Life's little surprises!

Several years ago I received an email out of the blue from a professor in Sweden, mentioning that he was writing a book on the Sanskrit language and that he had seen a blog of mine on Sanskrit on the Internet ("Sanskrit and the sruti": http://www.oocities.org/sanskrit_sruti.html) which he found useful and wanted to include in reference citations in his book. He asked me also whether I had published the article elsewhere, in a journal or magazine etc., because during early days of Internet then the blogs did not appear directly in the lists on references (especially in books).

I thanked him in the reply email for considering my blog as worthy of use and citation for his book, while indicating also that since I had not published the article elsewhere, he could include it in the references as such (as a blog title under my name and as a url, etc.).

I was glad anyway that my blog had been considered worthy of use as a literary reference for a book. Besides, I was also impressed that he thought of giving me and my blog the credit instead of using the information from my blog without mentioning its source in the reference list.

Needless to say, over the years I have noticed my blogs used and cited properly as references (including my name as author) by others in their works (books and articles etc.), but I also have come across several instances which show the materials from my blogs used verbatim in others' articles and essay (including on Wikipedia) without any mention in the references regarding my name as the author.

It pleases me nonetheless in both cases, whether or not my name gets mentioned as author in the references used by others to write books and articles, because it shows that the time and effort spent by me in writing the blogs as a pastime were not wasted and that my blogs are even proving helpful to others to write books and articles. As for a recognition and appreciation to me as an author in a writing, that sort of thing already had happened early and long ago in my case, while still in school.

In my Grade sixth Hindi class in school I once wrote an essay as a part of homework, as did my classmates too. After the essays had been marked by the teacher, he returned the essay notebooks to students except keeping mine with him. I was quite worried in the meantime that I probably had screwed up big time and got a zero for my effort on the essay.

The teacher then took out my notebook which was still with him and read the essay from it in front of the whole class to show the example in good writing. I suddenly went through a feeling of desperation to nervousness to relief to exhilaration to pride in a very short time while listening to the teacher reading my essay in front of my classmates.

Surprisingly, it did not end with my teacher reading the essay to Grade six students in my class. Since he was also teaching Grades seven and eight students, he read my essay to them too. The similar thing about my other essays and explanations getting read by the teachers to students in the classroom happened several times during my school days (Middle School and Hr./Sec. School) and each time, besides feeling happy and proud, I was grateful to the teacher in bringing my work to the forefront.