The past year has been very fruitful for me. I loved every bit of the year with lot of travel, lot of blogging and not to forget two wins.

BlogAdda Activities:

Blogadda had announced the World Remade activity in February and I did not get time for many days to write anything for that. But then one fine day inspiration struck and I typed away in a mad frenzy to come up with a poem “World Remade” . For days I waited for the results and as the dates for the India Today conclave neared I lost hopes of making it to the conclave.

I went about my day as usual, went for a walk in evening and all this while did not bother to take a peek at my cell phone. Later in the evening to my surprise there was this mail sitting pretty in the mailbox by Blogadda guys….I was one of the winners and was being asked my willingness to attend the Conclave. Ha! there was no doubt that I would miss such an opportunity even though my daughter had her final exams in March.

Delegate card for Conclave

Reservations to travel to Delhi were made in a hurry, friends informed of my stay with them and I reached the venue finally got my delegate card and made new friends!! Can’t thank BlogAdda enough…

The Conclave was a great experience and I attended sessions of some great personalities that included Sachin Tendulkar, Vishwanathan Anand, Moni Mohsin, Shobhaa De…

With new friends Arvind Passey and Tennyson Thomas

A To Z Challenge:

April saw me participating in a daily blogging challenge where each day except Sunday was to correspond with each alphabet. I was not confident of seeing the challenge through but I surprised myself with 26 posts from A to Z. Some posts came out good and some were disasters but I realised that if I really tried, I could write at least 500 words everyday. That means that when I decide to pen a book some day, it definitely is possible 🙂

Huffington Post:

I am one staunch supporter of freedom of women and often get into hot discussions if anybody says anything anti-women. I wrote a post for the Independence day and sent it to Huffington Post blog editor Ms Kavita. Now Huffington Post Blogs is one huge platform for any aspiring blogger and i had my fingers crossed…literally.

That evening on 15th August my article was active on Huffington Post and of course I was jubilant.

Three other articles of my travels also were published in 2015 on Happy Trips and WeNomad sites.

Book reviews:

I became addicted to books right from school days when in a day I used to finish three Noddy books by Enid Blyton much to my library teacher’s headache. After graduating to Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys, I however skipped Mills and Boon totally and instead got into reading all thrillers with the earliest being the Bourne series which was in my father’s collection. My husband introduced me to Richard Bach and later I simply fell in love with William Dalrymple. I read and read…. But never wrote a review. I never thought anybody would be interested in my opinion!!

This year however, I got into reviewing books with Writers Melon sending me the first book to write review about. Kirtida Gautam too sent me her book #IAm16ICanRape . I have been busy reading few mythological stories these days. The best among them was “Maneka’s Choice” by Kavita Kane.

I have started enjoying airing my views about a particular book now and it feels good when the blog visitors, author and the publication house appreciate the review.

The year ended with another good news, again courtesy BlogAdda. They selected my post Six Steps To Responsible Tourism as one of the entries which won me an early invitation to Outlook Traveller Summit. Though I could not make it to Delhi from Thanjavur at half a day’s notice but it definitely boosted my morale to have been selected!

With such a wonderful year gone by, I have become greedy and hope 2016 brings more joys. Yes, one good news is already in my pocket…my article on Adalaj Vav, with some cuts and fine tuning is now active on Open Road Review… Yay!

Bring it on 2016…am ready for you!!

“I’m sharing my #TalesOf2015 with BlogAdda.”