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

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

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

Seema Kumar showed us glimpses of the fashion show Fashionova where students of NIFT-Delhi showcased their creative designs, at The Ashok, as per the requirements for their last semesters of studies. I don't have to say that a lot of fashion designers are coming out in the industry every year & perhaps that might be the reason the prices of apparels are going up! Some modern variation of that famous cliché from Shakespeare, “let's kill all the lawyers“, might surface soon!! ;) Ok, bad joke, pardon me, lets move on. And while we are on fashion, it looks that smartphones etc. are sort of in thing. R.C.Mishra shows us his new HP iPaq.

Merasapna is telling that smoking is injurious to health. It just happens that one of my t-shirts, purchased recently, says “loosing weight, lung by lung” & has an old man smoking a cigarette. Don't think otherwise, I do happen to agree that smoking is not good & I don't smoke myself!! :) So if you do smoke, think about quitting it. :) The summers are hot, very hot in some places and a lot of parts of India are no different. So Hariram lists out some tips to keep your house cool this summer and I must say, having experienced a number of these myself, these tips do work. Manish's travelogue of his vacation to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands continues as he re-visits memory lane and takes us along for a ride to those beautiful isles and blue seas. It makes my resolution to visit those islands even stronger, I'll certainly go on a vacation there!! And Jagdish of Aaina(means “mirror” in hindi) has brought out another blog called Mazedaar Samachar which in Hindi means “Interesting News” and indeed he's blogging about quite interesting news stories, be it a married man caught with his girlfriend on live telecast by his brother-in-law or be it a member of Indian parliament caught by the Indian Railway Vigilance people taking along a gentleman on a ticket issued in the name of his wife! Mirchi Seth on the other hand, is telling everyone how money is made. And he's doing it by citing as example, Coca Cola's acquisition of Glaceu where 30 percent stake holder Tata Tea made a profit of around $500 million in just 9 months as they get about $1200 million for their stake which they got for about $677 million.

Sanjay @ Joglikhi wonders why so called wise people support something blindly without knowing anything about what they are supporting. Indeed, his frustration and anger is apparent in his post. At that, he's probably not far from being right when he says that a lot of NGOs etc are run by gangsters etc. to act as a shield for them and their men, because the most one can hear the human rights protagonists is when there's some criminal is to be hanged for a heinous crime or when a traitor is to be punished for his anti-national activities. As he puts it, Arundhati sees only the Indian armed forces in Kashmir, her impaired vision fails to see traitors & terrorists roaming in the valley killing innocent and those who have made it a living hell for the locals, not to mention the indulgence in anti social activities on Indian soil!! Perhaps the underlying meaning in her context is that she should stick to writing novels only, real life doesn't seem to be her cup of tea, or perhaps she is just another in that larger crowd of so called activists who crave for nothing but the limelight & always voice their opinions on issues they know are explosive but hardly care to stand by some commoner who can use their help in his/her fight for injustice just because the cameras & flash bulbs of the media won't be there to cover their un-glamourous faces!

Rachana has published her first podcast. Its a poem that she has sung(without background music) and even though it's in Hindi, I recommend listening to it. You might not make out what she's singing if you don't know Hindi, but you can enjoy it without understanding it as well!

After all this travel through last week's Hindi blog posts, I'm famished, how about you? Feeling hungry? Why not come along and check the first Hindi food blog, Spicy Ice. There's chinese, a word of caution about crap South-Indian cuisine served in a chain of restaurants called Sagar Ratna and a mention of tasty South-Indian food served in multinational chain Sarvana Bhawan. If the weather is too hot, try the home made mango ice-cream as Garima gives you her recipe. But that's not all, as Sameer shares his recipe of a cool cocktail that he made accidently! This is supposed to be a bilingual blog, so in future there'll be reviews and recipes blogged in English as well.

This concludes our look at last week's blog posts in the hindi blogosphere, sayonara!! :)

Links courtsey: Narad

Shrish asked some frequently questions from the Inscript users which gives a good peek down the Inscript corner of Hindi's online presence while Sagar celebrated 1 year of his hindi blogging. And there sitting in Pune, Debashish(also known as grand daddy of Hindi blogging) decided to bring out photos from some older blogger meets in which he participated. No doubt he thought about showing these photos after seeing the ones from the 6 hour blogger meet in New Delhi!! ;)

On the cooking front, Pratyaksha tried to tempt us all with these sinful delights and it was just too painful for me especially since I had nothing like them at that time to quieten the urge, though later I did treat myself to a hot brownie topped with chocolate sauce & vanilla ice-cream!! :D And after telling him many times to show the photos of pasta cooked by him, Dr.R.C.Mishra finally obliged but by showing photos of pasta made by others!! But the good mood had to vanish quickly as I had decided it was time I express my dislike of reporters in words!! Their know-it-all attitude towards everything which results in mis-information & bad reporting in TV or print media really ticks me off. Here in this post also I highlight in detail 2 seperate news-reports/articles published in a daily which give wrong message to people about Internet. The articles clearly show a propoganda against Internet, as if these cheap reporters think that they will sell more by going against the latest buzzword(more & more people are starting to warm up as far as internet is concerned in India), no matter how ridiculously(read crap) they write! Following up on this post, Tarun also expressed his dislike by telling us all a joke about a reporter!! :)

There was yet another (unofficial)blogger meet at Neeraj's home on an otherwise uneventful sunday, but it transformed into a hi-tech blogger meet. As I posted a video covering a bit more than latter half of the meet, Italy based Dr.R.C.Mishra posted the audio recording of the conversation that we had earlier in that meet with him. So all in all, there were 4 of us bloggers at Neeraj's place(including him & yours truly) while Dr.R.C.Mishra became the 1st hindi blogger to participate remotely in a blogger meet as he joined us for a while from Italy using GTalk and Sagar became the 2nd hindi blogger to remotely participate in a blogger meet as he joined us later from Hyderabad. So while this came as a pleasant surprise to a lot of people, another was in store when next day it was announced that Shrish has been appointed manager of Sarvagya(a wiki in Hindi with useful articles ranging from enabling your computer to read/write in Hindi to making a blog etc.). Been seeing some progress since then, hats off to Shrish! :) And while we are on the subject, I must say, I'm pretty much eager to see the third & final in the series of Pirates of the Caribbean, especially after seeing this trailer!!

Not all people are comfortable in revealing their identity on internet. A number of them think that by remaining anonymous or by adopting a pseudonym provides them with a freedom by which they can be their real self, which they are not in the real world, atleast Masijeevi thinks like that!! But some say that only cowards hide behind masks, else why would they hide!! Somehow this reminds me of Toby Maguire's Spiderman(first one) where on hearing about the masked saviour, the editor of Daily Bugle said something like that!! ;) Clearly Masijeevi ticked some people off & he is not alone, there are other masked characters in hindi blogosphere as well. But as the saying goes, you can't beat those who use their brains & so as per the last reports, the identities of Masijeevi & others had been successfully established!! How long can one hide, even Spidy was un-masked in the second movie!! ;)

Shrish contemplated should he upgrade his PC & go for Windows Vista or not & in that contemplation, he wrote a post about it on his blog detailing the requirements, pros & cons of upgrading & not upgrading!! Kalpatru asked whether money can be made from internet, a question which he also raised in the hindi discussion forum, Paricharcha, where he got more than satisfactory answers!! Mirchi Seth meanwhile in a rather unscrupulous manner, announced that he's got the new Blackberry Pearl!!

Pakistan's early exit from Cricket World Cup followed by the suspicious death of their coach followed by India's early exit raised many questions. I've suddenly developed a bitter taste in my mouth remembering that night, so I'd just skip this section, a lot has already been said & a lot more will follow, given that Cricket is a sort of religion in these two countries, given that India was one of the finalists in last world cup where they lost to two time champion Australia, given that both the teams lost to lesser teams due to their overdose of confidence & complacency!!

Google will now issue power-pedal bicycles and “Google” inscribed helmets to about two thousand of its employees in Europe, Africa & Middle-East to commute between their homes & offices, reported Kamal. The search giant is doing this keeping in mind that it'll keep its employees fit and will also contribute towards checking the pollution in those cities.

On the matter of plagiarism of some indian blogs by Yahoo! India, Yahoo! did issue a public apology & removed the content in question, putting all blame on its content provider's head, but recent resignation of Ajay Nambiar(Head of Content) & Niyati Sen Gupta(Head of Entertainment) of Yahoo! India does seem fishy & too much to be a coincidence!! ;)

And now the cream of this post. Ashish, the most eligible bachelor in hindi blogosphere, has decided to tie knot & get married, and the bride to be is the niece of none other but veteran hindi blogger Ravi Ratlami, who was the one to propose the match which was then later accepted by both the families!! :) Many best wishes to both Ashish & Nivedita.

Thats all for this issue folks, au revoir!! :)

Links courtsey: Narad

Sanjay reported the news changes & the launch of a new look Tarakash website which has been under testing for sometime now. On the other hand, Sunil is writing how India has gained the popularity for developing life saving medicines at low costs in the last few years and how this is under threat given that Swiss medic company Novartis has sued Indian Government as the government refused a Novartis patent on the cancer drug Glivec stating that its not a new composition but rather an old composition with some minor changes & thus(as per Indian law) Novartis can't have a patent on it. The reason why Novartis sued is pretty much obvious, if they loose it, other Indian pharmaceutical companies would be free to make this life-saving drug & will be selling it all over the world at much cheaper costs which can be plainly guessed from the fact that the expenses for treatment of AIDS using the drug sold by the western pharma companies shot upto $20000 while the same treatment using drugs from Indian pharmaceutical Cipla cost just around $2000!! No wonder that these big bullies of drug world were unhappy with South-African government & filed a suit against it(which was later withdrawn) when it tried to buy the drug from Indian companies! Just goes to show that medication is not cheaper & if a cheaper alternative is available you are not entitled to have it, you have a right to a cure only if you have deep and fat pockets!!

Moving on, Tarun completed his 2 years in Hindi Blogosphere(am almost there as well), Shrish reported on how a self-proclaimed spiritual leader Mata(Mother) Nirmala Devi insulted the Indian National Flag by putting it at her feet!! Outrageous as it is, a lot of bloggers called for her head & some people did the right thing of filing a PIL in a court & sending the photos to the offices of Prime Minister & President of India. Now lets see if this thing is noticed at all & if she gets anything for this crime since the Flag Code clearly states an imprisonment of upto 3 years for anyone who insults the Tricolour by trampling it or by any other means!! The travel train continued on my blog though as I wrapped up the travelogue of my Ajmer-Pushkar weekend trip in Part 3 & Part 4. Though in last few weeks, my music preferences have suddenly taken a 360 degree turn and all of a sudden I've been listening & liking World/Fusion/Classical instrumental & vocal music performed by maestros like Shiv Kumar Sharma(plays awesome Santoor), Hariprasad Chaurasia(bamboo flute king), Pandit Jasraj(classical vocal) which I've not heard or liked ever before!! Hard to say that am not surprised by a this sudden change in my taste!! ;)

Indian pro-blogger Amit Agarwal has expressed his views about viability of blogs written in Indian languages from a commercial point & what can be done to popularise them. Jagdish warned about one of the organised frauds being conducted by agents of the Life Insurance Corporation of India regarding which the company has also issued circulars cautioning people about the fraud & asking them to beware of them. The tele-marketeers are rapidly increasing in India and they really make you hate your mobile phones since for some people, a large number of incoming calls is from those marketeers. So as I shared my experiences and vented my frustration at big companies, be it Airtel or ICICI Bank or any other; they are all involved in pushing the tele-marketing to the limit of driving people mad! Sagar also shared his horrible experience with the customer service of his ISP, Tata Indicom and I can vouch for it along with hundreds of others, they indeed provide a third rate service.

Shrish did a comparison between WordPress software & WordPress.com blog hosting which I think is a bit biased in favour of Blogger.com to which he migrated from WordPress.com!! On the other hand, Jitu finally came out with his secret & let everyone know that Google has launched the hindi version of their news site. But sometimes one feels whether the country is going to the dogs?? It certainly seems so when a pack of goons beat up a family infront of policemen & police refuses to file the complaint of the victims & the goons are given medical treatment by the police while the wounds of the victims are shoved aside labelled as minor bruises!! The atrocity is really astounding and even the mainstream media is not interested in bringing these kinda issues to light, they are more busy in covering high profile & glamourous news items like Shilpa Shetty's win at Big Brother!! Even the Nithari case was given a cold shoulder by the media channels who were busy covering the kidnapping of Adobe India's CEO's son when there were about 14 kids kidnapped & murdered by a psychopath and the police were indifferent as ever about it!! It was only acted upon when the media finally ran out of any sensational stories & needed some fuel to keep their respective channels going & continue the inflow of advertising money!! I think thats why Eswami wrote that reporters are pitiful sensation seeking beings & that appears to be true in most of the cases!!

A sensation arose across the hindi blogosphere when Yahoo! stole the content from a couple of blogs when they launched their Hindi & Malyalam portals. As S.Chandrashekharan reports, when accused of plagiarism Yahoo! quietly removed the content without so much as bothering to acknowledge the ridiculous activity & apologizing for it. Imagine, if someone had done this kinda thing with Yahoo!, they'd straightaway sued that guy!! But finally Yahoo! came out with an apology & blamed its content provider Webdunia.com for the incident. I personally believe that Yahoo! should seriously re-consider its content provider as not everytime they can get away with such a thing & what has happened once can happen again. Though am all for second chances but seriously, this kind of act is usually done by amateurs & newbies who don't know what they are doing & no professional would do it as they know that they'd be caught in the act in a blink of an eye!!

Another sensational controversy that gripped the hindi blogosphere recently was regarding who should be shown the door by Narad, the first & foremost hindi blog aggregator which aggregates every hindi blog. This aggregator is responsible for driving a lot of traffic to hindi blogs & the issue arose with some bloggers writing supposed nonsense about religion & communalism, attacking other bloggers on a personal level etc. Sanjay blogged about what kind of blogs should be removed from Narad to which some agreed while some(including yours truly) said that freedom of speech is for everyone & those who don't like a particular kind of posts(or blogs) can just ignore them. All of this was targetted at the controversial & subjectively incorrect group blog Mohalla and this whole issue agitated a number of people who are fed up with this kind of useless debates & indeed this reflected in Jagdish's post when he asked his blog to be removed when Mohalla is shown the door from Narad. But finally after some blasts from here & there, the dust settled down and its peace again, maybe the lull before yet another storm!! ;)

Moving on, in another post, Jagdish replied to a question posed by someone, explaining why Bulls of stockmarket are called so & what are Bears there. Jitu is regretting why he's not in South Korea where a bank sends its employees on dates at its expense!! ;) Google run Blogger.com is being generous on hindi bloggers as it introduced a tool for its users that will allow them to write & blog in Hindi.

And on the end note, there was a Hindi Bloggers' Meet today in New Delhi which lasted a bit more than 6 hours!!

Thats all for this issue folks, adios!! :)

Links courtsey: Narad

Disturbed with the current social & political scene, Rachana gives a sarcastic look in her future news bulletin while Jagdish is contemplating; is Yahoo is saving Hindi or is Hindi saving Yahoo! Jitu is also not far behind in telling everyone about the Hindi Portal game where he drops a hint towards a possible upcoming hindi portal from Google!! On the other hand, Neeraj wished Gazal King Jagjit Singh a very happy birthday & long life. The hunt for truth about Netaji's death continues for Srijan Shilpi as he posts his latest piece. Ravi Ratlami blogs about Blogging Ethics & Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. No, its not about the medical condition but a funny look at the condition from blog addiction's perspective!! He then continues on writing some FAQs on commercial blogging or blogging for profit. And Tarun was not far behind in expressing his own views on the topic.

Personally, I seldom talk about such heavy topics, so after being tagged by Ben(not from Hindi Blogosphere), I decided to spread this disease in the Hindi Blogworld & so far I think I've been successful as this tagging epidemic has claimed more than 5 bloggers so far & more are expected to be affected soon. But it'll not end here as I've been tagged again by Alka and as soon as I see the ripples of earlier tag fading out, I'll create some more ripples by throwing this other tagstone!! ;)

Ashish took us beyond Moon in Apollo 8, or rather, he told us about the Apollo 8's mission to Moon, the fastest run of man(till that time) in Apollo 10 & the big leap in Apollo 11. Talk about going places, why not experience the ancient city of Ajmer as I continue my travelogue of Ajmer & Pushkar!! On the eve of Valentine's Day, Italy based R.C.Mishra told everyone about Valentine's Day & some interesting historical facts about it.

Hardly a day goes by without any discussion on politics, its become a part of daily diet like vitamin supplements, it nothing is discussed on politics then it feels as if no meal that day would digest in stomach! ;) So Jitu calls for suspension of Uttar Pradesh government headed by Mulayam Singh!

After much delay, Indibloggies finally started & while they were hot, everyone was talking about them including Fursatiya!! Finally after the busy rounds of nominations & voting, the winners of Indibloggies 2006 were announced with Canada based Sameer Lal grabbing up the Best Indic Blog(Hindi) award while Italy based Sunil Deepak & New Delhi based Priyaranjan Jha came runners up!! Recently Sameer Lal also won the Best Hindi Blogger award in a public poll organised by the Tarakash team. My heartiest congratulations to all winners! :) Looks like its a conspiracy to give away recognition to NRI(Non Resident Indian) bloggers to lure them to Hindi Blogosphere!! ;) :P

And GK Awadhiya's narration of Mahabharat continues as the great war between Good & Evil reaches its second day.

Links courtsey: Narad
Image courtsey: Dr. R.C.Mishra

But the theories don't only exist about creation and destruction of heavenly bodies, they very much exist for those living on this planet Earth and one of them is how Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose died, with his death still a mystery, Sanjay remembers the great patriot and contemplates on how and when Netaji actually died. Lokmanch also puts forth some new facts regarding Netaji, giving more room to existing and new theories.

On the other hand, there's no better outlet for theories than books, so Jitu shows us the new way of telling others what books you have. I'm, frankly, still not convinced with the idea and its possible use, but then I think the guys at Shelfari must've something in mind to get the concept moving around if its not just yet another Web 2.0 application sprung from a momentary brainstorm without much thinking going into it! ;)

Moving on, we find that Pankaj is trying to compare the opposition end in the Indian Parliament and in the United States Congress as he finds it very disturbing that while the opponents of the ruling party in US laud on actions of the ruling party and the president, the opponents here in India can mostly be found trying to find one fault or another in the actions of the ruling party without giving thinking whether the action they are opposing is good for the country or bad. And in the meantime, Ravi Ratlami found that someone stole the content of his blog and published it on his/her blog in his/her own name. Getting on the gun, Ravi immediately found out the culprit website and came to the conclusion that the whole website is about stealing other bloggers' content and publishing that in their own name, quite probably in order to get better search rankings and benefit by displaying ads like Google AdSense etc. on the blogs! On the queue, Fursatiya published his “Blog 101: How to protect your content theft”!! ;) Time continued at its own pace and thus arrived India's 58th Republic Day and on that day Jitu thought about what we've given to the country. He wrote that its not the time to think what the country has given us but to sum up what we've done for the country because every country is identified by its citizens, their thoughts, their work and their will to do something. On the occasion of Republic Day, Sunil writes about the freedom of speech and expression and how ruling bodies of some countries have been curbing this freedom by taking strict actions against those who indulge in this practice! But thats not all that is to freedom of speech. Sanjay writes about this explaining the social responsibilities of those who want to excercise their right to freedom of speech and expression. But while some were thinking and writing about serious issues on the Republic Day, some like me and my friends were taking a break in the city of Ajmer which has a history dating back more than 1000 years. :)

But does the freedom of speech and expression gives the right to freedom of action? I would hardly think so. Looks like the season of theft is on, as another guy started a couple of websites by lifting content from blogs of many bloggers. He did attribute the content to their respective writers but did it without permission from a lot of them and that is indeed wrong given that almost all the bloggers, whose content was lifted, don't have a copy-left on their blogs' content meaning that you can't just go around and copy their blog posts in whole publish them on your website. Justifying the action of theft, the offender came up on defensive saying that his motive is not profit and the websites publishing the stolen content have been created with the purpose of serving Hindi on internet! He asked for permission from several bloggers, some of them gave him the permission to publish their content freely or on some conditions, his action of publishing without waiting for an affirmative from the content owners is indeed unjust and is something that people need to understand, that you just cannot take away someone's work as and when you desire!!

After an year's waiting comes the next chapter from the keyboard of Jitu as he shares his experiences when he moved base from India to Kuwait as he continues with his story telling us the Visa problems he faced.

On the tech front, Jagdish on the other hand is reflecting some light on Windows Vista with his mirror. Debashish is not behind in informing us about the incompatibility problems between the newly released WordPress 2.1 and the popular tagging plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior.

And to end this update, we take a look at the narration of Mahabharat by GK Awadhiya as it reaches the Kunti-Karna dialogue as Kunti reveals herself to her eldest son before the greatest battle of the time since her eldest son Karna was going to fight against his five younger brothers since he owes to Duryodhana, cousin and arch-enemy of Pandavas.

Links courtsey: Narad

Further elaborating on the Assam problem, Jitu writes that maybe this problem is arising because of regional divide as people are putting themselves and their region before the interests of the country. And that is being seeded and fueled by the Ulfa Terrorists whose leader is in the safe Bangladeshi haven while his troops march around in Assam dictating their terms. And the political leaders are doing nothing because they are concerned more with their votebank in form of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants who illegally cross the borders and settle in Assam and neighbouring states, the local politicians(for their own gain) furnish them with false ids and papers which declare them as citizens of India and thus allowing them to cast their votes to form the government.

And as per Himanshu, India has been fighting the islamic terrorists till now and from now on it'll have to fight off Christian Terrorists as well which are starting to crawl out from under their rocks in the eastern states of India while Srijan Shilpi is also pondering on what can be the solution for this Assam issue. However, all this is sponsored terrorism, whether its funded by an enemy country or the local politicians. Else what will burning of shops and vehicles in Bangluroo(erstwhile Bangalore) will be called, an action which some followers of islam executed in supposed opposition to execution of Saddam!

Someone with some sense would be clearly able to see that all this is nothing but attempts to create anarchy by anti-social elements as opposing by burning property of fellow citizens would not bring a dead man to life. However Srijan Shilpi brought some good news in the form of the recent ruling of Supreme Court of India where the judiciary bench passed a ruling due to which the state assemblies will no longer be able to keep any of their decisions out of reach of judicial evalution, something which they did now and then as the constitution had given them the right to do so, which resulted in many unfair and unpleasant laws made and imposed on people by their state assemblies and no one was able to challenge them.

Moving on from politics, another draw for most people is investments, be it in a company's stocks or in real-estate or any other lucrative avaenue. So keeping that in mind, Jitu generously told everyone about the two lucrative real-estate deals that are in the market, the Castle Dracula in Romania and if you want, an island country called Sealand is also for sale! ;)

We will be happy to talk to you in Hindi” in a cafe in Connaught Place last week. Eswami told everyone about this new gadget in market which will easily convert your old music cassettes to MP3 format for easy listening on computer or MP3 players. Not far behind, Unmukt suprised everyone by blogging that Linux users are more sexy and sensitive than other operating system users. I'm sure that a lot of Windows and Mac users will refute this claim which appear to be baseless. ;)

Fresh from the recently accomplished Hindi Blogger of 2006 competition, Tarakash team is at it again, this time they are going to start the Best Hindi Blog Post competition which will select the best blog post written in Hindi every two months. These people are really pushing it in style now, and these small incentives will definitely encourage more people to blogging and push existing hindi bloggers to write more and better, hats off to Tarakash team.

GK Awadhiya's narration of Mahabharat continues as Arjun returns after getting divine weapons from heaven and eldest Pandav Yudhishtra saves his cousin(and enemy) Duryodhana's life.

Links courtsey: Narad

And its not that the new year started with all this serious stuff. Some of us welcomed the new year in the mountains in cold weather and survived it to tell our tale. And some have been really busy over the new year, like the Tarakash team who had setup a public poll to chose the “Upcoming Hindi Blogger of 2006″ which ended just a couple of days back and whose results have come out. This effort of Tarakash team didn't go unnoticed outside blogosphere as a leading Gujarati daily Divya Bhaskar published a story covering this effort to recognise Hindi & Gujarati bloggers. And while we are talking of awards, a special mention goes to Eswami for giving away the “Eswami Indifference Award 2006″ to Indian Police Force which in fact satirically highlights the indifference attitude of the indian police which stand correct on the saying

Laaton ke bhooth, baaton se nahin maante.
(explained in English)
Some understand the language of kicks better than the one of words.

Coming to the Hindi language, Ravi Ratlami got his new year's gift as popular online hindi magazines Abhivyakti & Anubhooti did away with the font-specific versions of their websites & adopted unicode from 1st January 2007. Hindi tech blogger Unmukt is kinda surprised as live streaming media service of Council of European Union can be seen only on Windows and Mac & not on Linux. As he finds out, the FAQ from EU says that they don't support Linux as they can't do it in a legal way and on this Unmukt is surprised because unlike Windows & Mac(which are proprietory systems), Linux is open source and is not owned by any company, so how can supporting it has legal implications!! Thus he asks people to sign & support a petition against this action of EU which he already has signed.

And on a final note, GK Awadhiya's narration of Mahabharat continues as Arjun gets divine weapons.