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Is free speech on the cards
Advertising gurus do it. So do students, making their views read and heard. The word “blog” has yet to be translated into an Indian language, but this unusual communications device may soon be at the centre of a national controversy, as a recent incident has shown.
Yet, India-related blogs are largely invisible and go unappreciated. Few talk about them and there’s no hype, probably because little commercial potential is seen in this form of IT-based communication.
Blogs come in differing forms and orientations — political, personal, cultural, commercial, scientific, moblog (or mobile blog), collaborative, eclectic, educational, directory-oriented, forum-type, or the ones just made up of spam!
As the Wikipedia explains: “A blog has certain attributes that distinguish it from a standard web-page. It allows for easy creation of new pages: new data is entered into a simple form (usually with the title, the category, and the body of the article) and then submitted.
“Automated templates take care of adding the article to the home-page, creating the new full article page (Permalink), and adding the article to the appropriate date- or category-based archive.”
In India where we are great at simply mastering the technology — rather than applying it efficiently — we’re probably missing the point here too. Blogs have the capability to empower the citizen, simply because entry barriers are so low, and it’s easy to express oneself on them.
Of course, one piece in the jigsaw is to get blogs working in Indian languages. One can come across a handful of blogs written in Indian languages using the Devanagari script (Marathi and Hindi, etc) and may be in languages like Tamil. But a lot more needs to be done.
To understand the importance and relevance of blogging, we can look to a case that made it to the headlines recently. In the IIPM blog war, as it has been called, a prominent media-savvy management chain was seriously upset by the scribblings in cyberspace of one blogger.
About the incident, this is what the Hindustan Times recently said: “That blogs would one day become an alternative media was never doubtful. That blogs would one day truly liberate the media and become democratic in the right sense of the word was also never doubtful.
“What was doubtful was that so-called ‘intellectuals’ in the traditional media (would) react the way they did to the new media. What was perhaps worse was that a leading educational institute sued two bloggers for airing their views on their blog.”
While we can crow on and on about the increasing influence of blogs, India is hardly a nation of bloggers. For a country of a thousand million, we have just a minuscule number of blogs. Or is it that they’re still mostly invisible?
A friend from Egypt, who has effectively used blogs to jostle for democracy in his part of the world, says his country has 500 bloggers. That, he feels, is a small number for a country that’s one-fifteenth of India in size.
Of course, there are no directories or comprehensive listings of blogs. It’s difficult to spot a good blog, unless someone emails it to you or talks about it to you. And the mainstream media seem unwilling to acknowledge the power of blogging. Unless, of course, there’s a controversy.
In January, Indibloggies
Some 1,300 people registered for the poll but only 892 actually cast their vote. India Uncut was declared the IndiBlog of the year. “India Uncut is the Best Indiblog at the Indibloggies 2005. Amit Varma, author of India Uncut and a Mumbai-based journalist, is a maverick of quick posts and anything that starts with a “C” — cows and cricket, for instance.
“He not only bagged 25 per cent of the votes cast for the category, but also has the distinction to bag 225 votes, the highest number of votes received by any blog/site in this competition (yes, we know that voting for this category was mandatory but we are talking statistics here) and emerged a clear winner. Such fun! Amit wins.”
Other winners were journalist Sonia Faleiro (best topical blog), Jabberwock by Delhi-based journalist Jai Arjun (best humanities blog), The Scientific Indian by Selvakumar (best science/technology blog), Digital Inspiration and Michael Parekh on IT (runners up in this category), DesiPundit (best directory), Mall Road by Shivam Vij (blog with the best tagline), Megha (best designed blog), Meenakshi Agarwal’s food blog Hooked on Heat (best new blog), ShutterBug by Nilesh Chaudhary (best photo blog), and Sight Screen (best group and sports blog). Guru Subramaniam, aka Lazy Geek, was adjudged the lifetime achiever.
There were also awards for DesiPundit (best group blog), Mumbai Blog (best blog in Hindi). Runners-up in Indian language solutions were Anup Shukla’s Fursatiya, Kanndave Nitya (Kannada), Kalesh’s World (Malayalam), Marathi Sahitya (Marathi), Disamaji Kahitari (Marathi), Mugamoodi (Tamil), and Amazing Telugus (Telugu), among others.
Responding to this contest, someone commented sardonically: “History... ? What history have you got dude! It’s hardly a year. It’s hilarious to see the ‘lifetime achievement award’ unless the nominees are worker bees which have a lifespan of one year.”
But there are other perspectives too on India’s blogging achievements and shortcomings. Neha Viswanathan
She said in an email interview: “While India-based blogs have been around for some time, the notion of Indian blogosphere by itself is a new one. It’s only in recent times — through the emergence of aggregators and sites like DesiPundit that the Indian Blogosphere is shaping an identity for itself.”
Ms Viswanathan argues that Indian blogs have their less attractive characteristics like “rank-competitiveness”, “high level of spite” and its sheer insular nature, by which it disassociates itself from the rest of South Asia. But she adds, “It holds great potential given that more blogs are emerging from smaller cities and in languages other than English.”
It’s difficult to spot a good blog, unless someone emails it to you or talks about it. And the mainstream media seem unwilling to acknowledge the power of blogging. Unless, of course, there’s a controversy
Ms Viswanathan argues that the growth in the number of blogs has been rather healthy in this part of the globe — even if most people seem unaware of their presence. “More people are taking to this medium which offers so much potential for expression. What is also interesting is that it in many ways is bridging the divide between resident Indians and the diaspora.
“It is encouraging debates that are otherwise ignored by the mainstream media. Issues like gender rights, cultural minorities, syncreticism, sexuality, volunteering etc. are finding articulation,” she adds.
The trend of group-blogs is also growing, which implies that there is a shift towards topical blogs, in Viswanathan’s view. “There’s also the trend of small communities and frequent ‘blogmeets’. Business houses are adopting the medium of blogs, and the recently launched CNN-IBN also has blogs by journalists and quite an open policy about comments.
“Each time there is a controversy (like IIPM, ToI vs Pradyuman Maheshwari case etc), more people who generally don’t visit blogs, become more acquainted with them and become bloggers themselves,” she adds.
She sees Indian blogs as being “very visible, and very active”. But still, in her view, these new tools of the cyber-age “need to focus on truly representing the cultural and intellectual diversity of India”.
The ToI vs Pradyuman Maheshwari case, which Ms Viswanathan referred to, was an instance where one of the closely watched media-related blogs run by a long-time journalist was shut down, following complaints from the scribe that he had been pressurized by one of the most influential papers in the country, following persistent critical reports against the daily.
Meanwhile, it can be tough to reach at the exact numbers. The owner of
Another directory
Impressive though all this might seem, there’s still a lot more road to be covered. Currently, blogging seems largely restricted to Mumbai, Chennai and expats in the US. This may seem like a unrealistic generalization, but this is true of many early blogs.
Bloggers seem to be working in isolated islands, rather than building synergies with more traditional media. This probably results in bloggers ‘talking to themselves’. Journalists, or a section of them, have taken to blogging; but are they largely attempting to impose their traditional forms of writing on the blogosphere?
With many different newspapers and websites starting their own blogging platforms, India could well be fragmenting its bloggers. Compare this with the situation elsewhere, where major players have established bloggers in their stables.
One might ask here if the wide range of issues that deserve attention are actually being discussed in Indian blogs. For once, here’s a form of the media which actually empowers. But is it being adequately deployed? Are students being encouraged to check out the power of blogs?
In a region where hierarchy and exclusion still matters, blogging is unlikely to make the headway it badly needs, unless it becomes a really inclusive movement. Is the technology community up to the task, and willing to make it happen? Only time will tell.
The writer is a Goa-based independent journalist who has written for many publications across India before opting for the online media. Email:
