The Real Housewives of Mumbai

I was utterly tempted to insert into my review some Bollywood Greatest hits on autoplay, however, after a long week spent lashing the masses, I am just too tired to hurt the ones I love. Today Miss Missives is charged with being your interpreter of maladies and a quick look at The Mad Momma tells me that boring has gone global, tedium has been outsourced. My dear readers, would it be better if I didn't absolutely insist on giving the ending away right out the chute? My apologies.

It would seem that Indian mommybloggers have much in common with Western mommybloggers. Of course there are the exceptions to the stereotypical, often vilified mommyblogger, but Mad Momma is not one of them. She hits all of the important milestones for mediocre mommyblogging.

Mediocre Mommy blog checklist:

Uses one of the following words in the blog title:
crazy
insane
wacky
mad
rants
musings

Check.

Take out of focus pictures of food or children or furniture. Make sure photos have zero emphasis on composition.

Check.

Refers to self frequently and fervently as a mommyblogger.

Check.

Have a generous space devoted to badges and awards.

Check.

Fill your space with boring, meandering content.

Check.



Mad Momma, your header image is fuzzy and boring. I cannot read the header text unless I highlight it. Your header

“...is missing her home of five years. BADLY”

is grammatically incorrect. I could say that you use grammar badly. Your About Me doesn't actually tell me about you beyond some basic demographics. You have an entire tab devoted to Our Cesarean Stories. The graphics on your "Badges" page show up in neither Mozilla Firefox nor Internet Explorer. Your sidebar is, okay. Your template is about as visually exciting as a pile of dirt which would fail to matter if the writing compensated. The writing does not compensate for the template.

That's the big problem for me because as we have noted before, when someone writes well, the minutiae of "proper" blogging matters far less. Your writing isn't terrible but it isn't a bit compelling. Your posts are far too long and they meander all over the place rather than have a central idea from which the subsequent branch offs flow. You write about salient topics like feminism and politics but you lack the ability to express your opinion authoritatively or pull in personal experience to draw the reader in. Of course I bring to this review my own cultural bias but truly good writing is universal.

A journalist, I am never short of words or ideas!!

Perhaps the medium you write for is a tome allowing for lengthy verbosity, but I can hardly imagine the editor is your friend. You use words like my five year old uses toilet paper, with no regard for economy. Your pieces, even the more serious among them, devolve into written diarrhea, the prattled chatter inside your head. This is sweet but it goes on so long that the sentiment becomes watered down and tired. This is nearly 2500 words. It goes on forever to make a point which could have been much more concise and interesting at 500 or fewer. Madmomma, organize your thoughts, make a goddamn outline if you have to, edit your words, cull them down to what's necessary.

Until then, I really just cannot be bothered. Yawn.