Announcing a refreshed soumyadip.com - my personal website

“What do you exactly do?” This remains one of the most common and flummoxing questions that friends and colleagues often pose me.

The answer that I generally give, borrowing a tea stall analogy, is “I am the chotu of the newsroom.”

The truth is I don’t know. Or more accurately, I don’t remember.

Therefore, thought of reviving my defunct personal website – soumyadip.com – as sort of a memory project. Which will continue to remind me of all that I have done in life, in the hope that it will encourage me to do more. And also, for others who may be interested in knowing me better than as the ‘newsroom chotu‘ who cleans up the mess.

This is also the most exhaustive CV that I could put together.

Now on to a little back story.

It was 2009, I was still single and spent late nights tinkering away on the internet on my little Asus Eee PC. On one of those nights, I bought for myself a domain name. A dotcom for my first name: soumyadip.com.

I was quite pleased that it was still available, not that my name is a very common name, but I feared that some other Soumyadip might have. Particularly the one who had registered the Gmail id I wanted before I could get my hands on those early Gmail invites.

What if I didn’t get the email ID of my choice, I did get the domain name I wanted. And I used the domain to create custom vanity email IDs. For a couple of years, this was all I used the domain for – fancy email IDs.

Meanwhile, I got married and soon switched jobs. After I settled down a bit from the new changes in my life, I started putting together a webpage for the domain in 2011. Which was just a simple profile of me.

I have always intended to spruce that up, but never could put together the time to do it. Not even during the lockdown. An unfinished website, remained in a folder on my laptop for years.

Sometime earlier this year, when a search for the domain name yielded no results on Google, I was disappointed. I had shifted my web hosts (on which I run this blog and other experiments) a couple of times during recent years and the page for soumyadip.com got dropped somewhere.

I opened up the files to that unfinished website and started working, little by little. Dedicating some time to this project whenever possible. Finally, the site took shape. It took longer because I didn’t remember much of what I wanted to put in here. Dug up old correspondences, CVs, photos to retrace the journey of my life. Finally, here it is: soumyadip.com