Nowadays people changed their stuff so often that any expertise in how to make things last was becoming superfluous. Quality: no one cared about that any more.

— Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove.

Hi, I am Amittras, and this is my blog. I could not find a simpler intro than that…

So, The Pilfered Diaries is not the first time I have been on WordPress, writing and putting stuff out on the internet. I have been here before. I’ve liked reading forever and in the early days of my time in college, I had started writing more regularly. That was the first time I thought about putting my stuff out there on the internet. 

Tangential Side Note — I know I talk a lot about my memories from college. Maybe because it was the best four years of my life, or maybe because I haven’t really tried having as much fun after graduating. Either way, that’s really not the point of this post. So, moving on… 

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The first time I made a blog website on WordPress, I named it A Mental Fragment. I intended to put my thoughts there, and for some time I did so too. But what I was not happy with was how it looked. I didn’t like the style, the colors and basically how I was structuring my content. So, after changing the theme over a dozen times within eight months and not being satisfied, I gave up. 

Once my profession as a software engineer began, I thought about writing again. This time I called it The Vastness Within. My intention was to write about my experiences in life. I wanted to record everything I found interesting, everything I found challenging. My experiences, and my reactions to them. I also wanted to write stories, but didn’t — I couldn’t finish anything successfully. This time around though, I stuck with it for more than a year and a half. But in the end, I just felt like I wasn’t really being truthful to myself and wasn’t consistent at all. 

After I deleted the second blog, I stopped writing altogether for about two years. Then one fine morning sometime in 2023, I decided to start again. But this time, I wanted to build everything on my own — the website, the theme, the content, the engagement. Everything. With my acquired knowledge of software building. But I overestimated myself and underestimated the complexities. I got slumped and obsessed with only the technology aspect of it all. I simply didn’t find time to work on the actual stories I wanted to tell. 

Finally, a couple months ago, I realized that all this time, I had been looking at it the wrong way. And that had already cost me a few years that I could have spent improving my craft. But, since whenever something happens, is the right time for it to happen, I decided to give it another shot. 

I came back to the platform, slapped on the first theme I found simple and clean enough, and started writing stuff for myself. Instead of thinking about how I wanted to tell my story, I started to think about what I wanted to say. I started to think about what all it is that defines me. And I came up with The Pilfered Diaries. This blog is about the few things I hold dear when it comes to literature and my hobbies. 

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I love taking pictures, so I set up a collection dedicated to that, called Snapshots from Life. 

The collection called Thoughts and Verses is dedicated to my experiences and ideas, and sometimes poems also. It also serve as a remembrance to how I started blogging in the first place. 

Then I also wanted to create a more organized collection where I would publish long form content, called Stories and Narratives. Because, little ideas sometimes grow into immense stories after all. 

And finally, because I am an enthusiast of the subconscious mind, I also created a collection called the Dream Journal. Here, I will be writing my dreams and sometimes my nightmares as well. 

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But the most important part of all this is that I did not want to do it alone. So, I planned to create more than a blog. I created The Pilfered Diaries as an open platform where people with similar interests could share their own thoughts, ideas, stories and photos. I accept submissions to host them on the platform, in hopes of both creating a collaborative environment, and as a source of motivation for me to be consistent. 

Like Fredrik Backman wrote in his book A Man Called Ove — “Nowadays people changed their stuff so often that any expertise in how to make things last was becoming superfluous. Quality: no one cared about that any more.” I want to make things last, and stop beating around the bush and start digging the ground itself in search for the gem. Too metaphorical, you guys decide!!

Come join me then, in this journey that I’ve started one more time.