Pliss try to attend. And bring friends. More the heppier.

The official launch of my book ‘May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss’ will be at Casuarina Hall, in India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road on March 5th, 2010 (High tea at 6.30pm followed by event at 7pm).

Everyone is invited. Please do plan to attend.

There will be another event in Kolkata whose date has not been finalized yet. Watch this space and the Facebook group for this blog for details.

Meanwhile the book got two media mentions, one in DNA India and one in Deccan Chronicle to go along with the Tehelka one. Which is good.

Finally, the spectacularly talented Sidin Vadukut’s book Dork releases this month from Penguin and you are requested to hop over here and read more about it. This is one book I am looking forward to read.

Now coming to the main program.

The Fake IPL Player (henceforth to be known as FIP) needs no introduction. But I will give a brief one nonetheless.

Last year during the Indian Premier League, a blog suddenly appeared that was purportedly written by a fringe ‘anonymous’ player of one of the IPL’s most popular franchises. Giving a warts-and-all, brutally irreverent, fly’s eyes view of the inner workings of a doomed team and liberally peppered with salacious accounts of the off-field activities of our superstars (whose actual identities were hidden behind easily-guessable monikers –a few of which like Kaan Molu and Appam Chutiya have since become part of our vocabulary)  the FIP became a viral Internet phenomenon.

Who was this FIP? Was he a disgruntled player? Was it a publicity gimmick, stage-managed from behind?  More importantly was this the truth? Or like everything else we are told, the ardh-satya?

Whatever or whoever he be, The FIP soon became water-cooler talk in every office where cricket is discussed as people poured over screens dissecting the allusions to real players and events. Certain players were suspected to to be the sinister blogger, a newspaper even broke the so-called identity of FIP and then retracted,  the said franchise came up with an official statement on their blog, and as the FIP’s posts sounded realistically accurate, confusion became more confounded. The world waited eagerly till the end of the tournament, not just because it was overtly long but because FIP promised to reveal his identity only then.

He did. Well not really. In a video which showed his shadow, the FIP confessed to not being an actual player.

Then who was he?

Just a Indian cricket fan, but not an ordinary one.

Somebody special who during “the faceless journey of life”,  happened “to get intimately exposed to cricket. From the Kings of Bollywood to the pimps of cricket and vice-versa”, an experience that converted him into “an insider, the the fly on the wall, the ghost in the darkness.”

He left with a promise.

Being intimately involved, I think I saw a lot more happening that most people saw on TV. I saw so much. It will probably take me a book or two to spill it all in. But if I actually write a book, I will be history even if my book is not. Still, it is a story that has to be told.”

Well the FIP is back to make history. With his book ‘ The Gamechangers’  being brought out by Harper Collins. And to tell you more is the man himself in his first ever interview.

In case you are wondering, this interview with me  is not due to the fact that we are both share the publisher. As some of you may know, I won the Indiblog of the Year at the Indibloggies. Now it is normally the tradition that the winner is interviewed. However Debashish, the administrator of the award,  felt that since I had been interviewed after winning the same award before it would be better that we did an interview of someone else. And FIP, the winner for Indibloggies Sports Blog of the Year, was the obvious choice.

Enough talk. Silence.  Because here he is. The Fake IPL Player. For the first time since he stopped blogging.

Q. What led you to start the FIP blog? Was it something that you had wanted to do for long or was it something you thought of one fine day on an impulse?

The blog itself was a spur of the moment thing. What happened was, over the years, I had collected a bagful of juicy stories which I sometimes shared with my close friends. For obvious reasons, they loved them. One evening, a few days before I left for South Africa, we were sitting around, drinking beer, me and three other friends, when one of them suggested that I put the stuff out on a blog so they can enjoy the stories in real time. I said cool. It was supposed to be a dirty little black book between just the four of us. I never thought of making it ‘Private’ probably because I never expected anybody to find out about it.

But, I do remember thinking about how to make it more interesting than just a discussion board. I thought about Fakesteve and ‘War for news’. And, coincidentally, I watched the movie ‘Wag the dog’ on the flight to Jo’burg. The Fake IPL Player persona was, in some ways, influenced by all three.

Q: People start blogs and struggle to get noticed. How did you manage to create a readership so quick? More specifically, how did an initial set of people even come to know that there was this delightfully “evil” blog called the FIP?

To be honest, I have no frickin’ clue how it got out. For the first few days, it was just the four of us having fun on the blog. Then, one fine day I woke up to see 5 or 6 guys not known to me who had signed up as Followers. And several others who had started commenting on the blog. I asked my friends if they had talked about it to anyone and they all said ‘No’. I have a feeling though that at least one of them would have told somebody. [At the time I felt differently about it, but now I am not complaining ] By the end of the day, the Follower count had reached double figures. I was a bit worried then. I texted the most sensible guy in our group and asked him if I should continue. His response was ‘Lage Raho Munnabhai’. So I continued. A couple of days later, Cricinfo put it on their home page. I remember I was on my way to Kingsmead for the KKR Vs King’s XI game when my friend messaged me saying that the blog was on Cricinfo home page. By the time I returned to my hotel, the Follower count was 150. Eventually, it reached almost 9000. I can’t stop laughing every time I remember how scared I was when it had reached 15.

Cricinfo got to know about it very early. My guess is that either they chanced upon it accidentally or one of the earliest finders may have posted it on their facebook wall or something. I don’t know. But, I think they were amongst the first to know. They may have monitored it for a couple of days to confirm whether the stuff being written was true or not. Once they were satisfied, they probably put it up. After that, it just took off.

Q: Was it all a work of fiction or was it what film-makers call “based on facts”? If it was, did you have a source inside the team or inside the press corps?

I stand by the disclaimer on the blog, “All characters in the blog are fictitious. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental and unintentional.”

Q: Were you ever bothered about the ethics behind maintaining the ruse of being an actual IPL player (I am going by the video you put up where you talked about merely being an avid cricket lover), which if taken seriously might lead to witch-hunts inside the team and ultimately to innocent players being put under a cloud? Or did you consider the use of the word “Fake” in “Fake IPL Player” enough of a disclaimer, even though the principal appeal of the blog did come from people perceiving it to be real?

I always ensured that I gave enough clues that would tell the management who I could or could not be. I must confess that during the initial days, when the blog was still private, I was a bit careless on that front. But once it got popular and I decided to continue it, I edited out some of the earlier indiscretions and made sure I wrote stuff that wouldn’t put any particular player under the scanner. There certainly was a witch-hunt on and I followed it closely, but I was sure that no innocent player would pay a price for the blog. I trusted the team management with at least a quarter of a brain not to do something that stupid.

I was concerned when Aakash and Bangar were sent back. I stopped blogging for a couple of days until I got a confirmation from none other than Aakash himself that it wasn’t because of the blog.

To correct your question just a wee bit, while I have always been an avid cricket follower, over the last ten years or so I have had opportunities to be a little more than ‘merely an avid cricket follower’ and I think something to that effect was mentioned in the video post as well. But, you are right, I did think that the word ‘Fake’ in the name absolved me a bit.

Q: Will you ever reveal your identity? If not, why?

I don’t know about ‘ever’, but at the moment I am quite happy in anonymity.

A couple of years ago, I met this fascinating man in Paris. He was extremely well read and knowledgeable, but other than that he seemed like a regular, middle aged guy with a regular job at a French Football Club. Nothing out of the ordinary. He invited me to spend a weekend at his upcountry home with his wife and three kids. When I went there I realised that his upcountry home was actually a chateaux, he was a billionaire and part-owner of the club.  I asked him how and why he keeps such a low profile. His response was ‘vivre cache pour vivre heureux’, which means ‘to lead a hidden life is to lead a happy life’.

Q: What led you to suddenly backtrack from revealing your identity?
There was a chance that my identity would put some players I know well in a bit of a pickle. When I thought of it I didn’t feel right about putting them in an awkward situation for no fault of theirs.

Q: Do you read other blogs? If you do, which ones?

My favourite blog is thevigilidiot.com This guy is just hilarious. I actually watched Kurbaan after reading his review to see how mind-numbingly inane it could possibly be.

The other blog I love is the Inclusive Planet blog (http://inclusiveplanet.wordpress.com/). Inclusive Planet is an organisation that provides services to the disabled sector and on their blog people with physical disabilities from all over the world share their experiences. The best part about it is that you hardly ever find any sympathy-seeking sob stories there. They are intelligent, evocative, well-written and inspiring stories. Personally, through this blog I have learnt a lot about a community that I understood very little about earlier. On the blog, read jbarath’s and Gidi Ahronovich’s posts.

I enjoy a couple of travel blogs. Janchipchase.com is the blog of the Nokia head of design. He captures the world with pictures and his acute ethnographic observations which others would normally miss. Then, there’s this interesting little blog of this IT sales guy from the land of Appam Chutiya who lives in Europe and blogs about his experiences. bottomofheart.blogspot.com

I like Cricinfo’s Page 2. They have some funny writers on their panel. Jamie Alter, Anand Ramachandran, Andrew Hughes, Nishi Narain, George Benoy they’re all quite good.

Prem Panicker’s twitter feed is another favourite and occasionally I visit ‘Cricket with Balls’.

Who has been your favorite Knight Rider player? Who do you think shouldn’t have been in the team?

My favourite Knight Rider? Well, there are so many.

Chris Gayle is great company. In fact, I think, Gayle and Gibbs are the funniest cricketers in the world. Although, the funniest guy one can ever spend an evening with is David Lloyd. He should have been coach of KKR, to be honest. They would have still lost all their games, but at least they would have laughed their way to the bottom of the table.

Another favourite Knight Rider would be John Buchanan’s laptop. For the whole month it kept him hypnotised like a nubile nymphet doing a strip tease. Since he was mostly distracted by the raging sexual energy of his laptop, players could afford to breathe.

Who, I think, shouldn’t have been in the team? Well, don’t we all know that the fish starts stinking from its head?

Q: Where does FIP go from here? Will he come back this IPL season? Tell us about the book.

My book ‘The Gamechangers’, which I have been writing for the last six months, is due for release in February. It tells everything that the blog didn’t or couldn’t. I am very excited about it.

About the blog, well, I still don’t know how close I will be to the action in Season 3. So, it’s a little hazy on that front.

Q: Do you think your book will sell more due to the buzz/controversy created by the blog? Also do you anticipate any legal actions (defamation etc) being taken against you by BCCI when you reveal yourself at the launch of the book?

I don’t know about whether the book will sell more due to the blog or not, but I know for a fact that the book would never have happened if it weren’t for the blog. If it wasn’t for the blog, the folks at Harper Collins wouldn’t have thought of me as anything more than a horse’s ass.

Q: Any words for your fans?

To those who followed my blog and commented on it, a big Thank you. You really kept me on my toes.

During the blogging experience, I realised how harmful public adulation can be to one’s character. Words like ‘You Rock’, ‘Genius’, ‘Dude’ can make you bloat up with pride and ego. The result is almost always a crappy post that would get the same guys to prick the balloon with a pin and cut you down to size. I think the followers of the blog balanced the bouquets and brickbats very well and my sincere thanks for the same. I hope they will support my book too.

Also, 50% of the blog’s success was due to the comments. There were many people who’d come to the blog to read the comments. Some of them were very funny.

Thank you for your time. Here is wishing you a whole DLF maximums of Citi moments of success for The Gamechangers.

[Crossposted here]

Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind won the Indiblog of the Year and the Most Humorous IndiBlog at the Indibloggies [polling statistics here] setting off mass hysteria in the country.

According to news agency Reumors, Kolkata went on a general twenty-four hour bandh, Mamata Banerjee asked for the resignation of the chief minister, Katrina Kaif signed another three movies, three more political parties demanded separate states, two more Bhojpuriyas were beaten up in Mumbai and Zardari got  three billion more dollars in “non-military” aid.

Yes mass hysteria. Of the mundane kind seen everyday.

But the most riotous scenes were seen outside RTDM offices where thousands of people were seen shouting for iPods, Zunes and Santosh Mp3 players for reasons unknown.

Meanwhile a solitary man was reported at the scene pleading, in two distinct voices, one normal and one immensely nasal: ” Aare dudes iPod ko maaro goli, koi mera Fulltoo attitude Radio le lo…Please…..koi le kyon naheen raha hai…fuckall…..”

Citizen journalists also took extensive footage of a lady who was present near RTDM offices, a lady who identified herself as a certain Savita Bhabhi, recently unbanned by the government in order to reduce uncontrolled emissions in the run-up to the Copenhagen Environmental Summit  .

According to people present at the scene, she kept on provoking the crowd with ” Aare chodo RTDM ko. Mere pass Ipod Touch hai.”

Opining on latest developments, expert-on-all-things Rameez Raja added his expert comments—- ” RTDM won more votes than its nearest competitor in a public voting competition. And that is why [with a contented smile] it won. You see the Citi secret in winning any election is to get the most votes. That’s the secret strategy. It’s not easy to understand that fact. As a matter of fact, it’s quite hard.”

In a statement to the public, RTDM spokesman Truckdriver Sooraj thanked all those who voted for the blog by paraphrasing a line from the song  Bade Kaam Ka Bandaar [Aankhen] : “Jo vote kiya us ka bhi bhala, jo na kiya us ka bhi bhala” .

And then he gave a very special, most sincere bow of gratitude to every reader who has ever visited RTDM in the more than five years of its existence.

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.

In the last post, I dispensed some very general advice about the art of blogging. In this post, I get a bit more specific, focusing on what I feel is the best way to build traffic for your blog.

For those of you who believe that they blog for their own satisfaction and do not care if anybody else reads it then please skip the rest of the post. But for those of us who desire an audience but struggle to get one (as I did once upon a time and the frustrations of which I detailed previously), here are some general thoughts on the topic.

The most important thing of course remains the same. Good content. Last time I said “If you build it, they will come”. Sure. But if the water runs out and the toilet stinks, then they won’t stick around. Trust me on that.

Use your friends:  Unless you are a celebrity, it is likely that the first visitors to your blog are going to be those who are interested in the blog not so much for the content (because they have not read it yet) but because they know you personally. In other words friends and relatives.

While it is quite easy to get your parents to read your blog (whether you want to is of course completely another matter) getting friends over to your corner of the virtual world is sometimes a little bit more difficult. It is difficult because you know telling your friends to do something “once” usually never works , be it giving the treat they owe you or returning the text book that was borrowed last week.

So you need to press them a bit. But then there is that conundrum: at what point of time do the “Hey I just started a blog. Did you read my latest posts” start becoming an imposition, where is the point at which you cross over from being an enthusiastic writer to an unctuous seller of life insurance?

While it is difficult to provide a definite answer to the above question (since one person’s hard-sell is another’s publicity), my suggestion would be to 1) keep your blog URL in the signature of your personal e-mails 2) if you belong to an e-group of friends then mention the fact that you have started blogging once in an email and then leave it at that (after all you do not want to appear desperate with the operative word being “appear” which is exactly how you will look if you have a “Please read my blog” in every mail) and most importantly 3) do not try to oversell ; when a friend you find is not visiting your blog don’t push him. Unless you want to lose him as a friend in which case by all means do.

Comment on blogs: No rocket science here. Commenting on other blogs allows you to put a link to your blog on their blogspace and enables you to announce yourself to a community (for instance if you are a start-up mommy blogger, commenting on a mommy-blogger’s blog will connect you to other mommys). Not that that should be the only reason you should be commenting but it’s not a wrong reason. However a few things to remember.

1) While your reason to comment may be to publicize your blog, don’t wear it on your sleeve. That is don’t just plonk your blog’s link in the comment-space and say “I also wrote on this topic. Here is the link”. Remember you do get your blog-link in the comment once. No need to put it in again and telegraph your over-eagerness. The better strategy to get traffic is to make well-argued comments consistently. People will definitely click on your blog URL if you do.

2) Don’t try to stand out amidst the comments by being a troll i.e. attacking the blogger or other commenters with the explicit purpose of getting traffic attention. While it does get a temporary spike of attention, it is unlikely to be something you can sustain consistently.

Leverage social media:  The best publicity you can hope to get is when people recommend your content to a friend.Most people now prefer to share content through Facebook and Twitter as opposed to forwarding over email. As a matter of fact, as a content-creator you would prefer they do not use e-mail. I can say that from my personal experience since forwards have this notorious trait of “losing” your name and it has happened to me several times that my posts have been forwarded back to me, with my name and URL removed. In order to prevent that from happening, make it easy for people to share your posts. This you can do my adding “Share buttons” for Facebook and Twitter giving people the ability to publicize your links through the click of a button. In addition, posting your blog-URLs as your status messages on Facebook  is a far more effective and far less intrusive way for publicity than emailing links yourself.

Twitter is often seen as a “blog killer” providing a lazy alternative to blogging—allowing one to get away with 140 characters and sparing oneself the effort of the exposition and analysis a full-fledged blogpost demands.  It does not have to be an alternative but instead can be used as a powerful supplement for your blog. For instance, I use it to post links or put small comments on happenings that are too trivial for the overhead of putting  on a blog. Putting your blog URLs as tweets is also an effective way to build traffic because of the organic way re-tweets spread in the Twitterosphere, making it possible for you to reach people who otherwise would not have heard of your blog.

Join community blogs: When I started out, I joined a group blog CSF (now defunct). But the experience was great because it enabled me to learn from and connect with fellow bloggers and tap into the community that had been built around CSF as a source for potential readers. So join up blog networks  Blogcritics or Desicritics or start a community blog with your friends. In that way, you are guaranteed an audience that not only includes your relatives and friends but also those of your co-bloggers, a significant part of which you would hopefully be able to siphon off to your own individual blog as time goes by.

Optimize for search engines: While it is easy to get carried away by buzzwords like “Search Engine Optimization” some amount of it is necessary to make your blog search-engine friendly so that people who are looking for a topic that your blog talks about can find out about you.

Promote your blog feed: Make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog feed by keeping a subscribe button in a prominent place. Some people try to make people visit the blog (as opposed to just read the feed offline) by providing partial feeds (say the first ten lines) but I personally do not approve of that. If people want to read your blog from their feed-reader client, allow them to do so. They will be pleased at the convenience.

Attend/organize blogmeets: People who know you are most likely to read your blog when you are starting out. People who have blogs themselves are more likely to read a blog. Putting these two together, it makes perfect sense to befriend other bloggers and blogmeets are the best place to achieve that.

And finally remember one thing. The multiplicative effect of traffic. While it may seem that getting four people to visit your blog after meeting them at a blogmeet is hardly worth the effort, if they like your content and endorse it on their blogs or on their social networks, each can bring in four other people and this effect, provided your content is good, can cascade onwards. For those struggling to get their voice heard, remember all it takes is one good post and a small critical mass of initial readers to make your blog go viral. Which is what makes it worth laboring on.

This is my 600th post (according to my WordPress dashboard). Also this month on 20th August this blog will turn five. In the accelerated world of the Net, that’s considered to be an eternity. Actually I would say that’s quite a lot of time  in the real world also , enough for instance to have completed another PhD.

Which is why today I put on the cap of  cranky old man and fortified by five-years and six hundred posts of wisdom, dispense five totally unsolicited bits of advice for bloggers.

Advice Number 1: Don’t give up. There are several good reasons for deleting your blog or leaving it to rot in cyberspace like a small pile of toxic waste. But don’t merely the fact that no one reads your blog except your mother make you pull the plug. Yes I know. People should not blog for traffic or attention—-a “lonely impulse of delight” (to quote Yeats) is the only thing that should motivate them. However, in my experience, that is rarely the case and if  feedback or readership was not a driver for most of blogging then everyone would be scribbling down their musings in a red diary hidden in a desk drawer or password protecting all their posts. A majority of people desire attention and a level of publicity for their thoughts and causes (and there is absolutely nothing wrong in wanting to) and once they don’t get what they want in a certain period of time, they run out of patience and ditch their blogs. Or worse move onto Twitter, the lazy man’s expression medium.

I started this blog for two reasons. One was after graduating with my PhD I moved to a city where I knew no one. Missing my circle of graduate school friends, I stumbled upon blogging as a medium to communicate with similar-minded people where the basis of conversation would be what I believed in and what I thought (as in contrast to social networking sites and chat rooms where people connect based on who they are or more accurately pretend to be).  The second equally important reason was to create a readership for my work with the hope that one day it would lead to media opportunities and perhaps even a book. Before conceiving of this blog I had tried various ways to get my writings published, including sending unsolicited material to different media outlets. All of them were met with silence.

Things didn’t get better for quite some time even after starting the blog. No one visited. There were no comments. I got increasingly frustrated and wrote this post. Yes that particular piece of prose makes me cringe today at the immature desperation and the persecution mania that runs through it but at that time there was no denying that this is exactly what I felt. The important thing is that I never gave up, even though I came mighty close. And five years and six hundred posts and 36,805 non-spam comments later,  I am still here. And will hopefully carry on.

Advice Number 2: Don’t go into blogging for the wrong reason. Namely just money. No matter what  the social media evangelist, the Web 2.0 startup expert, the excited anchor on TV and the online advertising don tells you, blogs, especially in India, are not going to generate  pots of gold. No it’s not that your ad placement is wrong or that you are choosing the wrong affiliate programs or that you are not properly search-engine optimized. It’s just that minting money online is not as easy as it is made out to be. Far from it.

Do people not make money from blogs? Sure they do. There is a whole group of clever people who have made money by selling the dream of making money to others. There are also an exceptional few who have indeed managed to generate such an audience for themselves that they can quit their day job and log in to their ad account and see the counter moving up every few seconds. But then the likelihood of that happening to your average Joe are very very slim and if your motivation for blogging is purely to retire on your ad earnings, then the odds are that you are headed towards a gigantic disappointment.

Remember that building up a steady readership is one thing. It is possible with a level of persistence (Advice 1). But the scale at which a blog’s following needs to be in order to make even a decent amount of money is so immense that for 99.9% of us it will be a bridge too far. Alas. I wish things could be different. But that’s just the way it is.

If there is any money from blogging it is not so much from ad revenues but from the possibility of getting writing assignments or book deals based on your content. However getting noticed by those who matter, no matter how exceptional your content is,  is largely a matter of luck. And even if you do get noticed it is unlikely that these secondary sources of income will rake in you the kind of cash that you need to have so that you may quit your day job and become that mythical creature—the “professional” blogger.

Advice Number 3:  Don’t get too taken in by the technology. I see many newbie bloggers so totally absorbed in the technology that they miss the wood for the trees. Moblogging. Podcasting. Videocasting. Search engine optimization. Pay per click. Pay per impression. Barcamp. Blogcamp.

All this jargon sounds cool and gives you a pleasant buzz. But remember technology is just a medium. What is important is the message.

As an example, you want to moblog because blog evangelist Mr. X says it is the wave of the future. However have you ever asked yourself what is the immediacy of your content that would  justify the need for real-time updates via a cell phone?  You want to videocast? Are you “Obama Girl”? If not, you have no use for that medium. If you are however, then by all means “bodcast”.

Advice Number 4:  Don’t let negative comments put you off. Do not be afraid of critical comments. Keep them on your blog as long as they are not offensive and do not attack you personally. Remember it’s impossible to please everyone all the time. Plus even though you write for an audience and it is human nature to want to be appreciated, the blog’s most important person is you. So write freely on whatever you feel you must. Use user-feedback to improve. But don’t let it be the be-all and end-all.

Advice Number 5: It is never too late to start blogging. Someone was telling me the other day “It’s too late to start a blog in India. The market is saturated.” What I told her was that I thought the exact same thing.  Five years ago.

If there is any problem with the Indian blogosphere even after so many years, it is the lack of variety. Which means there are many stories that are waiting to be told.  We want personal insights into Indian law. Into the Indian medical system. Into the life of a railway ticket checker. We want to hear from beyond the 15–35 demographic. We want grandma to tell us how college life was in her time. We want uncle to tell us how he felt when he bought his first fridge.

Final words. Write about what you are passionate about—-be it wriggling your ears or collecting match boxes. And most most important of all, produce original content.

Remember once you build it, they will come.

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]

“Aaj mere Munne ki saal giraah hain”

Four years in the turbo-accelerated Indian blogworld is like forty in the real considering the sheer amount of change, both in terms of the number of blogs and overall readership, one has witnessed over these years.

If on August 20, 2004 someone would have told me that in August 2008, people like Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Ram Gopal Verma and Karan Johar would be blogging I would have laughed him off by saying: “Yeah right ! I can just see the future. Amitabh Bachchan, who we know for his strong silence and aloofness, would be using his blog, perhaps twice a day, to take swipes at every Tom Dick and Harry who criticizes him. Aamir Khan would spend his keemti time informing us of the name of his dog (which happens to be Shahrukh) . Ram Gopal Verma would be justifying his questionable creative decisions through his blog. Hah ! Dude no way is that happening in four or four hundred years. What stuff are you smoking?”

And yet at a very basic level, the concept of blogs has still remained ambiguous and ill-defined for a majority of Web-users in India.

Many confuse the much more general concept of online speech with blogging,(which explains why the original brain-barfs and brain-droppings that adorn their message boards are frequently referred to as “blogs” by the sagacious readers of Rediff).

For many others, blogs are simply personal journals, mostly salacious or libelous in content, which exist to allow people to take anonymous snipes at others or express their naughty fantasies.

Blame “We The People” episode on NDTV earlier this year for strengthening these misapprehensions about blogs. In a 45 minute program that I felt squeezed in every journalistic no-no possible (sensationalism, poor research, blatant bias and lack of objectivity), the presenter, motivated no doubt by her antagonism towards blogs which she said had spread malicious rumors about her, presented “English language” blogs as exclusively frivolous “web graffiti” that are created to spread gossip, discuss people’s personal lives and to make confessions of a prurient kind. To drive home her thesis, she assembled a number of “personal” bloggers, picked out at random some juicy lines from their journals, made the point that bloggers seek to get attention/fame through juvenile sensationalism and then asked the nation whether blogs needed to be regulated.

Of course the reason such programs fill me with dread is that I know that some of my uncle-aunties back home know I “blog” , though I doubt they fully understand what that means. In my mind’s eyes I see a few of my relatives, say my uncle and his family in Naihati, in front of the TV, watching “We the People” all eager to learn about what they know to be my hobby. Then they see blogging being referred to as “textual intercourse” by one guest on the show and being generally defined as a medium for discussing sex (conventional and alternative) and for obtaining “cheap thrills”. As the show ends, they sit in shock till the silence is broken by a voice that says : ” Who would have thought that that cute innocent kid, who used to ask for an extra pantooya (gulabjamun) or two, would have grown up to become this? Do his parents know?”

If some seeks to trivialize the medium, there is also another group of people who overestimate the power and reach of Indian blogs. Whenever I hear of people discussing the potential of blogs to be an alternative to the Indian mainstream media or even more grandly  be a catalyst for social change, all I want to do is shake my head, Alok Nath style, and say “Maaf kar do beta, hum baade mamooli aadmi hain.”

Blogs are highly unlikely, anytime in the near or distant future, to have the resources and the infrastructure to do real-time reporting of news events on a national scale and on a daily basis. As long as they cannot do that, they can never totally replace main stream media.

An isolated scoop or an expose. Perhaps.

But, because of their very nature, they shall never be able to possess the authority of mainstream news outlets.

All that they can be good for is to provide an alternative source for analysis and opinion, free from editorial or commercial control, and that too for a privileged few Indians who have net-access. Even in the US, with its greater net reach and a vibrant and politically significant blogosphere, the Daily Koses and Huffington Posts, do not pose any challenge to the New York Times or the Fox Newses in terms of impact and authority.

So in conclusion, what does the crystal ball tell us ?

Will blogging (both writing as well as reading) become a popular Web activity of choice for Indians in the same way that checking emails, downloading media, chatting on Yahoo, scrapping on Orkut and surfing for adult material currently is.

Or will the blogosphere stagnate and then, like handbags for men, vanish from public memory?

And finally, will the Greatbong still be here, four years hence, dumping his dementia onto the Net like he has been doing since August 20, 2004?

Or will life, with its own plan, take the tranquil citizen far far away from the world of blogs?

Only Prabhuji can tell.

[Picture acknowledgement: http://www.passportmagazine.ru/]

1. Rakshabandhan for Education: (Registration No: – S/IL389/2) This organization, based in West Bengal, seeks to provide scholarships (Rs 500 a month) for meritorious yet needy students, mostly in the Class XI and XII stage where many of them are forced to drop out due to financial reasons. It has received some attention in the press and its supporters have an active Orkut community. Please go through the Orkut community if you are interested in success stories and more information [The web site unfortunately, at the time of writing, is more a placeholder than anything else.]

2. Democracy Connect: If you believe that our democracy has not performed as well as it is supposed to, one thing you can try is to adopt the “Rang De Basanti” approach—destroy the system (and those in it). Or you could attempt to make it work—which is what the folks at Democracy Connect do, providing strategy, policy, management and research support for legislators and government decision-makers. With a team of young and talented professionals straddling continents, working for some of the biggest names in business consultancy and corporate strategy, this group represents a rare confluence of idealism and intellect. All that remains to be seen is how many politicians are willing to make use of this resource for scientific governance as opposed to the vested-interest-driven ad-hocism that we have come to accept as a “given”. [More information here]

3. The Spark Group: Another education focussed initiative, its website describes it as: ” an idea incubator working at the grassroots level in India. Using insights from academic research, the Spark Group develops promising ideas into commercially viable business ventures that deliver valuable services to poor communities.” From what I understand, the Spark group is primarily focussed on three initiatives:1) Spark Ventures, which promotes investment in schools serving depressed areas 2) Spark Accreditation, a service for accreditation of schools and 3) Spark Guru, a national program for teachers. Like Democracy connect, its management team boasts impressive CVs and that’s not just because the founders were my seniors at high school. [More information here]

4. Aavishkaar: Aavishkaar, winner of the UNDP World Business Award in 2006, is a venture-capital firm for backing “socially relevant, commercially viable and environmentally friendly enterprises that do not have access to project financing – loan or equity – from traditional financial institutions”.[Link] Government funding for rural ventures in India has historically been a scam for providing low-interest loans, without appropriate collateral, to people enjoying political patronage ( if you do not believe me you can ask our newly elected President). Given this state of affairs, Aavishkaar serves as a much needed instrument for spreading the butter of liberalization more equitably. [More information here]