Possibilities boggle the mind

In the second article for the series "Hum Blogistani!" we have Gautam Ghosh focusing on the subject of Business blogging and predicting that Blogging will evolve into something much more than blogging. Gautam, an alumni of XLRI-Jamshedpur is a HR and Training professional. He works in the areas of Management & Professional Development, Organizational Learning, and Knowledge Management. Gautam's other areas of interests are Organizational Development, Human Resource Development, Communities of Practice, Cross-Cultural Working, and Learning Organizations. His blog was nominated in the best Indiblog category at Indibloggies 2004.

When I started blogging at Gautam Ghosh on Management, more than 3 years ago it was to use it as a tool of personal knowledge management. I was a hopeless contributor to some HR and KM e-groups and first approached a blog as a repository for all the mails that I used to send out to the groups.

Soon I discovered that people were linking to me and since my writings were related to HR and Management, I was getting some little traffic from other HR related blogs. These were not desi blogs and I started interacting with other bloggers outside the country. Of course, I came across Dina and Rajesh's blogs as both are interested in KM and we interacted a couple of times. My blog has followed my career interests, so going through the posts from 2002 you can see how my interests have changed.

A tool for social change

Blogging is gradually becoming the talk of the town In India. The number of Indibloggers is steadily on the rise and talking about the numbers while we are still far off from the Chinese count of 6 Million plus bloggers, we are only better off than, Brunei perhaps. This worldwide phenomenon may still be in a nascent stage here and there might be an upper skew as well, since the average blogistani comes probably from an affluent background with good “connectivity”. Yet, in a country where bijli, sadak and paani almost always collide with the dreams of bringing Technology to everyone, there are now so many blogs you would surely need some device to calculate the numbers.

The sheer variety in the desi-blogdom is sure to startle anyone. So there are the ubiquitous techies, there are students, professional authors, journalists, researchers and there are homemakers and occasional surfers. There are gossip blogs, cartel blogs, journals, splogs, bad blogs, good blogs, good-looking blogs, shabby blogs, celebrity blogs, popular blogs, abandoned blogs, English blogs, Hinglish blogs and Indic blogs, blogs as vivid as our country itself. Given all this and since it is the Indibloggies we can take the liberty of doing some introspection here. As they say, mauka bhi hai aur dastoor bhi!

Staring today Indibloggies features a short thought-series called "Hum Blogistani!" where various bloggers would do a guest-post for the Indibloggies with their views about the Indi-blogosphere, evoking its journey so far, probably doing the SWOT analysis and predicting the road-ahead. And who else but Amit Varma of 'India Uncut' to do the kickoff.

A couple of days ago when Debashish asked me to write this piece, the first of this series called “Hum Blogistani,” I was intimidated at the thought. The subject – the Indian blogosphere – is rather vast, and I wouldn’t know where to start on a piece of that sort. One can’t contain an ocean in a thimble, and so on. Also, I’ve been blogging for little more than a year now, and India Uncut, my flagship blog, is not even a year old. But it has been an enormously enriching time for me, and I thought I’d write about some of the things I’ve learnt, from a thimble point of view.

When I started surfing Indian blogs, the first thing that struck me was the diversity I encountered. Most non-bloggers think of blogs as just online diaries, which is a ridiculously narrow view of blogs. I often have to remind such people that “blogging” is as wide an umbrella term as “writing.” A writer can write novels, short fiction, political tracts, history, opinion pieces, reportage, travellogues, poems, promotional fluff, erotica and diary items. Bloggers can blog their way through the same areas, though with more flexibility (as I’ve elaborated here, in the context of journalism). And Indian bloggers cover all these areas and more.

There is one huge difference between writing in the traditional sense and blogging, though: anybody can find an audience by blogging. Many talented writers who have the potential of building relatively small, loyal audiences cannot do so in print because the costs of publishing are high, and publishers are averse to taking a risk with them. But there are no such entry barriers for bloggers. It costs only the cost of internet access to blog, as there are plenty of free hosting sites and user-friendly blogging software available. I’m pretty hopeless at tech stuff, and Blogger and Blogspot work really well for me.

As a result of this, many writers who would otherwise not break through into print manage to publish themselves and find an audience. These audiences may often be relatively small, but so what? There is a satisfaction to having a readership that may be geographically spread out, and that you wouldn’t have had access to before blogging was born. Blogging helps people reach out, and I can’t emphasise enough how rewarding that can be.

While blogging is thought of by many as a solitary activity – one person and a computer – it has enlarged my social life in ways I never expected. That is something that many other bloggers have experienced as well. As we write our blogs and read those of others, we get in touch with people we share interests with, and mutual respect often turns into friendship. I have made friends I haven’t yet met in the flesh, who are a continent away, and this would not have been possible to anything like the same extent ten years ago. As I wrote here, this is quite the most rewarding aspect of my time as a blogger.

But blogging is about a lot more than social networking: it can also be a tool for social change. Blog readerships in India are too low for that now, but as internet penetration in India grows, more and more people will become aware of blogging, and more and more people will blog. Readership will expand massively, and blogs will actually be in a position to influence events in the real world, or meatspace as some of us call it. In addition to the prediction I’d made in this post, I’d like to make another one: the most influential Indian blogs of the next ten years will be those written in Indian languages.
Most of India does not speak English, and for too long the elites have condescended to them. This will change. As internet access becomes ubiquitous, more and more people will want to read content in their own languages. And while the regional papers, set in their fixed ways, will largely disappoint them, bloggers will not. Language software today is easily available and easy to use, and a whole generation of free thinkers and fearless writers will emerge. They will write in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati, Urdu, Oriya and every other language and dialect of this country. They will reach out to an audience of hundreds of millions of people, not the mere tens of thousands we bloggers in English have access to right now. They will truly do what some us vainly and bombasticly speak of sometimes: they will change the country.

It will take years, but it will happen.

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 writeup 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!

Blogs cannot change India: Atanu Dey

A Hindi version of this interview is also available at the World's first Hindi blogzine, Atanu Dey, winner of the Best Indiblog at the Indibloggies 2004 and author of Deeshaa did his bachelors in mechanical engineering, then moved to computer science and received a master's degree. Product marketing at HP in the Silicon Valley kept him occupied briefly for six years. He traveled in India, US, and Europe for five years before realizing that he knew nothing about economics. So he studied economics at the University of California at Berkeley and received his PhD for his thesis on the Indian telecommunications sector. In his spare time Atanu listens to classical music, practices Vipassana meditation, reads physics, gives lectures on Buddhism and maintains his blog. He is also a published poet.

Atanu was interviewed for Indibloggies by Nitin Pai and Debashish Chakrabarty.

How has been the experience winning the Best Indiblog award at the Indibloggies? Do award sites such as this do any good to the blogging world?

The experience has been very positive because the ideas that I explore on my blog got wider exposure because of the contest. This exposure was a secondary effect of the contest. For instance, Brad Delong, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley noted the award on his blog and hundreds of additional visitors started coming to my blog. Tim Worstall and Om Malik were among those who also wrote about my blog on their blogs and increased my readership.

I do believe that such contests serve a function. They reduce information imperfections. That is, more people get to know about the good blogs and this raises the bar.

Why do you think blogging provides a good platform for what you say? Do you blog with a purpose?

Blogging is a great platform for an individual's viewpoint to be made accessible to the world at large (or at least, the connected world.) Each of us has a unique take on the world, which may be of value to others who may be geographically remote but psychically close. A web log allows a kindred spirits elsewhere to connect.

I blog for the reasons above, of course. But more importantly, it forces me to write. To me, writing is a process of self-discovery. When I write, I make explicit to myself what I implicitly know but I may not be fully conscious of.

What is that one thing you think Deeshaa achieves?

Deeshaa achieves connections. There is a core aim to the blog: discovering through dialogue, experience, exploration, observation and introspection what India is and where it is going. Deeshaa connects my efforts with others who have a similar quest.

Which are your favourite blogs?

I am not one of those people who read scores of blogs. It takes me time to carefully consider what others have written. Therefore, my reading is fairly limited, although eclectic. Mostly I read blogs of those who I know, either directly or only on cyberspace.

Rajesh Jain’s Emergic is my favourite tech blog. For India's rural news and viewpoint, I read Suhit Anantula's World is Green. My group blog of choice is Wetware, which was started by Reuben Abraham. Veerchand Bothra's Mobile Pundit is a great source for mobile related content. Brad DeLong is among my favorite professors and has an incredible economics and political blog. "It is all trivial and obvious except ..." by Tim Worstall of the UK is another eclectic intelligent viewpoint that I find remarkable. Sonal Vaidya writes "A potpourri of thoughts" from New York, which is guaranteed to entertain, inform and make you wonder. Oh, I should not forget Stupid Evil Bastard. Should not be missed.

Do you use any tools like w.bloggar etc to blog? Which newsreader do you use?

I use Movable type for my blog. Don't use any newsreader.

Do you actually have a life? How does life interfere with your blogging?

I should take the 5th on that question. Answering it may incriminate me. But seeing as I don't give a damn on my blog, I may as well answer that question. OK, I admit that I no longer have a life. Before I came to Mumbai nearly a year and a half ago, I had a life.

Do you think Indian blogs can change anything anywhere, especially in India?

Blogs change India? Are you kidding! Nothing can change India, least of all a bunch of stupid blogs that are written by a bunch of people who need to get themselves a life and read by those who desperately need to get out more often.

Blogs can bring alternative viewpoints to the public discourse

Seriously though, blogs can bring alternative viewpoints to the public discourse. In fact, blogs bring the public into the public discourse. The mainstream media can be very insular and incestuous. Blogs inject much needed diversity of viewpoints.

What do you mean by an Indian blog?

Since distance does not have any meaning when it comes to cyberspace, Indian blog means a blog that has as its major focus matters concerning India, irrespective of who the person writing is.

Tell us something about yourself.

I am just an average guy living in this material world, trying to scratch out a living without stepping on too many toes, and wondering how it is all going to come out in the end. I am on my third profession. Trained as an engineer first but did not practice that trade. Then moved to computer science and left it because I find computers artificially dumb and find natural stupidity rather intriguing. So I got a PhD in economics because economics has something to say about why people behave as stupidly as they do. Now I am concerned with what can be done to counteract the natural stupidity of people. I am working on figuring out an educational system that will make people grow up smart instead of being as dumb as doorknobs.

How do you analyse the current economic scenario of India?

India is a huge complex economy. One can partition India in many different ways and even with a huge number of partitions; each partition can be large in absolute terms even though in relative terms they may be insignificant. Depending on which partition one focuses on, one will get a different story.

For instance, take IT enabled services such as BPO. A million Indians work in that segment and things can't be better for them. Yet, they only represent 0.1% of India's population. The IT-enabled segment is rapidly evolving and progressing. The whole urban sector is also gaining grounds rapidly. But that is only 20% or so of India. What about the 70% of India that is in rural India? Things are not so rosy over there. What are the urgent and important problems that face rural India and how can they be addressed is the question critical to India's future.

Overall, I am cautiously hopeful about India's future. My guarded optimism springs from the realization that bureaucracy and politics can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory very easily as they have demonstrated in the past.

A Hindi version of this interview is also available at the World's first Hindi blogzine, Nirantar.