NOTE: We don't inhabit a fragmented reality. Nothing around us can be isolated from the catastrophic effects of the pandemic we're witnessing. All further posts on this blog will carry this caveat until there is some reasonable accountability established and substantial actions taken against the state's criminal abdication of responsibility. To understand if the government's handling of covid crisis can be called a 'crime against humanity' see here . I was talking to a dear friend the other day about writing. He had started writing a blog sometime back, but had stopped now. When I asked him about this, he told me that the main reason he stopped was because the blog didn't have scale i.e. not many people read it. His mantra was ' Build a brand first and then start writing to achieve scale '. There are a couple of things to be understood here. First , writing is not a monolith in terms of what it means to writers themselves. Between individuals who wr