Around a decade ago, I encountered a severe crisis in my life. I had too much time on my hands. I had taken a backseat from actively editing the English Wikipedia, and a certain other setback in my life left me with a lot of time on my hands and I was floundering as to what to do with my time. I had just returned from an internship at a magazine (which was then using WordPress for their website) and decided I wanted to do something real with WordPress this time. I had a blog on Google’s Blogger for a decade – interestingly started in July – and well, 13-year old me was a stark contrast to 23-year old me, which is to say that 33-year old me is another story, but that’s for another day. The one thing that has stuck without any change all this while however, is my love for public transport, especially buses. In fact, the earliest news story that I can remember is of an MTC (then Pallavan) bus falling off the Ekkatuthangal bridge into the Adayar river when we lived in Chennai.
Eventually, I realised that it was high time I stopped experimenting with WordPress on XAMPP and took a split-second decision, one which I was scared that I’d regret someday. I wanted full control over my blog, and I decided to buy a domain and hosting. And thus, BESTpedia was born.
But why BESTpedia? Well it had to do with buses, and it had to do with BEST, and the lingering hangover of Wikipedia was still there. This is the ‘official version’. The real reason will remain a secret for long time.
I chose to pick a written blog over a video or any other medium, because I loved to write. I did want to start a podcast, I was good with audio editing, I even got myself a Blue Snowball iCE microphone (thanks Arun!), but then podcasts got ruined by people showing their faces on YouTube. Oh and in case you guys did miss it, I did end up being on a podcast, hosted by my namesake in 2023. You can watch it (I know, I know) here. That being said, I have been told on many an occasion that I have a face for radio, which, well, sort of inspired me to move away from video. While most people would argue that a video-based platform would be more work; trust me on this, I have been called lazy for writing, I still think writing is the hardest form of communication, no matter which language it is.
On a side note; despite what I said, I have enjoyed video editing off-late, so, yes, WE ARE ON YOUTUBE. Please subscribe to our channel here; we will be posting videos soon.
Coming back to the blog, it started out as something and has since evolved into something else. The initial struggle was quite significant, but with time, it has evolved into something else. Today, it isn’t just my blog, but has evolved into a community of sorts, thanks to several people who have helped me out with things from sourcing imagery to ideas on what to write, to actually contributing full articles, and of course, reading them. Nobody took a blog about buses seriously, but then I eventually ended up in journalism, and that made people notice, although urban planners and folks actually working in the transport sector despise me and my blog, because I write from a commuters’ perspective.
In the ten years since I this blog started, public transport has changed, the perception about it has also changed. At the same time, we’ve all grown up with our views also shifting significantly over time. I want this blog to be a reflection of that change, the evolution, although transport in principle, does remain the same.
As I sign off, I want to thank all those who have supported me over the last decade and more, especially my parents, whose reaction I dreaded when I first started BESTpedia, my friends, my mentors, and well-wishers.
I’d like to dedicate this post in memoriam to my late father.
Featured Image: BESTpedia turns ten. Image generated using Adobe Firefly with text added manually because GenAI is terrible at adding text to images.
