Daily Blague

Every once in a while, you have to dream up a Google search and see where it takes you. There's nothing, for the moment, that you need to find out; or perhaps you might say that you need to find something that you didn't know about. My cerebral randomizer came up with "Indian blogs."

¶ I started with Bombay blogs, which didn't yield much of anything, at least not on the first screen. Through a link at the bottom, though, I came across this interesting, literate posting about 'Peters' - Indians who are a bit more anglicized than the people they hang out with. It's apparently Madras slang. (There is also a very pungent remark toward the end of the post about being reminded of The Pianist.) The blogs on the HT Sulekha site seem to lack some basic navigational tools, and comments are posted like entries, in descending order. Only members can comment.

¶ Dehli turned out to be a more profitable destination. (Perhaps I ought to have Googled Mumbai.) In no time at all, I was reading the reflections of a young accountant keeping a journal of her reactions to men and to movies, in a style somewhat more carefully literate than is common in such productions here, but studded throughout - duh - with Hindi. That's what I take it to be, anyway. The result is spicy - as to style, not content. Life, as it goes... has a modest but intriguing blog roster, too, and soon I came across Confusing Musings, where the references, not the grammar, reminded me even more forcefully that these blogs are written in a second language.

¶ I don't really know where Simla took me geographically, but it did introduce a serious current-affairs site, Vichaar.org. As this excerpt shows, critical thinking works just as well in India as it does here.

A lot of discussions and debates can occur about whether the tsunami toll in India could have been minimized - but there is one fact that is staring the government in its face - two hours elapsed between the Indonesian quake and the tsunamis that hit southern India, when no action was taken by the Indian Government.

What if it were a nuclear strike ? If the Indian government cannot adequately detect major geological events and safeguard our population with a two hour warning window, what chance do we have of preventing unnecessary casualties if the window is even lesser?

¶ And presently I was back home. Varnam, a site about Indian history, is run by an insourced software engineer currently living in California. That's where I got the link to the photograph of Alampur Temple, above.