The North Indians who got beaten up had come to appear for examinations for jobs in Indian Railway. Earlier it was only Raj's MNS that was singing the song of regionalism, which most people know has been nothing but dirty politics to capitalize on the local votes. Now it seems that the other political parties have also tuned into the show, writes Nitish. He adds that all of a sudden just about all the local political parties in Maharashtra are now saying that this is the people's fight and they being representative of the people have instigated it. In other words they also want a share of the vote pie that will generate because of this agenda. And after that beating up of north Indian candidates for railway jobs, the political parties & their leaders in north India called for action to be taken against Raj Thackeray. Some like the Railway minister Mr. Lalu Prasad Yadav went so far as to label Raj Thackeray as a nut case!!

Nitish writes in another post [hi] that the Jamshedpur High Court has issued a non-bailable arrest warrant against Raj which has been duly received by the Mumbai police. The police started arresting MNS workers who were disrupting law & order and by last count they had arrested 1100 of them. And finally the Maharashtra government displayed courage & arrested Raj, updates Nitish [hi]. The Vilasrao Deshmukh government in Maharashtra has been under a lot of pressure to put an end to this madness that has been brewing in the state for past sometime & growing violent day by day. But it is not clear yet whether this arrest will end that, since just after Raj's arrest the MNS workers got violent, burnt cars, smashed cabs and auto-rickshaws. And Nitish questions what can possibly be the reason that the state administration has been condoning only Raj Thackeray for such a long time?!

Links courtesy: Narad

In the latest video from Video Volunteers, there talk about the strike in Dharavi, the world's largest slum in Mumbai, India. The reason for this strike is that the government had promised an allotment of 400 square feet per family to build, but they went back on that and during the last meeting, they had discussed that it would only be 300 square feet per family. The following video, Black Day in Dharavi, has the complete story, shot and produced by the video volunteers:

Other videos by the VideoVolunteers of Channel 19 are insightful and inspiring: on Women Can Play Too!, the community journalists ask around their slum about what kids do to play. It turns out boys play, while girls have to do chores. So they ask a female cricket player about the importance of playing, as an inspiration for other girls to do the same. In Never too late to teach, a woman rag picker decides to change her future and decides to study to become a teacher and get certified.

Current TV's Collective Journalism program has started a series of video reports on how the rest of the world views the US. In The View from Over There, people from many different countries state their views on foreign policy, the war in Iraq, the situation with Iran and mention who they would want as the future president of the USA. The video interviews are sometimes in different languages, but all of it is subtitled in English.

This video also uses footage from other shows on the US Elections 2008, but this time concentrating on the foreign perspective. This is something Global Voices and Reuters have been doing for a while now at Voices Without Votes: gathering opinions from all over the planet on the US elections. If you have any posts you would like to submit to the site, you can do it here.

Current TV's next Collective Journalism assignment will be a worldwide view on the US immigration policies.

Some campers showed up right on the time at 09:30AM and readily volunteered to man the registrations desk giving name badges and DBNMS sponsored stationary to the campers. Since Microsoft had provided their spacious training lab as one of the rooms, it was decided that the sessions will be done in that only and should it happen that more sessions were listed than time allowed then a conference room would be used to run parallel sessions.

Ajay Jain giving an intro of IBNMS at BlogCamp Delhi

It started a bit late around 10AM, with Ajay Jain, President of IBNMS, giving an introduction of the society to the present bloggers and blog enthusiasts and explaining to them the commandments on which society has been formed and what it intends to do for the bloggers and blogging community. After this brief intro, BlogCamp Delhi officially kicked off with me taking the first session on Blogging Beyond English. In the presentation I explained how blogging exists beyond the borders of English language by taking up examples of Hindi blogging. And I further showed and explained in brief details how one can easily write in Hindi for the web and how readers wouldn't have any font related problems which have haunted writers and readers alike in past when it came to websites in languages other than English, all thanks to unicode.

The second session was a presentation by Ajay Jain explaining the “4Ps of Marketing Your Blog” where he, a professional blogger and freelance writer, gave quick practical and easy to follow tips along with explanations on how one can market and advertise their blog effectively and reap profits from it as well. It was not about Search Engine Optimization but about simple ways of good old marketing, making one's blog visible to others. It was quite a good session with people listening attentively and asking questions after the presentation to which they found satisfactory replies.

Abhishek Kant during his session on Corporate Blogging

After that session on practical information about marketing a blog came the next session from Abhishek Kant on Corporate Blogging Strategy. Kant, a communications manager with Microsoft India, presented thoughts on how corporate blogging can be effective and beneficial, both for the corporates and the clients. Citing their own experience from Microsoft's blogs, he shared the lessons they have learned and from which others can learn as well without having to go through the cycle. If knowledge is power then people from an array of various companies certainly gained quite a lot of power for their respective companies.

The clock ticked on and lunch was announced as Kant's presentation ended. The discussions amongst the campers continued even during lunch. People put time to good use and inter-mingled, taking up or participating in different discussions going on in small groups around the lounge or playing Xbox games as Microsoft had also set up an Xbox kiosk on which anyone could play. I also tried it out and my first time on an Xbox was quite good!! :D While people were involved in micro-discussions ranging on different topics, some mainstream media journalists, both from some reputed national dailies and national TV news channels, caught up with Abhishek Kant, Ajay Jain and Ashish Chopra, Director(Communications & PR) of IBNMS. It was nice to see that mainstream media in India is definitely taking notice and interest in blogs and acknowledging the power of blogs! :)

After lunch I gave another session but this time on Photo Blogging, explaining to campers how it can be beneficial if one is looking to gain something out of it and how it can easily be done. No sooner had I finished, I was kinda bombarded with various questions. The benefits of an unconference are that its very unlike a formal conference, everyone is a participant and they feel more at ease than in a formal conference. So it was very heartening to see that several campers came forward to answer those questions and pure knowledge was harvested in those discussions and this is what its all about - sharing with and learning from each other. :)

Mohit Maheshwari during his session on Monetizing a blog effectively

Next session was “Monetizing a blog effectively” on which Mohit Maheshwari, MD of new Indian online ad network TonicTag, gave a presentation giving facts and figures about how online advertising industry works and how bloggers can effectively monetize their blogs and how those who are already monetizing can enhance their earnings. One of the main points of his presentation was that when it comes to generating traffic to one's blog, which eventually decides on the kind of money that blog can make, its not a level playing field so not everyone gets the same kind of attention and hence not the same kind of love from advertisers.

Then there were other sessions after that like on Open Access - What it is and why it is required for scholarly community? by Sukhdev Singh, Micro-blogging: Life, and everything else… in 140 characters by Abhishek Baxi, Basic SEO Tips for Bloggers by Mayank.

One notable thing was that it was very much unlike other such camps that I've attended. All campers were participating in sessions peacefully and attentively, asking questions at the right times and all this without any hubbub or noise! Some campers who came in late peeked inside the lab doors and then almost returned as they thought some sort of official training session is going on, they couldn't believe that its a BlogCamp going on since the usual din was absent from it!! ;) Another noticeable thing was that hardly any campers left the room to skip any of the sessions as usually happens in BarCamps and BlogCamps etc. where campers get bored or something and go outside to skip some sessions; attendance was just about 100% for all the sessions! :)

What did the campers say afterwards? From what I heard, there were lots of nice things said and quite a good amount of positive feedback, campers enjoyed it and didn't feel their day went waste! Indeed, hindi blogger Jagdish Bhatia reckoned that the BlogCamp Delhi was enlightening. He came in late and hence missed first two sessions, but attended almost all of the others. In his own words:

मोहित महेश्वरी की ब्लॉग्स से कमाई पर प्रस्तुति How to monetize a blog effectively? How to enhance earnings from a Blog? से भारतीय संदर्भों में ब्लॉग्स से कमाई पर कुछ जानने की उम्मीद थी। मोहित ने आंकड़ों के साथ बताया की जिस गति से ऑनलाईन विज्ञापनों के लिये विज्ञापन दाता अपना बजट बढ़ा रहे हैं उस गति से इंटरनेट पर कांटेंट नहीं बढ़ रहा है। इसका अधिक से अधिक फायदा ब्लॉगर्स को मिलेगा।

Translated into English it means:

I was expecting to gain some knowledge from Mohit Maheshwari's presentation “How to monetize a blog effectively? How to enhance earnings from a Blog?” in context of Indian blogs. Mohit presented facts and figures and told us that the content on internet is not increasing at the same rate as the online advertising budgets of advertisers, so bloggers stand to gain from this.

With his experience of BlogCamp Delhi, he also has posted some photos which he clicked at the camp and ends his blog post with a remark that it was quite an interesting and enlightening experience for him. :)

 
Hindi Blog links courtesy: Narad

Zen Water by darkpatator

First, the issue of providing clean water: we have the Amman Imman: Water is Life program which strives to bring permanent sources of water to one of the most impoverished regions in the world. Their work is focused on the Azawak Valley in West Africa, where water is unavailable 9 months out of the year, and with people dying of thirst, unable to find enough water to drink. In the next video in English, Amman Imman founder Ariane Kirtley talks about her experience in the Azawak region of Niger, of why she founded the program and how she has gotten students to join her cause.

Then, from Witnesses´The HUB special segment on World Water Day: VideoVolunteers in Mumbai show a segment on a water privatization project in the slums and which after being screened to the community had an important impact on the viewers, who then flocked to the government´s meetings of water to demand transparency in the process of privatization and costs, and which resulted in an improvement of the water distribution. The following video is in Hindi with English subtitles.

Last, from Mexico, many users from Jalisco have taken to posting videos denouncing the contamination of the Lerma Santiago river in El Salto and Juanacatlan in Jalisco, Mexico. The audio which accompanies the Buitron2611 video [es] of foamy waters and dead greenery is of people speaking out publicly about the government selling plots of land right beside the polluted river which has been connected to cancer cases, even though the government denies the health hazards. Imdecagua´s video [es] has interviews with cancer patients and family members of those diseased, and they all blame the polluted river for the cancer cases and other systemic diseases. It is known that factories and the city of Guadalajara dump their unprocessed wastes on this river, yet nothing has been done to regulate this. The foam that is churned at the waterfall that is right in the middle of the city is impressive, flying up in clumps that cover cars and illustrate how just living near the river can be hazardous to health. Even high school students [es] have ventured to produce their own example, where they show how people are using this foul smelling and oily water to irrigate crops and for consumption in spite of it´s polluted state. Following, the short video uploaded by aletapatio[es] where you can see the thick layer of foam that covers the river.

If you want to read more about water issues and see more videos on possible solutions to this issue, at 1h2o.org you can see the aquaduct, a human powered vehicle which doubles as a water container and purifier and the lifestraw, a product which filters water as it is sucked, solutions that reminded me of the inventiveness that I had previously seen on the Playpump, a children´s toy which pumps up water to a reservoir as children play.

Pankaj mentions how the complacent Aussie skipper Ricky ‘Punter' Ponting had said before the first final match that the third final won't be played, clearly giving the message in hidden words that his team will wrap off the series in first two matches. Little did Ponting know that his words will come true word for word but not in a way he wanted or that he'd end up on the badly beaten side, a side on which many believe would've ended up in the test match series earlier had it not been for poor (many say ‘biased') umpiring against the Indian team!

Pankaj mentions that this one day match series was very successful as far as the Indian team is concerned as it found many young talented players, a captain with a ‘never say die' attitude who wouldn't give in. According to him, if the young gun fast bowler Ishant Sharma was the find of the series, it was also the series which showed that there's no alternative to the master blaster Sachin Tendulkar who gunned India's thrust towards victory with his unparalleled stroke play.

Dipanshu at Musafir narrates his foodie exploration experiences of old Delhi, the Chandni Chowk area where he goes on to eat the mouth-watering and yummy paranthas at Paranthe wali Gali which used to be full of shops selling only paranthas many years back but now has only a few shops which sell freshly made paranthas of different types and tastes (I'm already feelin hungry, eh!).

Then he moves on to tell about the famous chaat shop thats on the other end of the Paranthe wali Gali which sells absolutely yummy “aloo tikki” and “dahi bhalle”. And just a bit ahead from there is, he says, the famous sweet shop of Ghantewala which got its name from a big bell (called “ghanta” in hindi) which used to hang outside the shop in the Mughal times.

He further notes that he came across another great “chaat” shop near Fatehpuri Mosque further up and if one is fond of non-vegetarian food then they should try out the famous Karim's, near Jama Masjid, for Mughlai delicacies at this almost a century old restaurant which is said to be opened in 1913 by a descendant of a royal cook of last Mughal King Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Abhishek at Shabdarth remembers the old days when the first ever television serial(made by Ramanand Sagar) on the hindu epic Ramayana used to air on Doordarshan, a remake of the epic serial (made by Ramanand Sagar's son Prem Sagar) currently airs on NDTV Imagine which has caught Abhishek's fancy as did the earlier version years back as he recalls his old memories when a huge crowd used to assemble in the outer room of his house in his village during the showtime as only they had a TV in the whole village.

Links courtesy: Narad

BCCI (Board of Cricket Control in India) sometime back brought out its plans for its domestic Twenty20 tournament Indian Premier League(IPL) and recently auctioned different teams which were bought by multi-billionaires like Mukesh Ambani, beer king Vijay Mallya and movie stars like Shahrukh Khan, Juhi Chawla and Preity Zinta and other business houses. Now a couple of days back both Indian & international cricketers were auctioned and were bought by different teams in the run up to the first IPL (Indian Premier League) season kickstarting in mid April this year.

TodayKhabar reports that the Hyderabad team seems to come off as the strongest as its captain & star player VVS Laxman denied the status of icon player thus making it possible for his team to get star players like Andrew Symonds & Adam Gilchrist from Australia, Shahid Afridi from Pakistan and Herschelle Gibbs from South Africa as all teams were allowed to spend only 5 million USD at most in the auction to keep the buying field even for all. All these four players are explosive batsmen who can rip apart any bowling attack in the world and are thus very good choices for the shortest version of the game. Similarly Chennai team also have managed to come off good; even though it got the Indian One Day team's captain M.S.Dhoni for 1.5 million dollars, they managed to get all rounder Jacob Oram and ex-skipper Stephen Fleming both from New Zealand, star batsman Matthew Hayden from Australia and master off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan from Sri Lanka. Sharukh Khan and Juhi Chawla's team Kolkata doesn't seem to be that good with only ex-Indian skipper Sourav Ganguly and aussie skipper Ricky Ponting, New Zealander Brendon McCullum, West Indies star batsmen Chris Gayle and one of world's fastest bowlers Shoaib Akhtar from Pakistan. Similarly Mr.Mukesh Ambani's team didn't manage to lay its hands on many good players and have to be content with master blaster indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar, explosive Sri Lankan opener Sanath Jayasuriya and ex-South African skipper and opening bowler Shaun Pollock. Preity Zinta's team Mohali managed to have only one biggie in the aussie ripping fast bowler Brett Lee besides the sixer king Yuvraj Singh and Kumar Sangakkara & Mahela Jayawardene both from Sri Lanka. Other teams were left sort of deprived and only the outcome of the tournament will show how their less famous lineups fare against the heavyweights.

Dilip Mandal at RejectMaal is reporting that some US$2.9 billion will be spent over the period of next five years in India by the Indian government as well as other international organisations towards AIDS prevention program to ensure people don't get the disease. Highlighting the names of organisations contributing big amounts, he reports that about US$356 million will be contributed by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation while about US$447 million will be coming from The Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and approximately US$281 million will be put forth by World Bank, among others. All projected accounts etc. are available here at the website of National Advisory Council of India. Dilip further writes that US$2.9 billion in five years means more than half a billion dollars per year will be spent on a disease because of which less than 2000 people die in a year, a count which is in no ways increasing. However only US$10 million(approx.) were spent on the National Cancer Control Program in 2006-2007 and this amount has been increased to about US$35.5 million. The problem is that about 440,000 people die every year because of cancer. On the other hand, Tuberculosis accounts for about 370,000 deaths per year while approximately US$56.5 million were spent to fight this spreading disease!! So he wonders if really the aim is to spend this huge AIDS bounty to curb the disease and are the hearts in right places; somehow he seems to doubt that himself.

Gyandutt Pandey narrates an evening's incident as he returns from his office and his chauffeur tunes into a phone-in film music show on radio and on that evening a girl phoned in and is over the moon having had her call connected to the show. The hostess of the show asks about her studies and plans for the future but in her high the girl blurts that she's worried about her marriage! The hostess gets a bit uncomfortable unsure how to handle this and she gives an idealistic advice that the girl should focus on her studies and then her career and she'll get married when the time comes. Now the girl realized that by speaking her mind truthfully she'd unknowingly dissolved some tension in a film music programme. The chauffeur also feels a bit uncomfortable at this and turns off the radio while Gyandutt gets thinking that dowry issues are still very much present in the society, newly wed women are still being murdered by being burned alive just because their parents failed to give the demanded dowry. But when asked people say that they want a good daughter-in-law and not dowry. And he wonders then why the girl concerned was about her marriage??!!

Ravi Ratlami is telling everyone how commands in Hindi can also be given now to the computer. He says that till now this feature was available only in Unix and Linux but now its also available in Microsoft Windows using a tool called PowerShell from Microsoft. He says that commands are still in English and if one wants to use the Hindi commands then aliases will have to be created for the corresponding English commands and he illustrates this with an example of how to create an alias for opening Notepad and then opening it by issuing the Hindi command. Similarly other unicode languages can be used with PowerShell.

And as it seems, things are not going well in Stock Markets around the world and same is the case with the two major Indian stock exchanges; BSE(Bombay Stock Exchange) and NSE(National Stock Exchange). As Sauda Bazaar reports, Anil Ambani headed Reliance Power's share was listed on Monday but it sent shockwaves through the market as BSE's main index recorded its 3rd biggest and NSE's major index recorded its 4th biggest loss. Buyers, both who were left out in the IPO and those who wanted to buy more, were disappointed as Reliance Power's share opened at Rs.530 (it went for Rs.450 in IPO) and then came down after that throughout the day. Its sister company Reliance Energy also fell big as its share began the day on Rs.1965 and after going Rs.20 up it continued its downfall and at the end of the day it closed at Rs.1582.30. Overall except IT companies everyone saw a further drop in their stock's value and its expected that this slide in the market will continue this week.

Links courtesy: Narad

The only Hindi websites generating any decent or good revenue are either big news websites of media houses or bigger and popular portals almost all of whom get advertisers from direct sources than an ad program like AdSense. But things will improve for the better, reckons Jitendra Chaudhary in his interview with Bol Halla. Popularly known as Jitu in the Hindi blogosphere, the current administrator and co-founder of popular Hindi blog aggregator Narad, he reckons that Hindi bloggers should write on specialized topics and carve a niche out for themselves.

He thinks that a boom will soon come in Hindi websites and that the coming big websites will require good content and Hindi bloggers can fulfill the demand. It's also a point to be taken into consideration that off late Hindi language ads have started appearing in general public use ad programs like Google AdSense and that soon direct advertisers will also start approaching popular blogs.

And if you believe some, then popular yoga guru Baba Ramdev has got competition from none other than the gorgeous Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty (yes, the one who won Big Brother show in UK) who recently released her own DVD on yoga!! ;) And thats not all; some gossip says that the Bollywood actress Mallika Sherawat demanded a fee of INR 10 million from a producer for doing a song in his movie and the producer got out of there so fast that he could've put The Flash to shame!! ;)

As Harshawardhan tells us, the Allahabad University is celebrating 121 years of its establishment and is hosting a big alumni meet on 16th, 17th & 18th February 2008, an international affair with some gala events and symposiums.

Links courtesy: Narad

All this showering of affection and awards, however, didn't go down well with many. A number of people questioned the state governments' actions of showering cash when on other hand they plead lack of funds when it comes to other sports and improvement of basic facilities provided to players in domestic circuits. Many of the people questioning all this happen to be bloggers as well, so while Neeraj questioned the state of negligence towards national game hockey whose players have never been awarded even a quarter of what the cricket team got, some media persons, like Rajesh, got their chance to attack Gujarat chief minister Mr.Narendra Modi since his government didn't announce any award for the Pathan brothers who are from his state. Irfan Pathan played a key role in the World Cup final claiming 3 important wickets. Perhaps fearing political and media backlash for not making offerings to the gods of the moment, Modi government announced the cash awards for the Pathan brothers. However now that that issue has been taken care off, Rajesh pounced back on government for giving godly treatment to cricketers while hockey and its players are neglected!! Talk about turn arounds, this is the fastest I've seen in a while!! ;)

But this is not all, some Indian Hockey Team players seem to be considering going on a hunger strike in protest against lack of awards for them after their recent win in Asia Cup while the cricket team got a truckload of goodies from state governments! Meanwhile, since a lot had already been written on Cricket vs. Hockey on the awards and rewards issue, Jitu wrote about his childhood days & his experiments with cricket, cricket is in the air afterall!!

And India celebrated this 28th as 100 years earlier on this day a boy was born in a sikh family in Lyallpur(now known as Faisalabad which is in Pakistan). This boy was named Bhagat Singh who went on to become the most celebrated martyr in the Indian struggle for independence. Bhagat Singh, at the young age of 23, laid down his life for the nation & for his desire of independence from the British; he was hanged on 23rd March 1931 along with two of his less celebrated revolutionary friends Sukhdev and Rajguru. While a number of bloggers wrote on the occasion keying in their thoughts on the great martyr, I didn't find a single mention of Sukhdev or Rajguru who also got the hanging besides Bhagat Singh for just about same reasons, nor did I come across any tribute for Sukhdev on 15th May, the date on which this great revolutionary was born in 1907, just 4 months and 13 days before Bhagat Singh was born!! Feeling not-so-good thoughts/emotions at work inside, I didn't bother reading up on more Bhagat Singh tribute blog posts. Nothing against the great martyr but I feel that his two loyal friends who lived & died by his side sharing the same ideals have been robbed of their share of limelight which they very rightfully deserve!

Links courtesy: Narad

Now one particular blogger insulted another Hindi blogger by calling him a dirty napkin. This was against Narad's policy as it clearly states that if a blogger attacks another fellow blogger personally then his or her blog would be expelled from Narad and so it was. Most of the Hindi bloggers welcomed this action but some bloggers didn't like it and labelled it as an attack on freedom of speech and expression. However, it's interesting to note that the blogger wasn't forced to shut down his blog, only his blog was expelled from Narad. Some bloggers felt that this was rightly done as that same blogger was later putting up murder threats on another blog against all those who disagreed with him.

A second front was opened up against Narad and its public face Jitu. This issue went on for quite sometime and still hasn't subsided. During this, many accusations surfaced. Some bloggers found these accusations absurd. One stated that Narad and its technical team are radical Hindus who are running their saffron propaganda via Narad, while another accusation was that only posts supporting radical Hinduism are showing up on Narad, and that liberal and anti-Hindu posts are being blocked.

It's a little hard to fathom how Narad's team could have written a code that was somehow biased and differentiating on the basis of religion. However, things are starting to look as if they will settle down gradually, for now.

Anyways, moving on from this issue, let's see what else has been blogged in the last week. Notepad felt kinda low when she saw a photo of some nice looking coffee admitting that all she knew about coffee was that there's good coffee and there's bad coffee, not realizing that there are so many types of coffee. She narrates her coffee experience at Cafe Coffee Day, a chain of coffee shops in India.

Ravi Ratlami (who was recently awarded MVP from Microsoft) wrote a satirical article about a recent invention by Italian scientists - hunger killing pills. In his cartoon, besides the news clipping, he showed a pig saying to the other that perhaps one day someone will make a pill that would kill Indian politicians' hunger for votes and (currency) notes. Then perhaps they will be able to attend to more pressing matters, like running the country in a better way (for a change)! ;)

He also blogs about a new blog comment selling service called Buy Blog Comments(link) where you can buy one of the three packages available at different prices which will give you different number of valid and relevant comments on your blog. Seems like this service is based on the model of website traffic selling websites which sell traffic for websites.

Customer service is important these days and efficient customer service is crucial for a business if it wants to have its customers stick around. So it looks like Google's Blogger.com team is working on the age-old service and have now introduced the ability to create polls as well, because Ankur blogged just about that. And on Tarakash, Sanjay narrates his experience with the first rains of this monsoon and how he got stuck as train services were stopped due to flooding of tracks and he finished the 4 hour journey in 10 hours. While he's all praises for the Railways for stopping the trains while the things become okay, I think that they should consider thinking about how to prevent these train stopping incidents when such a thing as flooding of tracks etc. occur; they can take measures to battle minor flooding etc.

Not everyone however, is happy to serve their regular or would-be customers by providing any service, let alone efficient or decent service. This became quite evident when I had a bad experience with Dass Studios with their ignorant and arrogant staff. I called them up, inquiring about a polarizer that I was looking to buy for my new camera. They are not just another small shop but are an established name in photography and photographic equipment business in New Delhi. But as the saying goes, someone's loss is someone else's gain. Dass Studios' loss was Mahatta & Co.'s (a 92 year old photography shop in New Delhi) gain as I got excellent service from them; they even went to the trouble of finding the brand which I was looking for, even though they had told me earlier that I'd be lucky to get that brand in the market!

Blogger Meets are happening quite frequently in the Hindi Blogosphere now (or it seems that the blogger meet season is on). Pankaj blogged about his little blogger meet with the first Hindi blogger Alok(the man who started it all) as the latter was on a visit to the US. Sagar also narrated his experience as he had two blogger meets, one of them on the way to his native village. While I also participated in a recent blogger meet as Manish was on a Delhi visit due to some official work, it seems that this is all going to be just a warm-up compared to the BIG Blogger Meet that's going to take place this Saturday (July 14th) which if called an international blogger meet, won't be exaggeration as Kuwait based Jitu will be attending along with other fellow bloggers from other parts of India, and some from Delhi, the city which has more Hindi Bloggers than any other city around the world!

Ankur blogs about how he would like Linux to be, i.e., just as easy to use as Microsoft Windows with support for all his favourite and frequently used software. Now ambitious as this may sound, it's not far away. A while back, I blogged about ReactOS, which aims to be the Open Source and free alternative to Microsoft WindowsXP by being similar to the latter as well as having the application and driver compatibility, meaning all Microsoft Windows applications and drivers can run on ReactOS as well. Linspire's free offering of the scaled down version of their Linux distro as Freespire is already in the run, so things can be expected to be quite hot in the coming year or two. While we're on technology, Alok broke the news in the Hindi blogosphere about the availability of Blogger.com site in Hindi.

Sunil came up with a blog-post for the unmarried telling them about the hundreds of thousands of weddings scheduled on the 7th July all over the world and how people have booked venues for that day years in advance! And if you missed it, intentionally (like me) or accidentally, then not to worry, there's going to be 08/08/08, 09/09/09, 10/10/10, 11/11/11 & 12/12/12. Or for that matter even 06/07/08, 07/08/09, 08/09/10, 09/10/11, 10/11/12 & 11/12/13 as well! ;) Hmm, lots of cool dates to choose from, I think I'll also pick one of these & start planning! ;)

Manish finally finished his travelogue series of Andaman & Nicobar Islands. Just reading it one can imagine what fun it must have been (and you don't even need a strong and wild imagination like mine, eh!), so it's no telling how the real fun will be when you are actually there. So I think I'll just start saving!

This chapter of a guided tour through the Hindi Blogosphere concludes here. We'll meet soon again for another chapter of the guided tour. Till then, au revoir!! :)

Links courtesy: Narad