In the sixth article of the ongoing series "Hum Blogistani" Ravishankar Shrivastava talks about the scenario in blogging in Indian languages.
E
xpressions. You find it everywhere.
At a cool corner of a collage café, at the Bus adda, in a train compartment, at a Party, at your work place and, may be, even during those intimate moments with your beloved. Everybody out there is trying to forcefully convey his or her feelings. At times, you have to shout, make faces and even shove elbows to make yourself heard. Try fathoming a conversation within a group and you will quickly realize that nobody actually seems to be listening, yet every one of them is in a great hurry to express opinion. You also want to express yourself eloquently. However, you don’t get yet get an audience. You shout. Damn it, nobody cares. What do you do now?
Just Blog it!
Blog, an alternative medium to express one’s expression, can change things upside down for you. Even if you whisper in your blog, you will be noticed. In your blog, you can express yourself without any interruption, without an argument, and without an express permission from anybody else! To add to the beauty, you and your audience can share views in real-time through the blog-comments.
Blogs have proved that they can be effectively used as an alternate medium for personal publication. There are tens of thousands of writers in any given language. At the same time, writers do not get enough opportunity to publish their work due to high costs involved. Blog can be used as no-cost publication medium where you can publish unlimited contents for free, or almost free. Many blogs have proved this. By site counter reports, my personal blog attracts much less attention than my literary blog.
When I started writing my blog in Hindi, there were barely half a dozen Hindi blogs around. At that time, I had decided to blog regularly, at least for a year, even if it attracted only a few hits in the entire month! Hindi blogdom is still in its infancy, barely counting to 150. Except for Tamil, situation is grim for all other Indian language blogs. Nevertheless, I strongly feel that with computers reaching every nook and corner of the nation, vernacular language blogging will spring up.
A few months ago, at an Indic developer meet, some one complimented me, “When I search Internet for something in Hindi, it always displays either BBC or your blog”. It may have been a bit exaggerated, but perhaps not entirely false. It may be too early, still I can risk saying that blogs in Indic languages would soon be regarded as the mirror of their respective linguistic culture. In addition to that, blogging in Hindi lets me feel like paying back to the community to which I belong.
We invite all Indibloggers to share their thoughts with us. If you feel strongly about the theme of this series, don't hesitate to send us a short write-up at indibloggies at gmail dot com and we would be glad to publish it. Please note that the piece sent to us cannot be cross-posted to any other website, though you may link to here. Thanks!
2 comments:
Firstly, this is one of the most poorly designed websites I have come across. The first time around, i could not find the list of nominations first-hand. I actually needed someone to tell me that its hidden somewhere in the second post on this page.
Secondly, if you have jurors, you expect them to have greater expertise than the general public. I fail to understand how that word-press theme slip-up could have happened. (not to mention the fact that many of the blogs you have listed in the best design category use modifications of word press themes). What do you need the jurors for?
Thirdly, i have serious issues with the quality of the process. look at the stage 1 results for the best tagline. one tagline that actually misspells the word 'existence' (i'm not going to point out which one).two unoriginal latin phrases. a tagline that was a straight take from The Hitchhikers Guide (and has subsequently been changed to a Latin inanity). Again, where's the quality? What is the jury doing?
I'm sorry, but you guys just lost all credibility with me.
I cannot comment on the Juror's decision. Awards are all about subjectivity; your choice would be different from mine. This is the very reason we went for a big Jury, to get the maximum out of the myriad opinions.
You are damn right about the navigation problem. I just forgot to point the "Nominations" menu item to the right post. The post title has also been altered to tell what's inside. Hope that helps!
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