World's first Hindi blogzine

I feel elated in presenting Nirantar, World's first Hindi blogzine. It has been the result of untiring efforts of so many Hindi bloggers, and prominently that of Pankaj Narula, Jitendra Chaudhary, Anup Shukla, Ravishankar Shrivastava, Atul Arora and Raman Kaul but I must say that the fire kindled in the Hindi blogging community for strengthening it provided the much needed shot in the arm. I must place on records my special appreciation for Pankaj, who very patiently handled the Drupal and Civic Space installations and hacks and hosted the zine on his website.

The motivation behind the zine is manifold: consolidating the creative talent of Hindi blogdom under one hood; perhaps convincing others to take up blogging in Hindi (Isn't it strange that a language spoken by 400 million people and understood by far greater number of people has only 40 odd persons blogging in the language?); showcase the language blogging scenario in general and Hindi blogging in particular and above all providing a wholesome read on a plethora of topics concerning our nation and Indian blogging apart from other for the outside world.

In the inaugural issue of Nirantar, you may read;

• Best Indiblog winner Atanu Dey's Interview with Nitin Pai
• Book Excerpt in Hindi  from Rebecca Blood's book "The Weblog Handbook". I must thank her, not only to allow us publish this excerpt, but also to convince her publishers to donate Nirantar 4 copies of her book which we would award at forthcoming competitions at Nirantar.
• Dina Mehta's analytical take on the Indiblogging scenario, which also happens to be the Cover story.
• A tutorial on using Firefox

Apart from this there is whole lot of other stuff slated to become regular columns in the zine Photo feature, a competition, Jokes, Blogger profiles, Poll, Links to interesting stories, News roundup, Poems and Short stories, Quotable quotes, Best Posts handpicked by the editors. You are just a click away from this, and a lot more stuff.

If you love Hindi, you sure gonna fall in love with Nirantar! I look forward to your suggestions and criticism :)

Update: Another first 'feather' gets added to Hindi blogging's cap, the World's first Hindi Blog Radio "Blognaad" launched by Jitendra.

Blog strolling - 2

• Java's friendly mascot Duke has got a blog too.
• Indic threads has a 3 part skinny on J2SE 5.0
• Bus Service to Pakistan. Oh no not again! I am sick and tired of these gimmicks.
• "some countries"..so sweet Patil saheb! India ki diplomacy da jawab nahin!

Scratching the wounds

Visibly annoyed with its aging dinosaurs and amidst the aspiration scuffles taking its toll in the party, BJP's old turk Govind Govindacharya is scratching the wounds again. The Babri mosque demolition was the "failure of the saffron leadership..to gauge the mood of the karsevaks...a glaring example of contradiction between cadre-based and mass-based politics", says the expat.

An occupying contradiction is entailed in Maloy Krishna Dhar's book. Maloy, a former IB Joint Director, does not agree that the incident was a spontaneous misadventure of the mob. He maintains that it was engineered months in advance by top leaders of RSS, BJP and VHP, a choreographed pralaya nritya with the vandalism handled by the Shiv Sena while Sangh leaders added fuel with their "irresponsible rhetoric". Another occupying observation made by the author is about the late Prime Minister P.V.Narsimha Rao's piteous handling of the issue, who, according to the author, "had regained some jest for life and had started dreaming of short-circuiting the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty."