January 15, 2006
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.
January 07, 2006
Nominations for Blogmela Vol 4 Issue 2
nilesh.org is happy to host another blog mela, ten months after the last one here. Nominations for 2006's second blogmela are now invited. The usual rules plus one apply:
- All blogs must be written by Indians or must have an Indian connection.
- All blogs must be written between the Saturday 7th January 2006 and Friday 13th January 2006 (ah!). 14th January is when the mela will be published.
- The posts can be of any type except personal journal entries. You can nominate yourself without any guilt.
- Nominations should be the permalinks to the post. Please do not nominate entire blogs. Link the post in the comments section but do not paste the whole post. You can even mail to me (mail AT nilesh.org) the link to the post.
- Your site must not contain any pop ups or pop unders.
- Vote for shutterbug.nu at the Indibloggies in the photoblog category. ;)
If you are intrigued by blog melas, visit the previous blog mela published by Harini. And a compilation of recent blog melas. Enjoy!
March 13, 2005
Celebrating the Indian Blogosphere
Welcome to this week's edition of the BlogMela. I am already in the wee hours of Monday morning for a Sunday issue so let's not waste time with pleasantries. Here we go -
First, the blog news of the week - Mediaah, our best media blog, has been served with a legal notice by a Media biggie. They have been forced to shutdown but they promise to be back online in a different form by the first week of June. We all wish well for your third round, Mediaah! DesiMediaBitch has the story and Nilu has a few suggestions on how we can do our bit for Mediaah. The least you can do is sign this online petition.
Saket Vaidya is peeved by the way Indians worship superstars. He narrates a wierd experience he had in one of the malls in Mumbai when he found some 'champas, chamelis and chamans' walking into the mall amidst heavy security.
Eroteme lets us into his room and reminds us of those days when we clean up our rooms only to discover things we were supposed to do long back. Then what you get is an information overload. Lots and lots of things to do.
Neelakantan is impressed by Deccan's 0.5 grand offer for an air ticket not because of the price but because they are inviting a whole new segment of travellers to flying.
Bollycat or Wobblycat? Gaurav Sabnis points to an Indian site which is supposed to be a database of plagiarisms in Bollywood. Dissapointingly it turns out that the site owner needs to check facts before proclaiming that Lagaan is a copy of Victory.
Saurav Sarkar attracts our attention to the fact that Narendra Modi is about to make an appreance at the Madison Square Garden in NYC on March 20th. He urges NYC Indians to be a part of the CAG protest against the man. Modi sure was the 'chief abettor' in the Gujarat genocide and he should be made to feel shameful about it.
"The Great Ocean Road had a tourist radio frequency that tells tourists about the places while they drive". Sumeet Singh describes his wonderful trip to the 12 Apostles of Port Campbell in the US of A. How I wish I was there!
Ammani gives a very brief but beautiful description of a woman who lived all her life for her family.
Gaurav Meshram has just discovered that he's been addicted! I had the same feeling some years back. I still haven't been able to shake that off.
Kingdoms of Tomorrow. Sachin Nair has an analogy for multinationals. The bottomline, he says, is that we never really did evolve, nature ensures that we follow the same path but it changes the playing field thus helping us to think that we have evolved overtime. Very interesting!
Satellite townships - do they have a role to play? or are they in existence just to decongest big cities? That's what Patrix is pondering over after his visit to Cresskill in NJ. Hmmm, they are also called counter magnets.
Surya questions the popular notion that NRIs can help India by living in India. She explains how the 'Non-Returning Indian' can be a capable ambassador of India to the world and how NRIs are partly creditable for the changed perceptions of India in the last few years.
Kiruba wants you to know that money from Google Adsense is for real. That's because he's being paid for real. That's great! Now get going and register on Google.
Atul Arora narrates a playground incident about his friend Munna Kabbadi's football adventure. Its really funny - मुन्ना कबाड़ी और पत्थर से टक्कर!
Young and Fearless. Amit Varma observes these qualities in young Pakistani cricketers on their media interactions. On the other hand, Indians lack the burning desire to win. How true!
Xena's with an interesting short story - Ruse x Truce. It ends nicely. As with most of you, I too like stories with nice endings most of the time. Makes you feel good about life.
Finally Nivas reviews Aldous Huxley's The Brave New World. He relates the almost prophetic descriptions to where our world is heading. What catches me about Nivas's description of the novel is the Matrix-like future being presented in it. And that from a book written in the thirties!
Hope you liked the variety of posts for and of Indians this week. Do drop in your comments. Cheers and enjoy your week ahead!
Update: The next Blog Mela will be hosted on Kiruba's weblog.
March 08, 2005
Nominations for the Blog Mela
Update(Sunday evening): Hello there! The mela should be up in a few hours. I am working on it
Hello bloggers! The Great Indian Blogmela is back on nilesh.org. Calling for your nominations on the best and the greatest posts this week in the Indian blogosphere. Most of you know the rules but I'd like to reiterate the guidelines -
- All posts between March 6 and March 12 are eligible, including these days
- All posts should be made by Indians or should focus on India.
- You can submit any type of posts except personal journal entries.
- Deadline is by the end of the 12th, Indian time. The Blog Mela will be posted on the 13th.
- The nominated posts can be linked as a comment to this weblog entry. Do not paste your whole post in the comments. Someone actually did that on last week's PHD BlogMela.
- You can even mail me (mail AT nilesh.org) the link to your post. Do not mail the link to a whole blog.
And your time starts … now!
January 12, 2005
Blog Mela 2005 Issue #2
The year saw a great start for the Bharateeya Blog Mela. The Tsunami special moved slightly away from the tradition with nominating complete blogs instead of just posts. Now that's a good 'value addition'. Unfortunately, the response for the second mela hasn't been good. With just one submission from Amit Varma of the excellent blog India Uncut, the blog mela stands cancelled. Go, check out Amit's post. The next blogmela at Chaoszone, to be held on 14th, also seems to face the same problem. Hopefully we'll see more nominations there.
Well I hear you say I could have visited some blogs and nominated a few posts. But that defeats the whole purpose of the mela. Plus, this week has been too cruel to me. So let's move on.
January 06, 2005
Bharateeya Blog Mela: Calling for Entries
Sorry for the interruption. Calling for nominations of the Bharateeya Blog Mela! The rules are here again -
- Posts must either be made by Indians or must focus on India or Indians.
- Send in permalinks to the individual blog entries only, not just the URL. If the permalink is not working, send me the title and date of the blog entry.
- You can nominate your own posts or someone else's
- You can submit any type of posts except personal journal entries.
- Drop it as a comment to this post.
- The entries have to be dated between January 1-7.
- Please send your nominations to me latest by January 7, 8 pm IST.
If you are new to the mela, here's a brief, albeit dated, FAQ. And here's a dummy's guide too! The last Blogmela was held on Madmanweb and the one before that on AnarCapLib. The next Blog Mela will be hosted at Chaoszone.
December 27, 2004
The nth Bharateeya Blog Mela
Update(21:00): Due to cascading reasons, the nth Blog Mela has been postponed to the (n+1)th Blog Mela. I mean Madhu is hosting the current Blogmela and I'll host the next one on 7th January.
Read More (228 words) »»
December 06, 2004
Indibloggies 2004
The Indian weblog awards are back. And there are some changes in the nominations format. A jury has been set up to nominate weblogs for the twelve odd categories of the awards. You are free to submit your weblog to the jury for consideration. The nomination submission can be done here. The general public will get to vote on the short listed nominations once they appear on the site. For more information, visit the site.
If you are wondering where the above graphic came from, its from the prototype I made for the Indibloggies site. I don't expect it to be used there. I love doing quick designs on things just for the fun.
November 10, 2004
The Best Indian Business School Blog
Update: This is a sticky post till Nov 25th. Obviously for the contest.
Here comes the Nigritude Ultramarine of the Indian Blogosphere. 
Sponsored by Google, ISB has introduced an online contest to find the first site in Google for the phrase "The Best Indian Business School Blog". That…is not what I would call my weblog. In fact, I am in no b-school either. But, what's the harm? The name of the contest is Searchlight. Now in case, you feel the urge to help me out, add the following code to your weblog post, unless you too are participating -
<a href="http://nilesh.org/weblog/">The Best Indian Business
School Blog</a>
Dhar, is that you? Google, ISB, SEO …?
October 03, 2003
Mela Dynamics
So here we are, one of the largest democracies trying to emulate democracy in blogsphere. And why not, if you observe the BBM's egalitarian approach towards showcasing the best posts and discussions on Indian Blogs, you will easily conclude that this is the only way that ensures equality among all blogs. Quite in contrast with the west, where the most popular blogs get even more popular.
I had this all the time in my mind and often wondered how equality could be achieved. While I was trying to ape the western way, in reality only a simple solution existed, like the one Ashwini proposed and which led to the BBM ball rolling.
It feels very good to see that we are constantly reviewing the direction that Bharatiya Blog Mela is heading and check to ensure its very basic tenets remain in place. And it should so. No matter how big the Indian blogsphere gets, we should stick to the simplicity of BBM. At the same time we should not discount that Dina has good intentions in focussing on development for the 31st Bharatiya Blog Mela. So let's all put in nominations for these topics also.
September 16, 2003
Bharateeya Blog Mela
Indian blogging has really moved up in content quality in the last 6 months or so. We, as a whole, have distinctly matured from the i-had-my-lunch-at-four posts to more serious issues. People are discussing a plethora of topics on their weblogs as you can see from the 28th edition of Bharatiya Blog Mela. Mahesh has done a very good job of presenting it the way he has. Way to go, Indians! Still, I feel we should let the Bharatiya Blog Mela remain the unique way it is presented, each edition being passed on from blog to blog. And I would love to host one of the editions.
July 29, 2003
In-Quiz-itive
Sumit, the quiz master, has moved his quiz sessions to his new weblog. Go see and try finding those elusive answers. The quiz is very informal and you get to see answers from other posters, but hey, the aim is to enjoy! Actually Sumit has been treating us to these intellectually stimulating quiz sessions since last year when he used to mail everyone in our team with some tough quizes. So, over to InQuizitive.
January 27, 2003
hum*blog tasks
Since Ram's board again looks deserted, I need to paste my reply on this post. Me and Ram are the co-ordinators for hum*blog development. I assigned some tasks between the people who responded on the discussion forum. Here are the tasks -
- Ram - Weblog Directory (PHP)
- Suman - Usability Suggestions on existing design
- Nilesh - Community / Article Blog (MT)
- Amit - Discussion Forum Design (phpBB)
- Anand - XMLRPC server & client(PHP)
- Kiruba(Mahesh/Anita) - Writeups
For more details on the discussion and the writeups, visit the board. Ppl, please respond back.
January 24, 2003
hum*blog registered
The discussions, prototypes, the pre-runs and now the registration. Kribs has registered humblog.com and I have registered humblog.org - Another great push to the creation of an Indian Bloggers' Directory/Portal. We are reaching there, even though slowly.
January 07, 2003
hum*blog update
Ram has put up an actually working Indian Blogportal as opposed to some of us who have put up mock prototypes. :-) To put another good news before you, I had a chat with Veer Bothra of blogstreet.com a few days back. blogstreet.com has offered to sponsor the web hosting and huge bandwidth requirements for the Indian blog portal. Great! Let's take the enthusiasm further and everyone who can chip in any way, please express your desire to do so.
December 22, 2002
hum*blog features
Everyone seems to comment more on the design than on the features to be, on
the site. I had created a rough layout only to give a fair picture of the portal-to-be
and to arouse everyone's interest. And I think I achieved that. The design will
evolve slowly and we need not discuss too much on it for now. Jayant
has put up a quick collage
and I have a quick version2
of the site with Indian colours(without the collage). As Madman rightly
pointed out, the design is still anaemic and needs more work. Although I would
have liked a mute design, we should go by public opinion on this. Anyway, we
need to concentrate on freezing the site feature list. Here it goes »
Read More (313 words) »»
December 20, 2002
India Blog Home
Presenting, hum*blog! Phew! Atlast, here's a rough layout for the Indian blog home that we are planning to put up. I got stuck in some work yesterday. Anyway, read more for the explanation of the bloghome. And please put in your suggestions / criticisms / raves / rants on it »»
Read More (586 words) »»
December 17, 2002
XMLRPC and stuff
Vikas Kamat has put up a neat XML-RPC client for people who do not have XMLRPC pings enabled on their blogs. Its a cool idea. But all the technical issues in setting up an Index or a Recently Updated Directory or an XML-RPC client/server being trivial, I have always felt that, in addition, Indian bloggers need a meeting point, a place of their own on the web, something on these lines. I have expressed about it long back on Anita's blog (Can't find the link). I may be dreaming too much. What do you have to say?
December 16, 2002
Indian Blogdex
In the recent times, we have seen a lot of Blogdex and Daypop clones springing up - Technorati, Linkhype, Popdex, Ecosystem & Waypath among others. I do not find them any useful. I again feel strongly, these do no help to the Indian blogging community. Niether do they bring up good Indian blogs up the indices (Kribs managed to touch only 97th at Technorati). There are several examples of top listed blogs there having nothing more than … err … excuse me … poop. My question to fellow Indian bloggers - Do we need an Indian blogdex? Or if it were existing, will it be just another crawling spider filling up everyone's referrer logs? Or indeed will it be of great help to the Indian blog community?
