Off to the Presses

As we continue activities related to our imminent departure from Bangalore and return to our home in the US, we have prepared our blog to be printed in book form. The process required hours of patience to transfer our blog text and pictures to a Word document. Then hours were spent re-formatting and updating with a few corrections. Our blog book is now ready for the printer.

From work done for the Overseas Women’s Club, Helen selected Grafiprinters on Residency Road. The printer is housed in an old section of the former British Cantonment in an original bungalow that has fallen into disrepair.The printer told us that they have been renting space in this location for many years. He recounted a common story heard amid today’s soaring real estate values in this section of Bangalore. Ownership of the building is disputed by family members. At first, seven relatives were vying for control and the eventual proceeds from the sale of the land on which the building sits. Another 30 relatives have joined the fray. Our printer was not too concerned about receiving a notice to vacate the premises any time soon.

We named our blog book BeingInBangalore: A blog of our India Experience Sep 2005 to May 2007. With the cost of printing and binding running about $50 per book, we opted for 11 copies. We will keep a copy and then distribute the others to family and friends as gifts. We anticipate an expression of warm appreciation, perhaps a hug, a thumbing of the pages and then have our gifted opus relegated to a book shelf. That’s okay.

In this world of Google Instant Messaging, cryptic cell phone text communication… “where r u”…and ubiquitous e-mail messages, we are a society of perishable thoughts. Hardly anyone writes anything down on paper anymore.

Imagine our collective loss of prose if, John Adams, second president of the United States, and Abigail Smith Adams, his wife, had used their Yahoo e-mail accounts instead of quill pens in their exchange of 1,100 letters. Lost forever in a “You’ve Got Mail” pop up window would be a December, 1773 yearning from Abigail to her husband, “Alass! How many snow banks divide thee and me and my warmest wishes to see thee will not melt one of them.”

Our modest thoughts from our blog with its 141 entries, 206 pages, 975 photos and 66,940 words will soon find a home other than the ethereal world of the world wide web. Via the xerographic magic of electro-statically charged colored plastic inks, our work will be transferred to high gloss white paper. Maybe they're not the magic of the parchment- preserved words of John and Abigail. Yet, these are our 21^st century thoughts. A lone surviving copy of our blog book just might find a reader in distant times grateful that someone put their experiences and thoughts to paper.