Nirantar is a Hindi meaning 'Persistent'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.