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from Rediff blogs to JRoller to my own hosted wordpress) and a Hindi one NuktaChini, though most of my blogging has now been replaced by micro-blogging at my Twitter account.
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:
- Has an Indian blog touched you lately? : Indibloggies finds a mention in this Economic times article. [12 Dec 2005]
- I BLOG, so I am! : Indibloggies gets another mention in Deccan Herald. [15 Jan 2006]
- Shabdanjali: Hindi zine : Interviewed by Anup Shukla, the Hindi blogging doyen, at Shabdanjali magazine (in Hindi).
- Blog Bytes : Quoted in an Asian Age article [12 Mar 2006]
- Battle of the blog : “The Indibloggies Awards…is an idea that clicked for sure” says Anuradha Mane in this Pune city supplement of Indian Express. [10 Feb 2007]
- Blogging Glory : A Brand Reporter Story on the Indibloggies [1 Mar 2007]
- Is there money in them? : A Brand Reporter Story on possibilities of Blog monetization [16 Apr 2007]
- Speaking out : A Dataquest article about blogging in Indian languages. [Web URL] [10 May 2007]
- The Write way to earn : Quoted in a Money Today article [17 May 2007]
- Vernacular bloggers carve a niche on Net : Quoted in an article on Mail Today [9 Feb 2008]
- Ideas that change lives eye Tata Awards A report on Podbharti.com being nominated for the TATA NEN Startup Awards in 2008 : DNA Pune [01 Nov 2008]
- “Hindi crosswords, Tamil stock market analysis, bloggers doing it all”: a TOI story by Shreya Roy Chowdhury on Indic blogging that appeared in press almost after a year. [26 Mar 2010]
- Blogging takes a backseat in tweeting times: Quoted in a DNA Story by Divya Mangwani. [04 Mar 2011]
