Selective Amnesia There was a point to this. But I forgot.

One of the better descriptions of Chennai.

Chennai is a surprising city. Certainly is stuck in a certain time and mentality most of the time but once in awhile, she sticks a foot out to trip you up. And then you turn around and see she’s in leopard print thigh-highs.”

Twitter meets, Khala Ghoda festivals and my growing irrelevance.

Once upon a time, the blog world looked up to me to hold blog meets. If I didn’t deem it right, Blogger X never got to see Blogger Y’s or Blogger Z’s or Blog-city K’s face. It was my sole responsibility, my fiefdom even. What is more, other bloggers in other cities actively invited me to come to their cities so they could hold blog meets in my honour. And with me as chief guest and chief draw.
Now, with a growing blogosphere upstart young people have usurped that power from me (I’m looking at you, Mr. GAPP).
Still, I take it upon myself to publicise as many offline meets as possible.
It is in that office that this post is written.

@Gauravonomics is holding a Twitter meet for Twitter-ites from Bombay. The original idea, in his own words, was:

In Mumbai? On Twitter? Let’s meet up!

But then, he realised that not enough Indians are on twitter yet, and so the Mumbai tweetmeet adopted the funny as hell new mission statement.

Each one, Tweet one

(If you didn’t get this, you are too young. Which, going by the age of all upstart young bloggers, is true of you, dear reader)
So anyway, if you are in Mumbai, do go to the tweetmeet. And do tweet one.

Secondly, and this comes from Zigzackly saar (who is not an upstart blogger.), Khala Ghoda Arts festival has two kinds of competition going on/to be held. One is a short-film contest and the other one is a lantern making one. The idea I suppose is to combine the two – watch a short film by the light of a lantern. (Or, not.) The details for both events are here and here, respectively. Do check it out.

And, between all these kick-ass events, you have a little time, shed a tear for my total sidelining. Oh woe!

What’s the Godwin’s law equivalent for religion?

Over at the Metroblogging Chennai site, I’d written a post about my sepia-tinted visits to Marina, and the things we did there. And asked people if they had a Marina tradition as well. Two days later, that post has veered completely off track and is now debating brahmanism, hinduism, carvaka philosophy and hamam soaps. I love the blogosphere, I really do!

This reminds me, somebody quickly formulate a law, on the lines of Godwin’s, for gays, please. Every 10th comment in any thread will reference gays. Or gay-ness.

WordPress in Tamil

Check out http://ta.wordpress.com. Two familiar faces, BSubra and Icarus Prakash. Nice.

I love this:

மீண்டும் வருக‌,
ravages

[via Kingsley]

The Chennai Photo Quiz

PlaneMad here has a good thing going. I couldn’t answer quiz #3, but you might. Give it a shot.

SMS GupShup

Webaroo is a startup, with (I don’t really know how) some association with IIT Bombay. One of their services is something called SMS GupShup – a kind of twitter meets blog meets facebook service for your phone. On SMS GupShup, you can subscribe to groups and blogs and get updates delivered to your as a short text message. To quote the people behind SMSGS:

...an SMS service called GupShup that allows people to easily communicate and connect with friends.

We started GupShup with the idea of letting people be in touch with each other – and the medium we chose was SMS. GupShup allows you to create a group of your own and start “talking” to them. People can also subscribe through SMS (akin to RSS feeds). All the posts that you make are kept public by default – though you can chose to make it private (in which case only you can invite users).

Considering many users in India may not have access to the internet all the while, we first implemented the whole idea by SMS. We are soon coming up with a web based interface to enable Gupshup.

So, after a bit of back-and-forth-ing on the issue and after a few dozen very persuasive mails from Kirti, I signed up for SMS GupShup. Now, in addition to receiving all my trash via the blog, RSS, my mails and stuff, you can also get it on your phone. All you need to do is go to SelectivAmnesia group on SMS GupShup, and follow the instructions there. Or, you could text “JOIN SelectivAmnesia” to 567673434 and have all my brilliant writing delivered to you.

The Photo collective, BarCamp Bangalore 5

People throw up photos for review by the audience. Good idea. Only, um, throw-back to old flickr groups I admin-ned/were a big part of.

Some dude here giving random, totally clueless comments. Just like on flickr. Wow!

barcampbangalore5