10 Things You Need to Know About Twitter

Srini Chandra is a Bangalore-based writer whose satire I have enjoyed and admired from the time I discovered his blog. His work is incisive, funny and profoundly relevant. He is perhaps better known for his wildly popular book, 3 Lives in Search of Bliss and his collection of short stories, Instant Karma. He also is the funniest and one of the most followed tweeple on my twitter timeline. (News anchors don't count on either funniness or followership). I happened to send him a message a few weeks ago asking whether he would consider writing something for the readers of Subho's Jejune Diet. I was prepared for the kind of god-humored silence that meets many of our prayers. Instead, I received a warm reply, followed by the post you are about to read. Over to Srini.

The film crew at work at the writers carnival #hyderabad #bloggers #WC2015 pic.twitter.com/O4YOgFVijp

— subhorup dasgupta (@subho65) January 10, 2015

Sometime around May 2011, I got myself a Twitter account. I logged in and looked around for a bit. The first impression of Twitter was not a good one. Chaos ruled. If you�re a Member of Parliament, you�ll nod with a knowing smile on hearing this.

Back in the day, mad men (and women) roamed on streets muttering to themselves. It seemed that most of them were now on Twitter. It was bedlam. Disorder reigned. Daunted, I retreated to the relative sanity of the real world.

Fast forward to January 2012. In a moment of optimism, the sort that prevails at the onset of a new year, I ventured back. A password reset later, I found that I had 16 followers. This led to minor exhilaration and then confusion. It seemed incredible that these people (even if they were friends), having found me and after knowing that I had tweeted just once (�Hello World�), had found me worthy of following. That was perplexing. Indeed, I found this notion of �following� fascinating. Who should I follow? What did they have to tell me? Did I have anything to tell them? Intrigued, I decided to delve. And when I delve, it�s usually deeper.

Upon cogitation, I set myself the task of getting 1,000 followers by the end of 2012. I figured that if I was able to get there, that would be definitive proof of the Mayan prophecy. And so I began tweeting. Here are a few observations from that journey.

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