Aditya Mhatre and Abhishek Kumar, co-producers of The Indicast, are upbeat about the initiative as well as the tie-up. “There are lots of podcasts being done purely in French, Spanish etc, but there has been none in an Indian language, so it’s a great idea to produce a Hindi-centric podzine. Podbharti fills in a huge gap.”, said Aditya.

The idea of Podbharti took quite a long time to take shape. The Hindi blogosphere had been playing around with the idea since long, I am glad that the dream could take a shape now. Podbharti is a tribute to the growing strength of Indian languages on the net, bringing a podcast in your own language not only gives a sense of empowerment but also opens avenues for the spread of the language. "Of late Hindi blogging has started getting the much needed attention from the mainstream media. Through Podbharti we hope to add another dimension to the phenomenon and tell the world about this formidable force.", told Shashi.

Podcasting, seen as a corollary to Blogging, is an emerging trend in India, now slowly going mainstream. Podcast, a portmanteau of the phrase "Playable on Demand" (POD) and broadcast is not alien to Indians online, thanks to the increasing popularity and affordability of audio gadgets and portable media players. Growing number of India centric podcasts like IndiaTech and advent of community events like Podworks are testimony to the growing prowess.

It’s a fact that there are only a handful of quality Indian Podcasters around and they are all in English. Podbharti, as its tagline ‘Apni boli, Apni baat” goes, will be fresh breeze bringing shows in the language most of us Indians think in. Our Hindi would be simple but not flawed, good Hindi is so much better for the eardrums!

“We are aware that bandwidth is still an issue and our aim is to reach an audience that may not have the best hardware available to listen to us, therefore we will strive towards crisp programming with minimal audio file sizes, while not compromising with the quality and presentation style.”, said Shashi Singh.

Podbharti has a very distinct style of programming, the language is suave but simple and the show packaging is very professional. Initial commenters at the Podbharti website, who heard the first podcast, appreciated the radio-like quality and the professionalism. “I was really impressed with the voice and content quality. I remember that we had to scrap our first episode because the quality wasn't really that good. So Podbharti has started out really well”, Aditya told.

In its debut episode, Podbharti has presented a retrospective talk on Hindi blogging completing 4 years, where popular Hindi blogger Anup Shukla presents a bird’s eye view of the happenings in the blogosphere that has grown almost 25 times its size in 2003. Next, Ravi Ratlami, dedicated Hindi blogger and Technology enthusiast, presents a nipping primer on the Hindi Transliteration tool introduced recently by Google in its Blogger.com service. Last but not the least; Shashi Singh presents an interesting report, with quotes from the NDTV bloggers, on the recent Mohalla Controversy in the Hindi blogdom where discussions on communalism took an ugly turn adding bitterness to the whole debate. In the second episode, a Mother’s Day special, Shashi has a touching story on the children born in the redilight area of Pune.

The episodes at Podbharti could be downloaded as an MP3 file or listened to online at http://www.podbharti.com using the online players. The site also provides syndication feed enabling users to subscribe through podcatchers and listen to the podcasts at leisure.

Podbharti.com has ambitious plans charted out for its future programming. Both Shashi and me have been avid Hindi bloggers and being associated with several initiatives such as Hindi portal Lokmanch and Hindi Blogzine Nirantar respectively, we (probably) know what a Hindi net user expects. Podbharti will also serve as a platform for the Hindi net users to shout out to the netizens all over and would hopefully pave the way for increased use of Indian languages on the Internet.

For millions of net users who were longing for such content, a Hindi podcast would surely be music to the ears. So, as they say in the radio world, “Sunte rahiye, Podbharti”.

Desipundit is turning one. Congratulations guys! It has been a fabulous year for you people and I am happy to see Desipundit graduate from a link blog to a movement. The welcome addition of links to Indicblogs has given it a wholesome flavor. I salute the dedicated team for relentlessly pointing to the best of the Indiblogdom. What Indibloggies does once in a year, you guys do on a daily basis.

Patrix recently asked me to pen my thoughts on the scene and I must say that I am honoured. I am not good at writing longer posts and the following are a collection of jottings spread over several days, so dear readers do bear with me if you find a lack of coherence or flow.

On hindsight my own personal blog journey seems pretty insignificant to me. My English blog Null Pointer, with which my blog journey started, by virtue of it being techie in nature and being hosted on JRoller, a den for technology bloggers, didn’t ever earn much notice from desi readers. So being a timid blogger that I am, I get more casual visitors than regular ones, the latter are probably being those who rely on the feed. My Hindi blog Nuktachini probably gets better attention.

Over these years I can say that I gained a lot from blogging. Whether actually blogging or not I was always happy to be part of the activities that spun around it. It gave me opportunity to be associated with the growing Indicblogging phenomenon, explore various CMS and blogwares, learn and try new technology and getting involved in Hindi localization. I am happy that Indibloggies was an effort that was respected yet I think the majority of readers may not be aware that the Indicbloging scenario has had enormous growth too. Having seen the Hindi blogging scenario growing from strength to strengths over the last 2 years, my belief about the growth of blogging in Indian languages has been always strong. Recall that the category for Indic blogging was added to Indibloggies back in 2004, Abo-hawa was a column at Nirantar that kept tab on the growth and Chittha Vishwa still sports a pie indicating the Indicblog share apart from having blog aggregators for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and Gujarati blogs. With the meteoric growth in Indic blog count and with Google saying so now, that belief has been fortified.

I think that the journey of Indiblogdom has been significant if you see the blogs transition from mere personal journals to podiums contemplating on serious issues. There has been a spate of “Pundit blogs” since then, though even today majority of blogs simply postmortem news from the Main Stream Media (MSM). The paradigm that “content is supreme” still holds true; while bloggers like Rajesh Jain have been consistently blogging on technology others like Anita Bora also get good readership despite of her blog being chiefly a “personal journal”, so frankly one cannot say what works and what doesn’t, suffice to say that there is an audience for each kind of content.

Over the years Indian blogs also caught the fancy of the MSM, probably because many journalists recognized it as a potent medium for publishing their offbeat reports. Post IIPM furore I think, MSM in India also realized the “collective power” of, what the BBC calls, “army of irregulars”. Today many print publications and TV Channels have started vying for that element of conversation that had made blogs popular. It is therefore not too difficult to guess where the progressive news channels got the idea of “citizen journalism” from.

I think that this whole MSM v/s blogs debate is all bulls**t. Will Blogs replace MSM? Did FM Radio replace TV? Blogs and MSM can only compliment each other. Probably 60% of the blogs discuss topics brought forward in MSM, off late MSM, especially the online editions have started attributing Blogs as a major source of opinion. Peter griffin said it correctly, “Blogs will keep the MSM honest”, point out their flaws, make them more responsible, make them double check their facts and learn not to ignore seemingly insignificant issues. I can quote the recent case of The Acorn pointing out a historical flaw in Bill Clinton’s foreword to a book, a valid point that was augmented by a MSM journo and that led to the publisher apologize for the error. This is an apt example of how Blogs and MSM would co-exist and actually augment each other.

The advantage of Blogs is the collective wisdom that emerges, the 360 degrees perspective that they provide to an issue. Blogs would certainly help MSM take a true non-partisan approach, each news article can thus become a mini-forum voicing all concerns and bringing all facts to light. Moreover, the subjectivity of the view helps you get a bird’s eye view. The prudent can traverse the pheromone trail and could probably reach a better decision.

How has been the journey in Hindi blogdom? Alok, the “pitru-purush” of Hindi blogging, was the one who started the movement and even coined the term “Chittha” for blog. I “think” in Hindi and though I had written for Hindi print publication before I was bit hesitant to start as I was non-committal on the time it would need. So I prompted a colleague at Webdunia to start one. It was so difficult to hold myself after that and “Nuktachini” was born soon after. It was as if people were just waiting. Today we are a 225+ strong community; the growth is slow but steady.

I am fortunate that I just happened to be there, at the moment when Hindi blogging triggered-off. I was fortunate to be part of a group of like-minded people who were frenzied enough to bring Hindi to foray and do something new. Blogging was the common passion; this is what made it sticky.

I have high regards for Pankaj who launched Akshargram the first group blog of Hindi blogdom and Sarvagya our community wiki. People like Jitendra helped forge this community, the quality writing from people like Anup, Ravi, Atul, Sunil and so many others provided credibility. Since then many other ventures like Chitthakar, Anugunj, Nirantar, Buno-kahani, Blognaad and Narad came through; some survived some didn’t but I am sure the community was strengthened in the process. The baton of this passion has passed many hands since then, the knowledge base that we have created hopefully helped lot many people to create their own blogs.

I had been asked whether the regional language blogs can compete with Indian blogs in English. Honestly, I don’t see any element of competition here. With so many dialects we have, blogging in these languages was a natural course Indiblogging could have taken. Each has it own space to operate. The challenges with blogging in Indian languages are more technological in nature. Indian languages are not viable options for the blog-wares; there is still none with a built-in Unicode Indic-editor. A majority of computers in India still run on Win-98 that has poor support for Unicode, Internet Café owners despise Win-XP as it is resource intensive and warrants hardware upgrades. The whole publishing process, the simplicity of which made Blogging popular, becomes much tedious for Indic languages.

A corollary to the growth in Indicblogging is the growth in use of Indian languages over the Internet. The ubiquity of Unicode on Indicblogs has inspired websites in Indian languages hitherto using proprietary or TTF fonts to switch to Unicode. But Unicode is yet to find universal acceptance and it is here that tools such as Padma (extension for browsers such as Firefox) hold great value. Padma facilitates reading sites using popular formats by transforming the text to Unicode on the fly. Days are not far-off when search engines like Google would adopt similar technology to index numerous such Indian websites that have still not converted to Unicode.

No wonder there are many who foresee a bright future for Indic blogging. Many bloggers for example in Hindi started experimenting with blogs as a medium of showcasing their writings, their poems and stories. Literature is a great tool to popularize the language. Blogs in South Indian languages have already made it big, during Indibloggies I was pleasantly surprised to get a mail from a farmer in Kerala who has been blogging in Malayalam, despite being ignorant about the technical nitty gritty. So I think technological barriers notwithstanding the love for language would surely see the number of Indic blogs swell.

I am not sure if Blogging has got a long future, but it sure set alight many movements all along. Internet is more vibrant, news more vivid and opinions in galore. Even so blogging in India is an urban spectacle; the skew is so prominent, views portrayed don’t yet represent the real India. Indian corporate is still to recognize this phenomenon and employers still to devise blogging policy for their employees. Will there be a day when the blog post of a farmer written in Marathi and raising concerns on the agricultural policy of the state government echo in the corridors of Mantralaya? Amen to that.

I recently moved to my own domain and after migrating the blog to WordPress (read this post to know how I managed to do that) I simply dropped a note here at JRoller to let know my readers who still come here. For the email subscribers I simply changed the feed URL. Today it struck me that some of you also read me through newsreaders and you guys would probably never know unless I tell you through the feed about the migration, so this is the last post at JRoller.

Null Pointer now resides at http://nullpointer.debashish.com. Bloglines subscribers can click here to subscribe to the feed. For others, the blog has a RSS as well as an Atom Feed, please subscribe to the one you like. My hindi blog NuktaChini may be read here.

Thanks and see you at my new home.

A thing that prevents me from blogging regularly is absence of net connectivity at home. Then the recent happenings at the personal front are to be blamed too. Blogging at work is definitely awkward, your colleagues keep staring at your monitor and are not content to ask “Yeh kya hai?”; preparing a post especially in Hindi (and I am very poor at punching Hindi on Takhti) seems more heinous than looking a porno pop-up that shockingly appeared from an innocent looking site. During the day I must have been thinking at least a dozen times to blog about this and blog about that, but I am too lazy to jot it down immediately. Then it slips from your mind and poof, the slate is clean again. Now, I never have been in the habit of posting a link with a short comment, an advice given in the article that I just can’t follow, most of my posts are lengthy, some are notoriously so.

So I don’t think I (and the readers) have much choice really except that I don’t care a damn about those staring eyeballs and don’t feel ashamed in jotting a short link post instead of waiting to post longer ones and then not posting at all.

This is what I understood of the whole episode:

• A magazine publisher Rashmi Bansal also happens to run a blog called “Youth Curry”. Her publication JAM, a youth magazine, runs an investigative story on IIPM. They had fathomed lot of unknown facts,
  but they choose not to publish the IIPM's version.
• Another blogger Gaurav links to this story
• Gaurav gets a legal notice over email which he does not take very seriously (I am unable to get this part though, shouldn't this notice have been slapped on the JAM magazine?)
• This ignites the IIPM rage in the blogdom and every blogger worth his salt, has a post condemning IIPM in a bid to uphold the “freedom of speech”. A lot many so-called fake blogs also mushroom that bloat in favour of the institute.
• In a strange turn of events, IBM is arm-twisted by IIPM, one of its clients, to take action against Gaurav. Gaurav listens to his inner voice and decides to resign without any instigation from IBM.

In all this, the bad part have been the “fake blogs” who actually made the matter worse and indeed the IIPM administrative staff that did not deem it fit to talk to the bloggers directly. Still I do not find any version of IIPM anywhere and that is probably the worst part of this whole episode. If there is an aspect of the Mediaah story, there is always another point of view, and both deserve a mention. When things take this proportion, and when people have been writing to Instapundit and Newspapers for support, it would have been better to write to Arindam and IIPM asking for their version. I think even Gaurav realized that the huge outrage against the institution might very well hurt the career prospects of the students there.

The point that has been unarguably been proven here is that a line needs to be drawn between blogging and journalism. Though the conviction has been strengthened by entry of the “journalism dropouts”, as someone pointed out recently, blogging IMHO is not journalism, it cannot be, because being run by individuals the facts are not seldom verified, nobody checks your copy, and as an author you're mostly forgiven for behaving irresponsibly, or shall I say unethically. When others link to you, they become part of the same vicious circle.

IMHO for an employed blogger, for whom blogging is not a profession, it is all the more necessary to think twice before writing anything and ascertain before clicking the publish button that the matter does not conflict with the interests or IPR of their employer. While it was very dignified for Gaurav to quit IBM but I think he should have been careful because he had to pay a heavy price and the entire episode may have tarnished IBM's image too. This is also high time that the employers decide on formulating a clear blogging policy for their employees, the lack of any such policy only adds to the confusion to the extent to which one could write on his blog.

I just wish the blogdom sheds this attitude of turning any such episode to “David vs Goliath” proportions, I could empathise with fellow bloggers, the kick they are getting on being “instapundited” and all, but I wait for the day when we could really claim to be non-partisan and ethical in what we all blog.

Update [17 Oct]: When I did not get many comments on this post I wasn't startled, for my post was marked at Desipundit as a “pro-post”. And I wondered if I am the only one who thought “against the current”. However, in the crowd of posts I did not notice that few others had expressed views simiar to mine. Savor these:

• Fools paradise
• Of Herds
• David and Goliath – a virtual parable

Hearty wishes son for a long, healthy and happy life. We love you very much!

Hi, I fully appreciate what you feel like. I am extremely sorry for that. The site was not designed by me and was done by one of the summer trainee working for me. I had some simple HTML pages for my website which I have hosted few years back under my domain name when it use to be free by free domains. I will immediately ask him to remove the site at Lycos. In fact Lycos was just the testing site, the final site is hosted on geocities. I am not offering any excuse for the mistake I have been a part of. Currently I am in Colombo for 10 days on a business trip, should I request you to please give me some time so that I can also change my site at geocities, which is also I assume is based on your site. Apologies once again, awaiting your kind reply.

I don't know whether the LTTE took him since, as hostage or something, I see his mail today while doing a routine clean-up of my Gmail inbox and just out of curiosity click the link and lo, the site is still there, with no hints of correction. Funny part is, some of the links (for example, the link to “My Writings”) still point to my web page. I guess, the words guilt and repentance are not in the dictionary of this guy, who apparently has a blog too. The “owner of 3 houses” still has to resort to stealing when it comes to expressing, shame on you Dheeraj Rathi!