Today I welcome another versatile blogger to my blog. Shalini Baisiwala is an interior designer who loves traveling, food, and mosaic art. She also loves photography and blogging. I believe Shalini is an artist. Read her interview and decide for yourselves 🙂

What are the many caps you wear? Introduce us to Shalini.

A warm hello to the readers on Sulekha’s blog. I am Shalini, a 40+ gypsy soul who loves to explore India – its food, traditions and heritage. A typical Arien, I am steadfastly loyal to my friends and passionate about whatever I take up. I also possess a short attention span, hence many likes & dislikes.

What’s the story behind your blog? Was it easy starting out? Challenges you faced?

I started a blog in 2009 purely as a vent to my lonely state of mind. I had just moved to a new city and was going through a traumatic time in a personal relationship. I started to explore the city to alleviate my boredom. One trip to one post and then there was no stopping me.

Initially, I was just writing with no intention of gaining readers or follows. I was unaware of the technical side of blogging and continued forth in that fashion till about 2015. So I guess I was blissfully ignorant about the challenges too 😉

All I knew was that it was easy to create a blog on Word press, it was free and I could play with the FREE themes to my heart’s content 🙂

Could you share your thoughts on perseverance and commitment?

Well……. This one is kind of an irony with me as I have a gypsy soul and very short attention span. I don’t like to stay rooted to a place or hobby or cause for too long. Having said that, commitment is not something I take lightly (but I do tread on the side of no expectations to keep my hurts to a bare minimum).If I commit my time or word to someone, I will live up to it without fail. I don’t believe in breaking trusts.

Perseverance is not my strong forte; again I get bored very soon! It’s a pretty demanding host and needs a lot of patience to abide by its rules. I find it very difficult to persevere and instead prefer to “give up” for a while and get back to it when have found my mojo again 😉

What kind of content do you create and who’s your target audience? What are your top 3 favorite blog posts from your blog? Kindly put in links to the same too.

I love to write about my travel tales, food places I have visited and self-improvement/self-love. My target audience is primarily ME – yes I write to please myself first.

I hope that folks who are young at heart come to visit my blog as they would have the bandwidth to take in my viewpoint the best. I like to tell it as it is and don’t embroider with big words or fudge the experiences.

It’s very difficult for a mother to mark out her favorite child, but some posts have given me a lot of creative satisfaction (whether they have high stats or not, is irrelevant) and top three of these would be:

http://shalzmojo.in/2017/06/life-pie-single-by-choice-barathon/ (Self Love)

http://shalzmojo.in/2013/03/stop-over/ (Travel)

http://shalzmojo.in/2015/09/2283/ (Food experience)

 At a time when a lot of content is being created on a daily basis, how do you carve your niche in the blogosphere?

I got into “serious” blogging sometime in end of 2015 when I connected with a few blogging communities. That’s when I realized I had it all backward and needed to straighten out a lot of technicalities if I was planning to be serious about my writing. I am still at the learning stage but the most important lesson I have learnt so far is to write what feels good to read, to me. If I am not happy with what I have written, it’s back to the drawing board, no matter what anyone else says.

I am a long way from carving a “niche” for myself and am happy to meander in my mojo and write what feels important.

 What are your long term plans for your blog? Any special word or thought you’d like to share with our blogging community.

I don’t know how long I will keep up blogging as it depends on my attention span which is very erratic 😉 I am not much of a long term planner as is; I live for the moment.

I am very grateful to the so many erstwhile bloggers I have interacted in my journey who have guided/helped me in their wisdom and/or malice. I have learnt many a life lessons from all these interactions and am moving forward with the good while storing the bad and ugly as self-reminders!

I’d just like to thank you for letting me verbalize on your blog and am hoping it won’t be a long boring and morose monologue for your readers! Big hug and much Love!!!

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Shalini, thank you so much for being a guest at my blog and sharing your thoughts with me and the readers of the blog. I wish you the very best for your future and hope to read more about your design projects and see the wonderful photographs accompanying your blogposts. Happy writing.

Bio

An interior designer by profession, I indulge in creative avenues of writing, photography, sketching and at the moment Mosaic art is very hot with me. I love word games and Scrabble is BIG with me; am very competitive in it too 😉 I believe in Karma and practice Meditation, Reiki and Yoga; a recent attraction to crystals has me exploring them further.