The New SHP Says Hello

 ~ A Love Story of a Blogger and Her Blog ~

Love at Second Sight: When blogging first burst into the Indian scene, I stayed away. Everybody I knew seemed to write a blog. Meh. Fast forward a few years- A move to New York City. The tiny world of 'The Arts' as I had known it, exploded in my face after what Manhattan had to offer.  A year or two later, an annoyance set in on how a large part of the new Indian creative talent was relatively unknown here. 

SHP was born. I fell head over heels in love with the design blog community. It has been a wonderful year long journey of meeting several creative folks, online and offline. 

Growing Apart: I slowly realized that I had dived right into the deep end of the pool. I loved what I was doing, but simply didn't have the time to handle the amount of correspondence and requests for features that landed in my SHP inbox. It was starting to weigh me down.

Denial: I furiously typed responses, coordinated feature dates, coaxed out an artist's story; all on the tiny screen of my iPhone on my commute. I wrote up posts offline and hit publish as soon as I surfaced from Manhattan's underground subway system. All this multitasking eventually (and predictably) resulted in a complete 'blog burnout'. 

So-Not-Over-You: I sporadically resurfaced, but the 500 unread mails in my inbox kept blinging at me with the ominous red labels I place on unread emails. When I mulled over my reasons for starting the blog, I felt immensely guilty about not replying to all those creative folks that needed a shout out.

Re-Kindling the Romance: I don't give up on relationships in real life, I decided I shouldn't here. I hit the refresh button. I disappeared to teach myself the basics of photoshop, CSS, HTML; I gave SHP a cosmetic change. Like it? Love it? Hate it? I wait with bated breath. I'm blowing bubbles to kill my stress, while I wait to hear from you.

Voila! A solution to everything that was bogging me down! Notice new tabs/ pages right on top? 

A curated list of 'Favorite Indian Designers': A  growing list of all the young creative Indian talent India has to offer. Writing in to SHP? I promise to add you to the list. The word 'curated' here means that promises  can at times be bent on discretion ;) I hope to do bi-weekly profiles of all the new artists that are added to the page. Keeping my fingers crossed that this should ease my 'blogload' and also give me the leeway to blog on all the other stores, topics and pretty things that I want to have excited animated conversations with you, my lovely readers.

The 'Shop Indian' page: I get a large number of emails asking me if I can dole out information on places to buy desi stuff online, the stores to visit on trips home or where the people I blog about retail. It's is now all on SHP's landing page. Need a quick reference list? Hit Shop Indian!

Verdict please? Like SHP's new avataar?