February 6: TEDxIITKgp, 3 pm [Link to event]

February 8: Kolkata, 4 pm to 7 pm, City Center Salt Lake, (I will be sitting outside on the stairs…..or may sit at a coffee shop) Tweetup

February 11: Mumbai, 7 pm, Crossword Bandra Linking Road, “May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss” book event. [GR Floor, Unit G-1, Plot No 250-B, Kanaiya Building, Mala Mahal Co Operative Society, Linking Road, Bandra West, Mumbai - 400050]

February 12: Mumbai, 6:30 pm Oxford Churchgate,  I will be in conversation with Amish Tripathi, author of “Immortals of Meluha”

I will also be an invited speaker at INFOCOM 2011 at Kolkata in two sessions—Social Networking The Next Business Mantra on February 17th and Information and Communication Technology in Health Care on February 19th. [Link] These two sessions are however not open to the public.

[Apologies for not making Bangalore. Or Hyderabad. It is just that Crossword and Oxford expressed interest in organizing events. Hence Mumbai. For the "Mine", will do Bangalore and Hyderabad]

Update 1: The confirmation email, sent from “confirm_vote@Sparklit.com” and may be stuck in your spam. Remember your vote is not registered till you click on the link you get sent to your inbox

The Indibloggies 2008 is taking place and Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind has been nominated, aap ki kripa se,  in two categories: Indiblog Of The Year (Category 1)  and Most Humorous Blog (Category 5)

[Voting link]

In an ideal world, I would have been able to promise many things to get your vote—tubewells, blankets, quotas, the opening of an IIT or IIM in your neighborhood, free desi liquor or at least guarantee that my “friends” will not torch your house out of “spontaneous anger” should I lose.

But since we do not live in Utopia, I only appeal to the goodness of your heart.

If this blog has touched you in appropriate ways and in appropriate places,  please vote for Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind in the Indiblog Of The Year and Most Humorous Blog categories. [direct link into voting area]

Please note that you do not have to vote in all categories to register a valid vote, though I would very very strongly encourage you to look through the categories and click on a few blogs you may not have heard of before. Also note that a valid email address is required to vote and a vote will be registered ONLY after you confirm your email.[Note: the voting is not complete unless you click on the link that is sent to your inbox]

Voting closes December 10, 2009.

An update on my book “May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss” to be published by Harper Collins.

A little detail on what the book is about is here. The release time is the end of February 2010. I will hopefully be in India then and there will be, as per current plan, book events in New Delhi and Kolkata where I hope to meet many of you. Exact details will be available here at the blog and also at the Facebook group. As to the status of the book, writing has been finished and initial edits also completed in consultation with the editor. Now it goes for a second round of editing and once that is done and the book-cover finalized (currently under construction) by the designer, we are good to go.

The above picture (click for a larger version) is art developed by my wife for promoting the book. It is done in classic Bangali “pata” style using the traditional elements that go into a pata-chitra except with a modern twist, keeping in mind the theme of the book.

Stay tuned for further updates. And please do not forget to vote.

But yes yahaan pe kuch to hua hain.

Well the news is that RTDM underwent a slight cosmetic enhancement over the weekend. This was necessitated by changes to WordPress, the software that I use to create and maintain my blog. In theory, WordPress is this marvelous bit of open-source community software which rules over all its competitors because of its extensive extensibility both in terms of functionality (through what are known as plug-ins) and in terms of visualization (through what are known as themes). In practice, it is riddled with security vulnerabilities and feature instabilities, requiring very frequent updates and releases (sometimes within weeks of the last) with the problem being that updates are prone to sometimes “break” your blog beyond repair. WordPress developers blame plug-in/theme developers for this state of affairs while they deflect the blame back and in the midst of all this passing the buck, the poor user as usual suffers.

On my side, I had made customizations upon a basic theme (K2) developed by some people close to the WordPress project and so I felt I had insulated myself from the deleterious effects of  changes. Not really. When WordPress went to version 2.3, it broke my theme leaving me unable to edit any of the blog’s sidebars, a standard problem faced by many people using the theme, caused by a decision taken by WordPress developers, in their wisdom, to no longer support a technology on which K2 was built.

I had persisted with the broken theme for almost a year and stopped updating WordPress because I had no idea as to what further terrors future releases would bring for my theme. But with the book release coming up, the need was felt to regain control of my blog. And so I made a sandbox on my local machine, installed a local copy of WordPress 2.8, got a totally new version of K2 and re-made my blog’s look (including re-doing the headers since my column widths had changed), keeping much of the old intact but adding a silicon implant here and a scalpel there.

And over the weekend, I felt confident enough to roll out the changes.

Here are the principal enhancements

1. A new “Book” tab where I hope to keep everyone updated with the status of my to-be-published book “May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss”. Right now, it contains a one-line blurb about the book
2. Social media integration. I have noticed over the past few months, a significant number of people visit this blog following links shared on Twitter and Facebook. Hence every post now has “Share this” buttons to enable readers to share the blog-post through these two social media outlets.
3. I have myself taken to tweeting. So the left-sidebar integrates my twitter feed with the blog. The right side-bar contains links to my Facebook group and my Twitter.
4. I have removed the “Categories” and the “Archives” section from my side-bar simply because they were becoming too long and increasing the blog’s load-time for every page-request. Now anyone wanting to read old stuff has to visit the Archive page  (linked from sidebar and also presented as a tab) where everything is helpfully arranged by month and category, as before.
5. A new favicon has been added “GB” which you may be able to see in your browser address bar if you are using Firefox.
6. A few of my posts have been copied and sent as email forwards with my name and my blog-name being stripped off (since giving credit for work evidently does not fall within the purvey of forward etiquette). A month or so ago, an old college friend forwarded me a mail saying “Hey this is a very funny piece I got on a mailing list. I am sure you will love this as this is your kind of humor”. Indeed it was my kind of humor. Very much so. Considering I had written it. Anyways, I have clarified my “Copyright” statement (the new “Copy Wrong”) so that at least people are aware that when they remove my name off a piece they are forwarding, they are making doves cry.
7. My picture in the header (taken in 2007) has been changed to better reflect how I look today (This picture was taken last month).

Not everything is to my satisfaction however. For instance I preferred the old way in which “Recent Comments” were displayed on a per-post basis (with multiple commenters being separated by commas) as opposed to “on a per-comment basis” as it is now. However I was unable to get it to work the old way, despite checking out several plug-ins. Potentially the problem can be fixed if I tinker with some of the core theme files but then again that is a sure-shot recipe for “upgrade hell” , something I am most keen to avoid.

This is the way I hope the blog shall remain unless another WordPress update rips through its innards or I get another of my “let’s tinker around with my blog template” urges.

For now however let me get back to more pressing things of world-wide importance—-namely a certain Swayamvar. [Watch this if you have watched nothing else on the Greatest Television Show Ever]

The quiz was a close affair with Anantha’s team edging out Gaurav’s by a mere 5 points. My favorite moment of the quiz was when the audience whistled “lustily” at the video of Manoj Tiwari creating a truly subaltern Chapra zilla mahaul in the academic climes of Rutgers. Topics covered included male exotic dancing, strategic bathroom breaks, exorcisms, “lota” dance, Mithun-da, Night Lovers, singing chuckers and presidential roommates. Many of us have asked me to post the questions online.The only reason I do not do so is so that I may repeat a subset of these questions in the future.

Thanks again and hope to see you all in the future. Now back again behind the blog wheel.

Event: Asha For Education Quiz 2009
Time:   5.30pm, May 30, 2009
Location: Busch Campus Center Multipurpose Room,
Rutgers University, 604 Bartholomew Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854
Entry fee: USD 5 for non-Rutgers students.
Team size=2
Quizmaster: Me.
[website]

I will be at Rutgers, New Brunswick on 30th May from around 5pm as the quiz-master of the Asha For Education quiz, an event I have participated in when I was a student at Stonybrook.

It is going to be a masala quiz, kind of in the spirit of RTDM. No vague connections. A lot of pop culture. An almost exclusive focus on India.

And yes. There will be Prabhuji.

Any RTDM readers in the vicinity (New Jersey, New York, Long Island) are invited to put off their Saturday desi grocery expedition for the next day and attend the quiz.

It is all for a good cause.

More details, including link to the quiz site, will be posted.

[The two comic panels have been distorted by the three column WordPress theme. The original undistorted versions here (Deewar) and  here (Sholay) ]

I had been meaning to go “three-column” to better utilize screen space for quite some time now and my new look, which I was originally supposed to unleash to the unsuspecting world on my blog birthday (August 20) but which like Mazhar Khan’s “Gang” (it took 10 years to make and was released after Mazhar Khan died) kept getting “delayed” , is now flying full mast. A word (or two) of thanks to Vulturo and Megha who have helped me at various stages of the re-design process.

Apologies to those who visited the blog when it was down for a brief period today and also to those who saw it at a time when the comments font became excessively small due to a CSS error. In my defense, it was a cold day.

If you are in the area, free on March 2nd at 5:30 in the evening and would like to participate in a rather easy, lowbrow quiz with no arcane references then kindly drop by the Nyumburu Cultural Center to enjoy a liberal splattering of trivia about Chichi, Mithun-da, forgotten Indian bowlers, Doordarshan oldies, corrupt politicians and other assorted topics of no importance to anyone.

[Sample question: From the personal section of a certain newspaper on a certain Valentine's Day. Who is M? Hint: M is not Mithun Chakraborty]

If anyone is having speed issues with the new site, kindly do tell.

[Comments have been stopped on this post because of spammers]

RTDM is contemplating on moving from blogspot to a hosted site (where I shall be able to use WordPress in all its glory). I have been meaning to do this for some time now but the horrible effects this will have on people who are linked to my permalinks has made me dither. But alas I am unable to find a way to device a technological solution for this because redirectors work in (as far as I know and I don’t know much) the header section and there is no way I will be able to have “permalink-specific” redirections. [Each individual entry goes into the body section and the header section is reused from the front page]. So people who have bookmarked to permalinks will have to reset their links—–everyone will be redirected to the new homepage where there will be a nifty search box that will enable you to go to the post of your choice.

But for now don’t change any bookmarks. Please.

My new blog is still in a 3/4 created state—kind of like Puri’s Jagannath. I am still struggling with putting my tracker in the footer and most importantly finding a good, cheap, reliable host (Yes I know I am being unreasonable). One of the main reasons why I was tentative about moving is because in terms of reliability, blogspot rocks. You do lose a post or two if you aren’t careful but overall its availability has been beyond reproach. Suggestions are solicited.

My new-look blog can be seen as a work in progress at http://www.freepgs.com/greatbong . People who could suggest improvements in the design are welcome to opine. And extend concrete help. And oh reload it a few times to see the changing headers—there are 9 in all.

[This is also the reason why updates may be a bit slow]