{"id":610,"date":"2005-01-04T16:20:37","date_gmt":"2005-01-04T10:50:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/madmanweb.com\/2005\/01\/04\/bharteeya_blog_1\/"},"modified":"2005-01-04T16:20:37","modified_gmt":"2005-01-04T10:50:37","slug":"bharteeya_blog_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/2005\/01\/bharteeya_blog_1\/","title":{"rendered":"Bharteeya Blog Mela: The Tsunami Memorial"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Welcome<\/b>, Instapundit<\/a> readers.
\nGet yourself a cup of coffee, and set aside some time for reading all these
\nposts.)<\/p>\n

It’s Blog Mela<\/i> time again, as we present the best posts from Indians and
\nabout India\/Indians. This is also the first Blog Mela of the new year, which is
\nof course a meaningless statistic.<\/p>\n

As you would expect, this week’s reading is heavy on Japanese 101, as the
\nword "tsunami" is introduced to thousands of people who had never
\nheard it before. <\/p>\n

This past week, bloggers have supplemented the regular and mostly repetitive
\nnews coverage with their own account of the disaster, and some of these have
\nbeen more revealing than what the newspapers dished out.<\/p>\n

Sameer has an overview of what
\na tsunami is<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While we don’t typically accept whole blogs as nominations, Amit Varma’s India
\nUncut<\/a> has tons of reading, written while visiting the tsunami-affected
\nareas. <\/p>\n

(Update<\/b>: Amit is churning out reports faster than I can read them. Some outstanding writing there.)<\/p>\n

Amit’s travelling companion, Dilip D’Souza, too has plenty
\nto report<\/a>. I recommend you set aside a big chunk of time to read everything
\nthey’ve written.<\/p>\n

Kiruba<\/a>, who normally sticks to very "bloggy"
\nstuff on his site, changes gear to write long accounts of the relief efforts. He
\nalso takes photos, which is helpful.<\/p>\n

Suman Kumar<\/a>, who has suffered a bandwidth
\ntsunami on his site due to being mentioned in the New York Times (with a little
\nhelp from yours truly), is trying to do his bit with the relief. He has a tsunami
\nsite of his own<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Alpha is upset over the
\nloss of life<\/a>, but is more upset at the lack of news coverage in the USA.<\/p>\n

Patrix
\ndisagrees<\/a> with Alpha. He thinks the media is being particularly insensitive
\nin its relentless display of dead bodies and suffering people.<\/p>\n

Sandeep blames<\/a>
\nthe government’s apathy for the deaths in India. As did I<\/a> earlier. <\/p>\n

Gaurav
\ndisagrees<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Rhyncus has a
\nstrange rationalisation<\/a> of why God is needed because two tectonic plates
\ncausing the earthquake is not satisfying enough as an explanation. In part
\n2 of his article<\/a>, he says he’s got a rock which he calls God, and it’s an
\nextension of his parents. <\/p>\n

Yazad has some thoughts on depression
\ncaused by the tsunami<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ramanand thinks the media
\nis being unfair<\/a> in its criticism of cricketers for supposedly not doing
\nenough towards the relief effort because they make an easy target.<\/p>\n

And now, on to the non-tsunami stuff…<\/i><\/p>\n

After the silly MMS "scandal" where Avneesh Bajaj was arrested by
\npolice<\/a> for no fault of his, Sandeep
\nlashes out<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Anand
\nVivek draws some parallels<\/a> between Don Quixote and the Nasruddin Hodja
\nlegends in the middle-east.<\/p>\n

Manu
\nSharma says<\/a> "A human edited<\/i> product news feature is never going
\nto happen at Google" because he thinks Google is primarily a technology<\/i>
\ncompany.<\/p>\n

A lady known only as "Medium Latte" says that she prefers
\nnot to accept help<\/a> given just because she is a woman, although it’s
\ntempting.<\/p>\n

That’s it for this week, folks. I know some Hindi blog entries were
\nnominated, but I’ve left them out of this mela, not because I’m a snobbish
\nbastard, but because:<\/p>\n

1) I studied Hindi for 10 years at school, and speak the language fluently, but haven’t read any big chunks of
\nHindi since 1990. So my reading speed has reduced to a crawl.<\/p>\n

2) The thin strokes of the text coupled with the low resolution of a PC
\nmonitor made it even harder to read the entries. <\/p>\n

3) Some of the spelling mistakes (mostly misplaced matras<\/i>) didn’t help
\neither.<\/p>\n

My apologies to you all. Perhaps we should start a Hindi version of the Mela
\nsoon. Shanti<\/a>, what do you think?<\/p>\n

I’d like to remind you that my web links blog, in addition to being on this
\npage, also has a separate page of its
\nown<\/a>. Even if I don’t write longer entries, the links blog is still updated
\nalmost daily. Check back often.<\/p>\n

The next Mela will be on Nilesh.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Bharteeya Blog Mela – showcasing the best writing from the Indian blogosphere. This edition is dedicated to coverage of the tsunami that hit Asia last week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madmanweb.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}