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Eight-year-old Shreya Sanjay loves her Barbie dolls. Pink dominates the colour scheme of her room – from the pink curtains and doll’s house to a huge Barbie doll right next to her computer. Though she loves singing and dancing, these days her most favourite hobby is blogging.

“My mother taught me how to blog,” she says as she sits on the edge of the chair and switches on the monitor. She started learning to use the computer when she was four and is comfortable using notepad and MS word. In fact, she writes out her post in her pink ‘blog book’ before typing it out in a word document file. Her mother then posts it on her page.

“Oops! I haven’t switched on the CPU,” she says and wishes her “comp” and Internet would work faster. She easily manoeuvres the mouse, and opens an Internet Explorer page to log on to her blog. “I forgot my password, Amma...” she runs out of the room. As she settles back on her chair again, I ask her what a blog is? “Hmmm... I don’t know. It’s a dotcom,” she replies looking puzzled. “When I get bored, I blog.” Another reason, she adds, is “because I have no friends here. They are all grownups. That’s why I blog.”

A ‘youngest blogger’ tag occupies the left corner of her blog, which is called ‘Shreya’s journal’. “I searched for the princess picture on Google and cut it out a bit and used it in the centre,” she explains. On either side is written, ‘Follow your dreams’. Off the virtual world, Shreya dreams of becoming a doctor and build a “huge hospital, where she can treat patients and help people”.

Her blogosphere is filled with her reactions to everyday happenings that affect the people around her. “My grandmother looked worried and hassled one day, when I was at her place. So I wrote down this piece on ‘Wishing and Expecting’ and put it on her wall,” she says, pointing to her first post.

Another time, during a holiday in Kerala she saw people fighting over tickets for a boat-ride. Disturbed, she turned over her ticket and wrote out the post titled ‘Why is the world fighting?’ “They (the sky, wind, water and land) do not fight with each other. We are also a part of nature, we are also a little powerful, but why do we fight?”

Mostly, though, her posts are a result of “my conversations with mom and dad”, who were in the US for 12 years before shifting back to India recently. “The book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne has changed our outlook towards life and we often talk to our children about it,” says mother Shoba Sridharan, who is Senior Learning Executive at Cognizant Academy and an avid blogger herself.

Shreya’s blog is flooded with comments from her ‘Chitha and Chithi’ (aunts and uncles) and from her father’s colleague, “Sukumar uncle, who is the Senior Vice President of Cognizant and comments on my blog even at 2 a.m. from America. I like it when people comment on what I have written. Sometimes I don’t understand what they have said, so I just say ‘thank you’.” “As parents we moderate and field comments on her blog, though it’s usually fine,” says Shoba. “I don’t change or correct anything she has written, not even the grammatical errors. It’s her blog and her ideas,” she adds. A third standard student, Shreya is the only one in her class who blogs. “Her friends from school don’t blog or comment. That, for her, is very disappointing.”

Shreya’s journal — http://shreyasjournal.wordpress.com