Bharteeya Blog MelaThis has been the first ever Blog-Mela hosted by Null Pointer, and though the number of nominations haven’t been spectacular, they haven’t been discouraging either. Now that I hosted it I can empathise how difficult it is to select a handful of entries from a maze of good posts. My thanks to Melodrama, Ravages, Aadisht, Aashish and someone who would remain nameless, for the nice nominations. So fellow bloggers (or IndiBloggers, as they say now a days), countrymen, Indians lend me your attention. I present to you the Dash-ratnas of the 39th Bharteeya Blog mela. Enjoy!

“I found out about his aversion to other people’s nails when we were having machchi baath at my favorite Bengali-Israeli-Japanese eatery. I was just remarking how long my nails had gotten and how they need chopping, and S runs to the bathroom! Of course, he always makes it a point to find out where the bathroom is whenever we go to a new place.“, this and more in a hilarious parody on Indian Blogger’s nail cutting frenzy, at this post of the one and only, Kingsley.

In his lotus-notes from Nairobi, Ashok Hariharan presents this interesting anecdote on his encounters with Law Enforcement guys. Amazing parallel between the Kenyan “Comatose Cop” and our Pandu hawaldar! Only our thullas are more straight-forward to pounce for your wallet at the first go.

A new blogger on my radar, Aadisht has a lengthy post that explains why the American Chocolate is “crappy”, well..no it actually highlights the “third-world mentality”, err.. its a review of Bill Bryson’s book, or is it..oh I am so hopelessly (yawn) dumb at reading long posts. If you happen to read it here, in entirety i.e, do mail me a summary, will you? (Hey Aadisht, do forgive the punn, it was all in funn.) Now to some serious stuff, so throw that grin off your face, you may now twitch your eyebrows a little, take a deep breath and tune your mood, ok now your are ready,

A proud Bihari that he is, Ranjan is aggrieved that provincial affiliation instead of merit is being considered to judge his community. In his post titled “See my shoes? Want to be in them?” Ranjan remarks on the recent spats in Assam and Mumbai and hopes that the contempt in Bihari jokes does not become a stereotype. On the same subject, Prasenjeet thinks that the onus falls on the community as according to him, “to this day, the people of Bihar haven’t risen against the democratically elected tyrants who have denied them entry into the 21st century”.

Aashish performs a psephological postmortem of the recent Assembly elections and opines that despite the technological advances it has seen, the Indian electoral process will remain “complicated” and “infinitely fascinating”. On a similar note Chakra presents the good, the bad (and not the ugly) of something that has made his life “so interesting”.

Om Malik has an interesting post on his chat with venture capitalist Jacques F. Vallee. Contrary to the growing view that the Blogging will bite the dust, a point I wrote on recently, Jacques believes that being an extension of the computer conferencing concept, weblogs will save the Internet.

Outsourcing is a sensitive issue for US techies and Arnab is understandably shaken by the use of phrase “does not use overseas labor” by the owners of waypath project. While a company might be based at US and there is nothing wrong in being proud of that, keeping in mind that funding and clients for many such projects do not come from US alone, it makes business sense to mind one’s language, seems to be his point.

Lastly, one of my own posts, concludes that even after 19 years, the ground realities of the Gas victims at Bhopal have not changed at all, as the settlement money, thanks to the bureaucratic red tape, is being pocketed by the middlemen.

Thanks Madhoo for giving me the opportunity to host the mela. Watch out for the announcement about the next mela on her blog!