Oh hello! Namaskaram! Enthaanu vishashangal?
My name is Sidin Sunny Vadukut. I am very glad you dropped in and I assume you want to know a little bit about this blog and its author. Good good.
So what does “Domain Maximus” mean?
Well the name has its root in an incident that occurred some nine years ago during a college festival. In a moment of notorious hilarity during a Tintoretto (20 qs.) competition an old friend spent a full minute desperately trying and failing to guess a “Famous Incident”. The clues he had till that point were:
- Happened in Bhopal
- Many people died
- Happened within the last twenty years
- Was a controversy
- Made into at least one movie
By the end of the minute the entire audience was pulling their hair out while my friend sat on stage looking completely flabbergasted at his momentary lapse of trivia. “Gladiator” had just been released and someone in the crowd began to chant “Maximus, Maximus” as was made famous in that excellent movie. Soon the whole crowd joined in.
The incident soon became legend. The perpetrator soon became the benchmark for moments of overwhelming nincompoopery. I will not reveal his real name here. But if it was, say, Blossom Babykutty, then we soon developed a method of measuring nincompoopery in milli-blossoms and centi-blossoms and so on. (One blossom would be equal to a display as profound as the Bhopal incident.)
For instance a first year student who chose Electrical Engineering by choice automatically started his B.E. with a score of 50 centi-blossoms. You get the picture.
In 2002 I decided to convert a weekly email newsletter I wrote to my co-alumni into a blog. The buzz about Pyra Labs’ Blogger was just emerging. Everyone was talking about how this new online publishing tool would revolutionize the world of porn content generation.
I jumped at the chance. And since I mostly wrote about the world and all the nincopoopery in it I chose ‘Domain Maximus’ to signify a place where all the amusing nuances of life congregated.
For some two years I wrote intermittently and this was widely appreciated by a very niche audience, and by niche I mean close family and one COMPLETELY PSYCHO spam commenter.
Dad: What does he mean by ‘spank slave’ son?
Sidin: Err… thats some new fangled internet type term for… err… you know… distributed computing…
Dad: Ah I see.
Sidin: *phew*
Dad: *phew*
And then sometime in mid-2004 I wrote that Travails of Single South Indian Men of Conservative Upbringing piece. Suddenly traffic to the blog jumped hundred fold. I was getting emails by the dozens.
The rest is history. I started writing more often. Honed my skills, so to speak, over the next couple of years and today I am a freelance writer and consultant features writer for the weekend magazine of a leading Indian business newspaper. Along the way I grabbed a few degrees, bagged a wonderful girl and wrote a book.
That is, pretty much, all. But for good time’s sake here’s the old profile I had on my blogspot blog for over 5 years.
Sniff.
Abu Dhabi Indian School -> St. Thomas College Thrissur -> REC Trichy -> BE Metallurgy -> Auto Comp -> B2B Portal -> CAT -> IIMA -> ATK -> Freelancer -> Business Planner -> Youth magazine -> www.livemint.com
p.s. To know more about my writing and what sort of work I do click on the portfolio link above.