Nilesh's Weblog

Blog Mela - Sankranti Edition

Welcome to the Makar Sankranti / Pongal / Lohri / Bhogali Bihu / Bhogi / Sakarat / Kicheri edition of the Bharateeya Blog Mela. Isn't that amazing? Seven different names for a festival. It happens only in India.

Apologies for the delay. Blogging has been pretty low this week and I had to spend quite some time scouting for the best and unique ones. Not to mention, that 24x7 blogmela, Desipundit, makes my life more difficult :-). But as anyone can agree, it is all fun in the end. So now that the Sun has begun its northward journey, let's begin our journey into blogistan.

Searching for something
Akshay Mahajan is out on the streets of Mumbai searching for the Byculla Soufflé. And the best samosas in town. Ram talks about his visit to the historic Ajanta & Ellora caves. Varnam writes that the recent discoveries in archaeology may just prove that Indians are the oldest farmers.

Books and related
On what is the one of the firsts in the Indian blogosphere, Sonia Faleiro podcasts an excerpt from her recently launched book The Girl. Amardeep Singh points out the recent additions of Indian-oriented works at Project Gutenberg, the free online ebook project. Vikrum Sequeira reviews his recent read - Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality.

Tech peck
Arnab Nandi lists his reasons for not liking the new Intel Macs. Michael Parekh talks about a non-obvious solution to managing the tons of gadgets and their accesories you have in your drawer. Amit Agarwal has a nice photocasting guide for those unfortunate to not own a Mac (Photocasting is the photo equivalent of podcasting). Veerchand Bothra talks about the mobile industry crying foul over piracy. Notice how they all come up with the same failed solution to counter piracy. And you'll know the losses they project will have a margin of +/- 50%, once you read what Rashmi Bansal has discovered.

On current stuff
Samanth expresses his dissappointment over the Hindu appointing their "internal independent ombudsman". Ashish points out the problem in Tavleen Singh's fallacious arguments in support of free irrigation. Aks analyses the larger trends in how the CAT has evolved.

Naveen Mandava talks about the archaic real estate laws in the country being a major hurdle, rather than politicions, to the boom of the economy. Nitin Pai wonders whether cricket has ever helped India-Pakistan relations. Nandan says it is not the monetary compulsions but maintaining the old lifestyle is the reason why bar girls refuse to go out of news.

Spaceman Spiff proposes an idea for eliminating caste based discrimination, thereby removing the need for reservations. Shivam Vij has an interesting discussion on the possible conflict between labour reforms and reservations in the private sector. Gaurav Sabnis hates the word 'caste' itself.

Society, culture and related
"Objective art is meditative art, subjective art is mind art" - Karamadude attempts to explain these words of Osho. (I'd tend to agree with him.) Neelakantan says Shubh Labh epitomises capitalism more than anything else. Crystal Blur writes about a terrible disease on the loose, especially in the recent times - Sanctimonitis. Curious gawker writes about the irony of Indians celebrating on the inclusion of Hindi as a terrorist spoken language by the US. Sakshi Juneja informs us about celebrities participating in the Mumbai Marathon.

There we are. This week's short and sweet blogmela. Enjoy! The next blogmela will be hosted by Spaceman Spiff.