Indie Blogs - Part 1

I love blogs and spend a significant time every week reading blogs. Most of the blogs I read are technical . After I started my blog, I had some fun chat with my friends about my blog and other stuff. After some hesitation one of my friend asked "why you Indians always write about technical things ?". We had a good laugh over it and I gave a vague answer that people write on all topics.

After coming home , I was curious about blogging scenario in India. I know we are big shots in IT but what about blogging ? Are we so shy that we don’t write much or are we monochromatic that we write about some fixed set of (safe) topics ? Of course these are not research questions but I was curious of the answers. Obviously, I am not interested in blogs of big guys – Amitabh   or Aamir Khan . I have nothing against them but I was mostly interested in every day guy’s blogs.

One of the things I felt which would trouble a newbie indie blogger is the language issue. India has so many languages and not many blogging platforms support all the languages. Heck, even most popular operating systems don’t support all the languages. So if you want to have a blog in some less popular languages (I refrain from giving a name ) you will face lot of hurdles – lack of support with blogging tools, platforms, not much support from search engines and a potentially much restricted audience.

For this post, I will use the term Indie blog to refer to blog written by an Indian guy/girl though not necessarily residing in India. That was a vague definition but this word seems to be catching on. So this post is an attempt to take a peek at Indie Blogs.

First in terms of blogging platforms , most popular indie blogs seems to be hosted on either WordPress or Blogspot. No surprises there. But there are some home grown blogging sites like BigAdda  or Bharat Student. They are not as mature as WordPress or Blogspot. These sites try to be primarily a portal or a social networking site. Blogging mostly seems to be an after thought.

Next I tried to find some good blog directories for indie blogs. I liked this site  but others were not much impressive. Desipundit  seems to be popular and it was good too. Its contributors page was striking as many of its contributors are actually out of India  but still connect back. Cool !

I found that a huge number of bloggers write in english – well, that is in Indian english. Some even transliterate their blogs in English. I felt that technique was quite effective as it allowed them to jump between their primary language (say tamil) to deliver punch lines and english easily. There were quite some blogs which were primarily written in Indian languages with Indian scripts. Nice ! But I guess most people will have trouble viewing them .

I have been following some indie blogs for some time. Some of them were very good and I have become a regular follower and some were boring and I have stopped following. There were also lot many blogs that were very good but were not continued – perhaps the main author got caught up with life

As expected the blog topics cover the whole spectrum – politics, philosophy, literature , technology . I even found some good fun blogs. I will try to introduce some of my favorite blogs in this series.

The following are some of my favorite (primarily) fun blogs . (In no order).

1. Doing Jalsa and Showing Jilpa
This is probably one of the most famous indie blogs. Has a lot of humorous posts. Probably one his most popular post was his excellent critique on Mile Sur Mera Tumhara song in the post Mile Sur Mera Tomorrow? Fail . Love it !

2. Autobiography of an ordinary man
Another excellent blog. Written by Shenoy. The posts have posts with unique sense of humor and touch that has been dubbed as shenoyism .

3. Gilmananda
This is another real fun but rarely updated blog. Some of his posts made me remember the fun events during my college life. It is written in taminglish and the posts contain lot of tamil dialogs. If you are going to read this blog, I would suggest taking a look at his archives. Most of the posts are serial and rely on some characters/events from previous posts.

4. Lightning Strikes Everyday
This is another nice blog with posts on variety of topics. I liked the recent post on VTV .

5. Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind
Another good blog with some great acerbic posts.

6. Son Of Bosey
Another interesting blog. Has some nice Onionesque posts spoofing on latest news.

7. Dubukku- The Think Tank
A blog written primarily in Tamil. Has lot of humorous posts.

8. Dappan Koothu
A blog talking on variety of topics (a lot on movies !) . Has lot of interesting posts.

Have fun with these Indie blogs !!

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