About the Author

Thansk for visiting my bio page. I am Debashish Chakrabarty, a Software PM based at Pune, and an occasional blogger and podcaster. I have been on the Internet since the “geocities” days but opened my Blogger account in October 2002. I have an English blog Null Pointer (that changed many homes, from Rediff blogs to JRoller to my own hosted wordpress) and a Hindi one NuktaChini, though most of my blogging has now been replaced by micro-blogging at my Twitter account.

Me, myself!I have been a DMOZ editor (that used to be quite prestigious at the time), created the first Hindi blog-aggregator Chittha Vishwa that also tracked advances in Indic Blogging, launched the first desi blog-awards called The Indibloggies and keep a sharp eye on Indic-blogging. I used to evangelize the usage of Hindi and Indian languages on the Internet and was instrumental in creation of Sarvagya, a wiki aimed at providing primers and advanced tips for people interested in using Hindi (and other Unicode supported Indic languages) on the internet.

I also used to moderate “Chitthakar”, a popular mailing list of Hindi bloggers and have been involved in initiatives like Buno Kahani (a group blog where various authors, literally, weaved a story) and Anugunj (a web event hosted in turn by Hindi bloggers – where various bloggers wrote on a given topic). He occasionally used to contribute to the Hindi Wikipedia (till it was taken over by fanatics).

I published Nirantar, hyped to be the world’s first Hindi blogzine and another Hindi webzine Samayiki, both seldom updated now. I was also the initiator & editor of the Hindi Lingua Project of Global Voices Online, a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

During those good days I had been contributing towards localization of tools & software. Some of the projects I contributed to, include WordPress, Gregarious, Pebble, IndicJoomla, IJoomla, Scuttle, Snap Shots, Blog Bar and Splitweet.

All those activities have now taken a back seat, the daily grind of bread & butter has taken its tool. Although I still long to revive my Hindi Podcast show, may be some day I will. I was able to revive my Hindi podcast finally in 2021 although in a new avatar, with a career based podcast “Sopaan“.


My websites:

The Indibloggies was an annual blog-award clique for Indian Blogs. Indibloggies hosted 5 editions between 2003-2008 and became quite popular and is still regarded as prestigious by the winners.

Aggregates latest headlines from various online Hindi news feeds such as BBC Hindi, Dainik Bhaskar, Navabharat Times, MSN Hindi, Dainik Jagaran, Deutsche Welle etc.

A Hindi Podcast Magazine that got nominated for the TATA NEN Hottest startup awards in 2008. StartupDunia also interviewed me. We published 9 episodes with about 25 reports over a year. The podcast was revived in 2021 with a career podcast Sopaan.

Chittha Vishwa was the first ever Hindi blog aggregator with resources such as Blog stats, Blogger Profiles, Trivia and Bookmarks (defunct as MyJavaServer shut down its free services).

Nirantar : World’s first Hindi blogzine, covered socio-economic issues, literature and technology. It published 11 editions between March 2005 to July 2008. Now archived.

Samayiki: Hindi Web magazine that was published in a blog format. Seldom updated.

Bangla Blog Primer : One of the first tutorials on the web that helped people start blogging in their mother tongue using Unicode in a jiffy.

Buno Kahani (Hindi for “weave a story”) was a unique attempt of collaborative story writing by a group of Hindi bloggers where they, literally, weave a story. About 6 stories were written this way, each by different authors who take the story forward.

I created Aavaran in 2005 on Google’s Blogspot to enable Hindi bloggers get ready-to-use Hindi Blogger templates (yes, Blogger didn’t support i18n in those days). The idea was also to adapt popular themes of other blogwares like WordPress to Blogger platform.

Press mentions:


More Photos (at Flickr)