Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Bloggers can be nailed for their views

Today a news item featured in the TOI which mentioned about the case of a 19 year old blogger against whom a case was filed by a political party. His mistake: he started a group against that party and lots of people posted their hatred filled thoughts under that group. Though this guy had moved the supreme court to quash the criminal proceedings against him, but it didn't work in his favor as the honourable court upheld the proceedings against him.
I am sure this is going to be an debatable event in the blogging community, more so because we Indian's believe it to be our fundamental right to express our thoughts freely and blogging being one of the mediums to do so. Already i could see many sympathizers posting their comments on the TOI website. Whatever be the ulitmate ruling in this case it would be a path breaking one and would surely impact the blogging community in a considerable way.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Polarization Of News

Its quite surprising to see the extent to which news channels polarize the news depending on the region where this news is read. One of the best examples of this being " Slum dog Millionaire" the most talked about movie in the recent times. Today when Slum dog bagged 8 Oscars out of the 10 nominations it had received, i decided to check on two news websites just to see how they put across this news.

BBC news: Stated the headlines as "British Movie Slum dog Millionaire" sweeps the
Oscars.

On the Other hand IBN Live puts it across as " India based movie " slum dog bags 8 Oscars. Though neither of the news items are wrong as slum dog is an India based movie directed and produced by British citizens, but then the impact that the two news items leaves on the mind of the readers are quite different.

Say for e.g.: an Indian would be more happy to read the IBN live version of the story and for a British BBC's news might sound music to his ears.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Traveogue: Elliot's Beach

After spending my last weekend in Kerala, this time I decided to explore chennai. Subsequent to a awesome chicken curry that we (me and my room mate) prepared we went to the Beasant Nagar Beach also called as the Elliot's Beach. This is supposed to be among the more cleaner beaches of chennai. 

From Porur we got an A/C bus ( one of the few in chennai) quite a comfortable journey to Saidapet with just two stops in between. I wish there were more such buses in chennai. From Saidapet it took us another 20 odd mins to reach Beasant Nagar beach. To my surprise as my friends had told me it was quiet a clean beach. Since we were not carrying any spare clothes we didn't actually venture into the sea, rather enjoyed the cool breeze from the shore. Considering that it was a weekend the place was quite crowded.  

To my surprise lots of well known brand’s retail outlets are there  around Elliot’s beach. Infact I managed to have my first vada pav in 4 months from a small shop out here, though it didn’t match the taste of a typical Mumbaiya vada pav, but then considering the fact that I was having this vada pav in one of the most conservative cities of southern India gave me immense pleasure. 

Out an out it was a nice weekend cooked a delicious meal and visited a nice place, hopefully the subsequent weekends would as well be equally good. By the way the next weekend we are supposed to go to ECR road, for a Go-karting competition .. J