Category Archives: Blogging
This is an interesting piece of reportage:
Mithun would never speak out openly against Amitabh and fear incurring his wrath especially now that he has started blogging.
Ignore the grammar—that sentence confirms what I’ve always suspected: Blogging is a powerful tool in the hands of the powerful. That means little for the rest of us, who blog to indulge ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. What else is life about?
(Link via email from Rajeev Mantri.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 14 May, 2008 in
Arts and entertainment |
Blogging |
India |
News
The quote of the day comes from Andrew Sullivan to Jeffrey Goldberg:
Calling you an asshole is just the blogosphere’s way of saying hello.
So what I thought was either envy or cussedness on the part of a few people was clearly just conviviality. Well, it’s not too late. Hi there! Assholes!
(Link via email from Arun Simha.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 30 April, 2008 in
Blogging
XKCD is priceless:
(Link via Language Log.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 22 April, 2008 in
Blogging |
Miscellaneous
The SMS of the day comes from Peter Griffin:
On the flight with Annie and Chandrahas. If it gets hijacked, you’ll get live blogging, news and reviews.
Heh. And if I may add to that, all three of the highest quality.
PS: They’re headed here.
Posted by Amit Varma on 17 April, 2008 in
Blogging
“Google AdSense and Blogging Brought Me This Car,” reveals Amit Agarwal. It’s a Honda CR-V. It couldn’t be more well-deserved, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Congrats, Amit.
And why is this other Amit still a pauper? I can rationalize. Boo hoo.
Posted by Amit Varma on 15 April, 2008 in
Blogging |
Personal
I did. And that’s exactly what just happened to Stuff White People Like. Way to go, and all that. So much can happen in just a few weeks…
Posted by Amit Varma on 22 March, 2008 in
Arts and entertainment |
Blogging
During my recent visits to the Amazon pages of books by Chris Anderson and Neil Gaiman, I found that those pages now carry their latest blog posts. If Amazon does this across all its books, then it represents a great way for widely read authors to become widely read bloggers, as chances are that many readers interested in their books will end up discovering their blogs. This doesn’t guarantee success, of course, as they need to convert those first-time visitors into regular readers with compelling content, but the fact that they’re successful authors indicates that writing is their core competency anyway—the rest is adaptation to this new medium, and the desire to adopt it.
And yes, I know, Amazon doesn’t actually direct traffic to the author’s blog, but to their mirror of it. But, as in Gaiman’s case, it specifies that the content is syndicated from his journal, and links to it. And once you get hooked to it, the chances are that you’ll go to the original site, not to its Amazon mirror. Of course, Gaiman’s blog already has a significant readership and doesn’t need to be promoted on Amazon, but that isn’t true of most other writers.
So all I need to do to expand my blog readership beyond current levels is write a bestselling book. That can’t be too hard!
Posted by Amit Varma on 06 March, 2008 in
Blogging |
Economics
I’d written in a column last week about how the internet has no entry barriers and is meritocratic, and how if a new blog is good, it will gain the readership it deserves on word of mouth alone. Well, here’s a blog that illustrates just that: Stuff White People Like.
The blog began about six weeks ago, and already has about 4 million hits. That’s no surprise—it contains satire and social observation of the highest quality, and I’ll be very surprised if a lucrative book deal doesn’t come its way soon. Just scroll through some of those entries, it’s super stuff.
More dope: Here’s an LA Times piece on it, and here’s an interview of the author, Christian Lander.
(Link via email from Sruthijith.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 27 February, 2008 in
Blogging
This piece of mine was published in the Indian Express today.
“Where in the world are truly free markets?” a friend asked me the other day. “The kind of economic freedom you libertarians dream of just doesn’t work. Freedom leads to chaos. All markets need to be regulated by the government, which alone can safeguard the interests of the people.”
“Have you been online recently,” I asked.
“Don’t change the subject,” he said.
“I’m not,” I replied.
A couple of years ago, the libertarian blogger Warren Meyer was asked why there were so many, well, libertarian bloggers. His reply, in a nutshell, was that the internet is a libertarian space. “Libertarianism resists organization,” he wrote. Libertarians tend to be “suspicious of top-down organization in and of itself. Blogging is therefore tailor made for us - many diverse bottom-up messages rather than one official top-down one.”
In many ways, the online world is like the beautifully functioning free market that governments have never allowed in meatspace (the ‘real’ world). To begin with, the government does not pose an entry barrier to individuals who wish to have a presence online. You want to start a blog? It’ll take you three clicks to set one up. You don’t need a license for it, and you won’t have inspectors coming over and scrutinising your methods of work.
The blogosphere is a meritocratic space. Each blog finds the audience it deserves. If you like economics, you’ll find tons of good economics blogs, often much better than anything you’ll see in the mainstream media, because they’re written by specialists, not generalists. You want gardening? Literature? Technology? You’ll find content in any niche you can think of.
There is a lot of junk on the internet, but readers navigate through it easily, and soon settle on a few sites they regularly visit. Information percolates so quickly that a good new blog doesn’t take much time to build a readership. You write something nice, people who like it link to you, their readers check you out, and so it grows. Marketing and hype are generally wasted, and everything is viral. If you provide compelling content, readers come. If you write rubbish, readers go. Competition is the best regulation.
The blogger Ravikiran Rao once speculated on what would happen if the government decided to protect users from “bad blogs”, and regulate blogging. If government babus started deciding what content was appropriate for audiences, good bloggers would be intimidated away, not bothering to enter a space where there were so many hassles. Established bloggers would lobby for regulation to protect them from pesky newcomers. The quality of blogging would go down, not up - and readers would be shortchanged.
Far-fetched? Well, it works that way in many fields - such as, as Rao pointed out in his post, “private schools and educational institutions.” Indeed, in India at least, it is pervasive.
If only our government understood the power of free markets. I wish our bureaucrats read “I, Pencil” by Leonard Read, one of my favourite essays. It is a first-person account by a pencil of its genealogy – and by the end of it, you realise that a mere pencil is such a thing of wonder that no government could have put it together. It takes legions of people, possibly across continents, doing disparate things without knowledge of one another to make sure that when you need a pencil, and go to the shop to pick it up, it’s there. It’s a miracle, almost beyond comprehension, and certainly beyond planning or oversight. It takes a free market, not a benevolent central planner - economists call this process spontaneous order.
The internet benefits from this freedom. Consider Wikipedia, for example. It once used to be laughed at - how can a few volunteers produce better content than experts? - but is now a classic example of what spontaneous order can achieve. It is much broader than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and often deeper as well. It has its own self-correcting mechanisms, and its rules of use have evolved from the bottom up, and not been enforced from the top down. It shows that the voluntary actions of people working towards their self-interest is a far more powerful force than the self-important and sanctimonious supervision of governments. Online, we’re all free.
Supporters of free markets stress on the importance of the rule of law - and the internet is not a lawless zone. The laws of the real world apply to what we do online - sometimes to worrisome effect, as jailed bloggers in countries like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia have discovered. But on the whole, the internet is free of the kind of needless, suffocating government regulation and barriers to trade that bedevil the rest of the world. Long may it stay that way.
* * *
Also read: In Defence of Blogging.
You can browse through more of my essays and Op-Eds here.
Posted by Amit Varma on 23 February, 2008 in
Blogging |
Economics |
Essays and Op-Eds
The Gawker formula’s been leaked.
Posted by Amit Varma on 14 February, 2008 in
Blogging |
Miscellaneous
Nice.
(Link via email from Deepika.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 29 January, 2008 in
Arts and entertainment |
Blogging
The Q&A of the day comes from Isaac Chotiner’s interview of Ian McEwan in the New Republic:
Chotiner: Do you read any online reviews?
McEwan: I don’t read the blogs much. I don’t like the tone-the rather in-your-face road-rage quality of a lot of exchange on the Internet. I don’t like the threads that come out of any given piece of journalism. It seems that when people know they can’t be held accountable, when they don’t have eye contact, it seems to bring out a rather nasty, truculent, aggressive edge that I think slightly doesn’t belong in the world of book reviewing.
This is true of much more than online book reviewing, of course.
(Link via, again, PrufrockTwo.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 17 January, 2008 in
Arts and entertainment |
Blogging
In an excellent interview, Tyler Cowen is asked about blogging:
Knowlege@Wharton: You are a writer and co-founder of the popular economics blog MarginalRevolution.com. How does your inner economist explain blogging? What is the incentive for people like yourself to offer high-quality goods and services online for free?
Tyler Cowen: Blogging is fun. I’ve made friends through blogging, but most of all I have learned a lot. I think it has made me a better economist. I would also say it’s helped me to discover my inner economist. Because when you are blogging for real people, they don’t want techno babble. They don’t want jargon. They’re like, “What can you tell me that I actually care about?” Most of the ideas in this book, in one way or another, came out of blogging.
Knowlege@Wharton: So we can be motivated to do a lot of work, even highly skilled work, just because it’s fun?
Cowen: Absolutely. A lot of science works on the same basis. It’s true that scientists get paid, but typically they don’t get paid more, or much more, for discovering something that will make them famous. They do it because they love science, or because they want the recognition or because they just stumble upon it. Einstein was never a wealthy man but he worked very hard. So blogging is a new form of an old idea: that people do great things for free. Adam Smith didn’t get paid much for writing Wealth of Nations, even though it’s a long book that required a lot of work. He had an inner drive to get his ideas out there.
I’ve often been asked, and have often asked myself, why I blog. I spend more time on it than any other productive activity, and make only a small fraction of an anyway-insignificant income from it. The above excerpt answers the question rather well.
Posted by Amit Varma on 08 December, 2007 in
Blogging |
Personal
A number of readers over the last couple of weeks have drawn my attention to The Blog Readability Test, which claims to measure the level of education required to understand a blog. I’m delighted to announce that India Uncut can be understood by anyone who has gone to junior high school. I’ve always aimed to keep it simple, and to avoid jargon and obfuscatory words like ‘obfuscatory’. I’m glad that it seems to be working.
Of course, you can argue with the substance of what I write, but as long as the style has clarity…
Posted by Amit Varma on 06 December, 2007 in
Blogging |
Personal
Dave Walker explains:
I’ve nailed one step: “Become a Blogger.” The other one can wait.
(Link via email from Sanjeev Naik. Ach—I now see it’s also on Linkastic. Never mind!)
Posted by Amit Varma on 09 November, 2007 in
Blogging
Scott Adams writes in the Wall Street Journal:
A few years ago I tried an experiment where I put the entire text of my book, “God’s Debris,” on the Internet for free, after sales of the hard copy and its sequel, “The Religion War” slowed. My hope was that the people who liked the free e-book would buy the sequel. According to my fan mail, people loved the free book. I know they loved it because they emailed to ask when the sequel would also be available for free. For readers of my non-Dilbert books, I inadvertently set the market value for my work at zero. Oops.
So I’ve been watching with great interest as the band “Radiohead” pursues its experiment with pay-what-you-want downloads on the Internet. In the near term, the goodwill has inspired lots of people to pay. But I suspect many of them are placing a bet that paying a few bucks now will inspire all of their favorite bands to offer similar deals. That’s when the market value of music will approach zero.
That’s my guess. Free is more complicated than you’d think.
The irony is that free isn’t free. You might think that you’re reading India Uncut content for free, but actually you’re paying a price for it: The price of your time. Every second you spend reading India Uncut, you could be doing something else, and that opportunity cost indicates the value you place on my content. Sadly, there is no mechanism yet by which I can benefit from that, which is why we bloggers are so impoverished.
Except Scott Adams, of course. Sigh.
(Link via email from Manish Vij.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 03 November, 2007 in
Blogging |
Economics |
Personal
Tim Harford is back to regular blogging, which means one more top-quality blog to follow every day. It looks like he’ll also reproduce his Dear Economist pieces and his Undercover Economist column here, which makes for quite a treat. Time to get the feed.
Meanwhile, I still have only 24 hours in a day. That’s never enough.
Update: Reader Akanksha points me towards one way to get myself a little more time. Round and round I go…
Posted by Amit Varma on 25 October, 2007 in
Blogging |
Economics
David Miliband, Britain’s foreign minister, has started blogging. His reasons:
Diplomacy is traditionally seen as something that happens between governments and behind closed doors, but as the distinction between domestic and foreign becomes blurred, increasingly foreign policy is becoming the domain of all people. Whether it is climate change, the threat from extremism or the fight against poverty and degradation, these are challenges that have an impact on all of us and we can all play a part in tackling them.
Through this blog I want to explain my priorities, how I approach my job as Foreign Secretary and my ideas about the issues we face. But I also want to use it to hear the views of the readers across the world who have their own perspectives and ideas.
That’s quite excellent, but the last time Miliband started a blog, it was alleged to be costing the British taxpayer “somewhere approaching £40,000 a year,” in a classic example of government inefficiency—a blog costs next to nothing to set up and maintain. If he wishes to portray himself as transparent and accountable, he should first indicate on his new blog how much taxpayers’ money is going into it. After that we can look past the clunky prose and figure out if this is just an exercise in public relations, or Miliband really wishes to engage with the world. If it is the latter, hats off to him.
(Link to Milband’s blog via FP Passport, which Gautam John pointed me to via email.)
Update: Ravikiran Rao writes in:
You’ve mentioned that a blog “costs next to nothing to set up and maintain”. But that is true only if you ignore the opportunity cost of the blogger’s time. For comparison, if a CEO of a major corporation blogs, he will almost surely have an assistant to do the research for him, and that will cost him something. Given that, 40,000 pounds a year does not seem hugely inefficient to me. It is inefficient only if you think that blogging is just hot air, which seems to be the premise of the criticism.
Good point. But the premise of my criticism is not that blogging is hot air, which would be rather ironic given the medium of my message, but that money coercively gathered from citizens should, at the very least, be responsibly spent. So the big question here would be whether Miliband’s blog is worth the taxpayers’ money spent on it, a matter that can be left to individual taxpayers to decide for themselves. To do this, they should first know what Miliband really is spending.
Also, if Miliband’s blog really has value, there should be better ways of monetizing it than using funds coercively gathered from hapless citizens. And that principle applies to more than just the blog.
Posted by Amit Varma on 03 October, 2007 in
Blogging |
Politics
Here’s a map.
My favourites, of course, are the GMU Mafia—but there isn’t one blog on that list that is not worth reading regularly.
(Link via email from Ravi Venkatesh.
Also read: Economics as a Guide to Human Behaviour.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 29 September, 2007 in
Blogging |
Economics
I see this all the time in the blogosphere.
Besides dissonance, I think many people have a hard time tackling complexity and nuance. It’s much easier to have a simple position consisting of absolute values, and then to view everything through the prism of that worldview.
(Link via Silk-list. Related columns by me: Reason vs Rationalisation. The Comfort of a Worldview.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 28 September, 2007 in
Blogging |
Miscellaneous
This is the 31st installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.
Not a week goes by these days without someone bashing blogs. Last Thursday, the essayist Mukul Kesavan referred disparagingly to how the “masters of blah have migrated to the Republic of Blog”. Just days before that, Robert McCrum wrote in the Observer of how “the democracy of the Web is in danger of becoming a cacophonous nightmare”. The Times of India famously (and ironically?) wrote last year that “no one can beat Indian bloggers when it comes to self-obsessed preaching, gossiping and bitching”.
I write a fairly widely read blog, India Uncut, so let me jump to the defence of blogging. Firstly, all these gentlemen are right—but they nevertheless miss the point, as Theodore Sturgeon could have told them. When Sturgeon, a writer of science fiction, was attacked for the rubbish that came out of that genre, he famously came up with what is known today as Sturgeon’s Revelation: “90% of everything is crud.”
Sturgeon’s point was that most attacks against science fiction used “the worst examples of the field for ammunition”. And while he accepted that 90% of science fiction was rubbish, so was 90% of everything else. If one just looked at the crud component of any field, it would be easy to dismiss anything.
This problem is amplified in blogging’s case. In journalism, for example, there are filters to publishing. Newspapers and magazines have editors who constrain what goes into print, and the limitations of space ensure that a lot of crud gets filtered out.
Read more...
Posted by Amit Varma on 13 September, 2007 in
Blogging |
Essays and Op-Eds |
Journalism |
Thinking it Through
Here’s Salman Rushdie:
The thing I learned most at Cambridge was that you should be as brutal as possible toward ideas but as courteous as possible to the people who hold them. It is entirely proper that people not be discriminated against, whatever damn fool thing they believe. That doesn’t mean we can’t say what horseshit it is.
Sadly, the opposite approach is what one encounters most commonly on the internet.
(Link, again, via PrufrockTwo.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 26 August, 2007 in
Arts and entertainment |
Blogging
I am immensely impressed by the quality of this discussion over at Marginal Revolution. First, Tyler Cowen writes his impressions of the first 112 pages of Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms. Then an outstanding—and civil!—discussion takes place in the comments, with the author of book being discussed, Clark, joining in. This is blogging at its very best.
I’ve received a review copy of the book, as it happens, but haven’t yet begun reading it. But when I do, having read the discussion on MR will enrich and inform my reading experience so much. May there be many more such posts!
Posted by Amit Varma on 23 August, 2007 in
Blogging |
Economics
Scott Adams is a fantastic cartoonist and a very funny writer, but he writes the occasional odd post when he tackles a subject that he is not too familiar with. PZ Myers tears into him for a strange post on atheism, in which Adams had remixed Pascal’s Wager in a rather odd way. Read Myers and Austin Cline for more on his post, but being an atheist myself, let me clarify one point.
Atheism is not a belief that there is no God—it is the absence of belief in God. I am an atheist not because I am 100% sure that there is no God—how does one prove the negative anyway?—but because I see as little evidence around me for God as for flying fairies or invisible pink unicorns. I’m open to evidence that any of those exist, but in the absence of such evidence, I will not believe in them.
Adams’s post was particularly galling because he was not even arguing against atheism, but against his own silly misrepresentation of it. If it was wilful, it was intellectually dishonest; I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was just sloppy thinking. I am a massive fan of Adams’s blog, and will continue relishing his posts, but I wish he avoids one of the great dangers of blogging: publishing thoughts without thinking them through.
And yes, of course, I’ve done that as well, and have silly posts in my past that embarrass me when I revisit them. (I’ve done around 5000 posts across my blogs, and such wanton prolificness invites blunder, though I try my best to avoid that now.) So I feel for Adams…
Also read: Austin Cline on the difference between atheism and agnosticism.
(Link via email from MadMan. This post comes out of an email conversation with Neha.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 08 August, 2007 in
Blogging |
Miscellaneous |
Personal
Navin of BasKya.com has a number of interesting Bollywoodised plot points from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Here’s one:
#6. Harry, Ron and Hermione are being chased by death eaters and are in danger of being captured. They use the polyjuice potion to convert into Lara Dutta, Mallika Sherawat and Rakhi Sawant and do an item number until the death eaters leave.
I especially like #1, which reminded me of Sholay. And the update with Mosilager‘s suggestion, with Nagini’s melodrama, is also immensely viable.
Speaking of Mosilager, he has a post on how the Harry Potter series would be had it been written by writers other than JK Rowling. The Enid Blyton one is particularly excellent.
Posted by Amit Varma on 08 August, 2007 in
Arts and entertainment |
Blogging
Really, who thinks of such things? Time reports:
In a move that might make some people scratch their heads, a loosely formed coalition of left-leaning bloggers are trying to band together to form a labor union they hope will help them receive health insurance, conduct collective bargaining or even set professional standards.
The effort is an extension of the blogosphere’s growing power and presence, especially within the political realm, and for many, evokes memories of the early labor organization of freelance writers in the early 1980s.
Sigh. A lady named Susie Madrak has been quoted as saying that bloggers “feel a little more entitled to ask for something now.” Don’t ask what forms the basis of this sense of entitlement.
Also, someone named Leslie Robinson has said, “It would raise the professionalism. Maybe we could get more jobs, bona fide jobs.” Heh. If Mr or Ms Robinson can’t get a job on his or her own steam, then he or she doesn’t deserve a damn job. What kind of self-esteem must they have to want to rely on a pressure group, which is what a union really is, to get themselves a job?
To each his own, of course. But it’s irritating when people criticize ‘bloggers’ on the basis of what some self-important bloggers happen to get up to. Pah.
Also read: “Don’t Think In Categories.”
(Link via email from BVN.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 07 August, 2007 in
Blogging |
WTF
For all of you who have ever been involved in an online debate in any way, Arthur Schopenhauer’s “38 Ways To Win An Argument” is indispensable. Most of these techniques will seem familiar to you, right from questioning the motive of a person making the argument instead of the argument itself (No. 35), exaggerating the propositions stated by the other person (No. 1) , misrepresenting the other person’s words (No. 2) and attacking a straw man instead (No. 3). It’s a full handbook of intellectual dishonesty there. Indeed, I generally avoid online debates because they inevitably degenerate to No. 38.
The full text is below the fold. Many thanks to my friend Nitin Pai for reintroducing me to it.
Read more...
Posted by Amit Varma on 28 July, 2007 in
Arts and entertainment |
IU Faves |
Blogging |
Politics
... is my favourite sports blog at the moment. Lindsey covers cycling, and his posts on the Tour de France are crisp, sharp and insightful.
Despite all the doping controversies, the Tour is my favourite sporting event by a long way. Cycling is an elemental sport—the machines don’t make much difference, as man goes against man and the elements with not much else in between. These three weeks of racing test the body and the character more than any event in any sport that I can think of, and you can see the effort, the pain, the despair, the ecstasy in the faces of the riders as they ride, even on their bodies. It is pure sport.
And today’s the finest stage, where the hardest mountains loom. Back to television!
Posted by Amit Varma on 25 July, 2007 in
Blogging |
Sport
Old pal and one-time colleague Abhirami Arumbakkam (aka Ammani) of ‘Quick Tales’ fame has a quiz up here on Indian bloggers. It is part of a series of contests she is holding on her blog to promote LAFTI. Do check it out—it’s a nice quiz, though it would have been much better if question No. 8 was No. 1.
Having said that, the first word in my first Extrowords, which was themed on Indian bloggers, is the answer to her first question here. Fitting, in a way.
And guess who is 17 down?
Posted by Amit Varma on 13 July, 2007 in
Blogging |
Personal
Amit Agarwal is an exceptional tech blogger, besides being a wonderful guy, but that alone surely cannot explain why he makes thousands of dollars every month through Google Adsense while I earn in the mere hundreds. Well, I have found out the secret, and it has nothing to do with our abilities. Instead, it’s all because of our last names.
Richard Wiseman of the Telegraph writes:
A few weeks ago, I invited Telegraph readers to take part in a unique experiment to explore whether your surname influences your life. There was a massive response, with 15,000 readers participating online.
The results yielded a fascinating insight into a hitherto hidden aspect of the human psyche. I wanted to know if people who had a surname that began with a letter near the start of the alphabet were more successful in life than those with names towards the end. In short, are the Abbots and Adams of the world likely to do better than the Youngs and the Yorks?
No prizes for guessing what Wiseman found. As I’d mentioned last year, a study had once found that last names did matter in the field of economics, but Wiseman now finds that it matters outside academics as well. And the habit of listing names in alphabetical order has everything to do with it.
[W]hether it is on a school register, at a job interview, or in the exam hall, people with surnames towards the start of the alphabet are used to being first.
Given that we often associate the top of a list with winners and the bottom with losers, could all of these small experiences add up and make a long-term impact on someone’s life?
Indeed, I’ve recently joined Facebook, and whenever I browse the friends list of a friend, I feel almost hurt to find myself near the bottom. Surely I’m closer to them than that? At this rate, I’ll end up resenting the world and having no friends left.
As for that Amit Agarwal chappie, pah! I demand that the government taxes away 90% of his income and redistributes it to bloggers with last names like, um, mine.
And don’t get me started on the Bushes, Blairs, and Bin Ladens of the world.
(Link via email from Ullas Marar.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 11 July, 2007 in
Blogging |
Economics |
Miscellaneous
Kudzu shows us the reasons.
My reasons have more to do with Cthulhu.
Doug Marlette, Kudzu’s creator, died recently in a car accident. I love the way he once explained what caricature is all about:
It’s kind of like when you recognize somebody walking 100 yards down the beach, before you can make out the features, you can tell who it is. That’s the quality I’m trying to get at in caricature.
(Link via email from Sanjeev Naik.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 11 July, 2007 in
Arts and entertainment |
Blogging
Two good friends of mine, one of whom is the self-proclaimed president (and only member) of the India Uncut Fan Club, are on their way through the Himalayas (or suchlike) as I type these words. Neha Dara and Akshay Mahajan have Shez Jifri and Saira Bano for company, and they seem to be having a rocking time. Who Saira Bano? That’s the auto-rickshaw they’re travelling in. They hardly blogged through the first section of the trip—if you’re zooming through the jungles of Nepal in an auto, whaddya expect—but have built up some decent posts by now, and more posts and pictures will surely follow. So far we have:
Shez: Rickshaw Driving 101
Shez: DAY 1 : Biryani and blowing flutes
Shez: Gianni and Maurice : Team KarmaPizza
Shez: Pimp my ride for Pole position!
Neha: Gathering a crowd 101
Shez: Some rabblings over rubble
Neha: To pack a bag is no easy thing
Neha: Team of Four
And Akshay’s pictures are here. His photographs are a joy, check them out!
Let me place it on record here that I’m burning with envy. We all tell ourselves that we shall take off on such an adventure one day, but trapped by the inertia of everyday life, we rarely do. These kids seized the day, and I’m immensely proud of them. The fan club has a fan club now. (Recursive? What’s that?)
So where are you off to this weekend?
Posted by Amit Varma on 05 July, 2007 in
Blogging |
Miscellaneous |
Personal
The International Herald Tribune reports:
Four years ago, India was rocked by the murder of Satyendra Dubey, a government engineer who exposed corruption in the national highway building program. Two years later, Shanmughan Manjunath, a manager at a state-owned oil company, laid bare a scheme to sell impure gasoline. His body was found riddled with bullets in the back seat of his car.
To [JN] Jayashree, her husband, MN Vijayakumar, appeared to be trailing in their footsteps. Vijayakumar, 51, is a bureaucrat in the southern state of Karnataka, and he has a penchant for chastising colleagues who supplement their modest salaries with bribes, kickbacks and garden-variety pilferage. In recent months, his chastising ruffled feathers at high levels, and he began seeing the signs often directed at whistle-blowers in India: He was flicked around the civil service like a hockey puck, switching jobs seven times in the past nine months, most recently on June 26.
As her husband made powerful enemies, Jayashree began to fear for his life. And so she devised an unusual ploy to protect him: She blogged.
Here’s Jayashree’s blog; her reason for starting it, she told IHT reporter Anand Giridharadas, was to “[create] a fortress around him - a fortress of people.” Well, I wish her all the best, and certainly the visibility that the blog gives Vijaykumar should make his enemies wary of attacking him. But I’m skeptical of the concept of a “fortress of people”, because of this, illustrated most recently by this. Voyeurism comes naturally to us, but beyond that…
(Link via email from Arjun Swarup.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 03 July, 2007 in
Blogging |
India |
News
The Telegraph has a list. One that I often find irritating comes in at No. 2: ‘Blogosphere.’ It leads to lazy generalizations, and encourages thinking in categories.
How would Ian McEwan and JM Coetzee like it if you told them that they’re part of the Bookosphere? And then if you begin to rant against the Bookosphere because you don’t like Paulo Coelho and Dan Brown? Now, wouldn’t that be silly? And still…
Posted by Amit Varma on 25 June, 2007 in
Blogging
... please stop reading this blog right now. It seems that India Uncut is rated PG-13.
Of course, my earlier Blogspot avatar was rated R, so it must be admitted that I am getting more child friendly. In a few years, I’ll be writing for toddlers. Goo, ga, parents suck, walking is boring—all that stuff.
(Link via email from reader justescaped.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 23 June, 2007 in
Blogging
... John Buchanan? Prem Panicker is due to interview Buchanan, and will incorporate reader-submitted questions that he finds interesting. Almost a Web 2.0 interview, you could say, without the anarchy of a chat. Hop over to leave your suggestions.
And by the by, I’m quite delighted to see Prem blogging regularly on his own space. He’s a magnificent blogger, though he’s often been too busy running large teams of journalists to blog regularly. I’m going to watch that space.
Posted by Amit Varma on 21 June, 2007 in
Blogging |
Sport
Heh.
(Link via email from Corporate Whore.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 14 June, 2007 in
Blogging |
Journalism
I think it is immensely cool for an Indian Idol contestant to have a blog. Indeed, make that blogs. Here’s Meiyang Chang’s Blogger page, which lists all his blogs: The Buddha Soliloques is his regular blog, with travel posts and stuff, Fool’s Imagery contains his photographs, and The Amyegin Outburst has cartoons drawn by him.
Chang comes across on the show as much more intelligent and balanced than the rest of the contestants, and that comes through in his blogs as well. I predicted in my last Indian Idol post that he will reach the final three, and last night’s performance gave me no reason to rethink that. Among other things, his voice has a timbre that sets him apart from the others, and he sings with a certain sukoon, as it were, that most of the other singers just don’t have.
The boys were outstanding in last evening’s episode, and seem to be getting better with every performance. I take back what I said earlier about this year’s contestants not being as good as those in the last two: The boys, at least, are every bit as impressive as their predecessors in the last two seasons, even if there is no one quite as stunning as Karunya was last season.
Speaking of stunning, I never thought I’d think something like this, leave alone open myself to ridicule by expressing it publicly—but isn’t Alisha Chinai just superfreakingcute? The years have sat really well on her…
(More Indian Idol posts here.)
Update: Oops, apologies, forgot to indicate that I got the link to Chang’s Blogger page via email from reader VatsaL.
Posted by Amit Varma on 08 June, 2007 in
Arts and entertainment |
Indian Idol |
Blogging
Heh.
(Via email from Gautam.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 08 June, 2007 in
Blogging
We could have one if some chappies in our government read this and get inspired. Can you imagine what would happen if Arjun Singh ran it?
(Link via email from Scribbler.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 27 April, 2007 in
Blogging |
Freedom
That’s a line I particularly like from a poem by Space Bar, the newest contributor to Rave Out. That section’s coming along rather nicely, I think, and the already-healthy contributors list will have a couple of new additions in the next couple of weeks that will make it rock even more. Watch that space.
And yes, just as floors love feet, my keyboard loves my fingers. Such is the level of obsession there that I fear that such a love affair can only be doomed. Its offspring, of course, exist for your pleasure.
Update: You can pick up RSS feeds from here.
Posted by Amit Varma on 11 April, 2007 in
Arts and entertainment |
Blogging |
Personal
Oliver Kamm writes in the Guardian that “parasitic, political blogs tend not to enhance but poison healthy debate.”
Well, I’d point out here that debate tends “not to enhance but poison healthy debate.” That’s the nature of the beast. Open debates, especially, tend to degenerate into incoherence, particularly on the internet, where anyone can enter a conversation, and anonymity enables trolling.
Despite that, I’m not sure what to make of this proposal to have codes of conduct for bloggers. All bloggers already have implicit codes of conduct for themselves, manifest in the way they blog and moderate comments and so on, and their credibility and readership derives from that. I’m skeptical of a formally stated code of conduct, and don’t think it would serve any purpose. Except for debate.
(IHT link via email from Arun Verma.)
Posted by Amit Varma on 09 April, 2007 in
Blogging
Jimmy Wales is asked, in Time Magazine’s “10 Questions” section, why people contribute to Wikipedia. Is it altruism? He replies:
It’s realizing that doing intellectual things socially is a lot of fun--it makes sense. We don’t plan on paying people, either, to contribute. People don’t ask, “Gosh, why are all these people playing basketball for fun? Some people get paid a lot of money to do that.”
Bang on. Also, please stop asking me if I make any money through this website. Bounce bounce bounce.
Posted by Amit Varma on 31 March, 2007 in
Blogging |
Personal
So much to do, so little time. On a regular basis these days, I go through the cycle mentioned in the headline of this post. I wake up in the morning (somehow!), get to work, and soon fall behind schedule. Sometimes non-IU work does not allow me to post on this blog until lunch: immense guilt then comes. (As I mentioned here, guilt is a key reason for the frequency of my posts.) If, FSM forbid, I cannot blog by evening, despair sets it. And if the sun sets and the blog is still showing yesterday’s post, panic happens. I go on the internet then, and feel paralysed. What to blog? How can I make up for an entire day gone by?
Pretty much the same phenomenon happens with email as well. Often, when I am travelling, even if it is for a day, the emails pile up. So I use the immensely useful functionality that Gmail has, of starring a mail. The action is supposed to be my way of telling myself, “This is important and I will reply to this email later.” But the message that effectively gets communicated is, “You don’t have to worry about this right now. Chill. Do something else. You can come back to this.”
And, of course, I never do. If fact, the starred mails are so many, and so guilt-inducing, that I’m in denial much of the time. I do not dare to click on the folder. Panic arises at the thought, and alternates with resignation. No doubt I have lost many friends in this way, and upset many readers. Sigh. Weep. Wail.
It has to be said, though, that readers of my blog have less cause for complaint than those who correspond with me. I am, after all, writing a post now—not an email.
Also see: An earlier post on this predicament.
Posted by Amit Varma on 02 March, 2007 in
Blogging |
Personal
... were basically a group blog. No?
Posted by Amit Varma on 01 March, 2007 in
Blogging |
Small thoughts
This piece is the third installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking It Through.
As a blogger, I often get phone calls from journalists who have been instructed to write a story on blogging. Generally, all they know about it is that it is some new kind of buzzword, and they have often not read any blogs. Their questions invariably include the phrase “blogging community.”
Oh how they generalise. “What does the blogging community feel about the new KBC?” they ask, or “What do bloggers write about?” I try to be polite and say that I can only speak for myself, but I won’t deny that the image of hanging a journalist upside down just above a vat of boiling oil gives me great glee at such times.
Read more...
Posted by Amit Varma on 22 February, 2007 in
Blogging |
Essays and Op-Eds |
India |
Politics |
Thinking it Through
After much delay, let me finally welcome you to India Uncut!
I first discussed the blueprint of this site with MadMan, who has designed and programmed it, in March last year. Immense procrastination ensued, largely on my part, but we finally got round to working on it a couple of months ago. A brief introduction to each of its sections follows below, taken from my detailed note on how this site came to be and what it contains, ”About India Uncut.”
Read more...
Posted by Amit Varma on 15 February, 2007 in
Blogging |
Personal
The piece below by me appeared on January 19, 2005 in the Indian Express as ”The world according to me”. That headline wasn’t mine, though. I’d also posted it on India Uncut.
Towards the end of December, just after the tsunami struck, I told a journalist friend of mine that I was planning to travel through coastal Tamil Nadu to report on the aftermath of the disaster. “Ah, excellent,” he said, “Which publication you going to write for?”
“I’m not going to write for any publication,” I replied. “I’m going to blog.” He looked at me incredulously.
Read more...
Posted by Amit Varma on 15 February, 2007 in
Blogging |
Essays and Op-Eds |
Personal
Page 1 of 1 pages
