or hear something they needed to hear. Who knows? What I do know is that I don’t have any qualms about limited readership because this is something I am doing for myself. I have thoroughly enjoyed this journey so far and I hope I can continue on this orbit endlessly.
the drifting satellite 