A2Z 2022 Challenge – Road Trip Reviews 1…

For my own version of the Road Trip that follows the A2Z Challenge each year, I like to visit other blogs and then post a review of several together – here goes…

Each Year I have participated, I have had some commenters from India which is always a thrill because it feels like I am truly part of a global village and not just a US/UK English speaking bubble! This year there were three new readers, and in her “W” post, Afshan Shaik revealed why that was.

We created a whatsapp group just for 2022 A to Z challenge, and the group is a backbone to me whenever I feel like quitting the challenge. We pushed each other and finally have reached the last leg of the challenge. The group helped me with ideas and boosted me when I felt the heat of challenge. I am voice typing most of my posts of the last leg of challenge due to my ailments and the group is the only reason – I am able to continue the challenge. Our group members are:

 Deepa – https://fictionpies.com/

 Anuradha – https://momandideas.com/

 Aparna – https://prernanayak.blogspot.com/

 Afshan – http://afshan-shaik.blogspot.com/

 Renu Sethi – http://day-to-daystories.blogspot.com

 Jayashree – http://pagesfromjayashree.blogspot.com

 Ranjana – https://reflection-by-ranjana.blogspot.com/

So three of this list regularly came to visit, comment and contribute ideas and recipes so I thought I would start my road trip by properly visiting these friends to a depth I did not manage during the challenge due to having to pants most of the posts…

Afshan Shaik whose blog is The Pensive, was a frequent visitor and it was from her post on “What’s happening on WhatsApp?”, that I learned of the above Whatsapp group and realised that I knew several of the names. Now some bloggers tell you about their lives and yet do not succeed in conveying who they are as a person – Afshan is not one of those – whether she is writing about “covidiots”, Indian politics, the problems with trying to feed her beloved daughter or the nature of blogging, you are being treated to Afshan’s personality and good humour, her passions and the things that make her angry. Afshan has a maid, which for people in the UK, is a luxury reserved for the very rich, but I guess in India, it is a way of trickling down earnings to people who need it and is quite normal for many people in India. Interesting then to read of Afshan’s having to take up her maid’s duties – one senses a greater appreciation of the maid, during the lockdown, and on the other hand, her amazement at just how stratified the servants were in Downton Abbey, which she reviews for “D”. I urge you to make the acquaintance of this lively minded young mother…

Jayashree of Jayashree Writes, offers us a guide to her favourite (or whatever fits the letter of the day) Indian food. A software writer, she’s lived in America and Singapore since venturing from her native India, which has no doubt cross-pollinated her cooking! Certainly, she has embraced Tofu since living in Singapore, but the dishes she offers in the A2Z are classic and not too stretching in either skills or ingredients, so most people could enjoy them – I know I am going to…

I had a comment from Anuradha of “Mom and Ideas” on my very first post of the A2Z Challenge and I naturally returned the visit where I found a post about the difficulties of raising a three-year-old – however, from the “B” post onwards, her challenge took a completely different direction – a tale, written on the fly, about a woman discovering she has a superpower… No this wasn’t the wish fulfilment fantasy of a power to quell unruly three-year-olds, but I won’t spoil it by telling you what it is – go check it out… Plus Anuradha manages to start each paragraph with the letter of the day – so much for the slur that women’s brains are addled by children – not in this blog!

Deepa, in her “Fiction Pies” blog, has generated a piece of flash fiction each day – starting with “Animal Farm” and going through to “Zeitun” by way of “Tintin” at the letter “T”! As well as the clever fiction – Animal Farm was a riff on Putin’s war in Ukraine – there is a little review of each book in case you are not familiar with it. I hadn’t heard of Zeitun but will be purchasing it for sure… Deepa was the one who thought up the WhatsApp group which supported this group of friends and how lovely must that have been!

Aparna, at Life of a Woman, a blog name which could easily be a movie title, writes film reviews of the films that she loves and which sustain her as she lives the life of a carer to her daughter, hence, like Afshan, Aparna tells us about herself through her emotional and personal reviews of films. This does not mean that her reviews are only from her point of view and that others might experience them differently, but rather that the reviews tell us about both the films and Aparna, and as I said above, for me, this is what makes a great blog, the opening up and reaching out to others from our own small corners of this tenuous space, the internet…

Renu Sethi of Inner workings of an (in)sane mind, like Aparna, lives in Mumbai but she loves to travel and to photograph her world (hrer other blog is World through my eyes ). Although, like a butterfly, she darted off without completing the Challenge, still like a butterfly, she returned to carry on though it may be an on-off thing, but why not, so many of us complete the madness of April only to collapse in exhaustion until the following April – if having some letters to cover helps Renu continue blogging – good for her. As to her writing, anyone who can begin a post with “Raising a husband can be an exhausting task”…

Ranjana whose blog Expressions (subtitled reflection-by-ranjana), boldly chose to write all her posts as rhyming couplets. This (to me) could be irritating, but giving a fair chance, I found myself enchanted by the content, the manner of it’s telling and the cleverness of the rhyming. Try T#Trickledown Theory… Ranjana is not one of those who dry up after the Challenge and I have enjoyed her subsequent posts too…

Between them, these seven bloggers have turned out a prodigious output during the course of 2022 and if this is the result of supporting each other in a WhatsApp group – then we should all be so lucky to have such a group of friends…