yazadjal.com

The Bombay Bloggers Meet is on today.
4 pm
Café Coffee Day
Chowpatty
(nearest railway station: Charni Road)
See you there!

One of the many basic beliefs in libertarianism is the belief of total ownership of one’s self, body and soul. And since many empiricists doubt the existence of the latter, for legal purposes, one can say that libertarianism often boils down to two simple axioms – You own yourself totally. Other people are not your property.

The Harvard Business School newsletter Working Knowledge has an article on Dr. Devi Shetty’s Narayana Hrudalaya.

It’s kind of a Robin Hood hospital. When you walk in with a heart ailment, if you can pay, you pay; if you can’t pay, you get treated for free. It doesn’t matter what your heart ailment is. Its operating […]

I’ve always found it nice to see people I know start blogs. And when they are editors of a youth magazine (with a sharp eye for observation), I know I’m in for a treat. Rashmi Bansal of Jam Magazine has started a blog called Youth Curry where she’d like to
go beyond the superficial level and […]

The results of the 2004 Indibloggies are out. AnarCapLib came 2nd in the only category we were nominated in (Best Topical IndiBlog). The winner was Shiok Chef’s Notes, the food blog run by Madhu Menon, webmaster of this blog, guest blogger here and of course web guru extraordinaire. Madhu also wins Best Designed […]

The latest Bharateeya Blog Mela is up at Selective Amnesia. A nice eclectic set of posts garnished with some chirpy commentary by Ravages. Go read.
Next mela will be at the Examined Life and Ravikiran has a PJ ready for you!

Amit writes about plagiarism in the Indian blogosphere. I saw a couple of interesting blog posts, circa Nov 2004, that caught a famous film critic from one of India’s biggest newspapers plagiarizing blatantly from the reviews of a world famous US critic. Read about it in Kitabkhana and DesiMediaBitch.

Around 1997-98, CricInfo published an article on […]

Around an hour back, I was chatting briefly with MadMan and Kingsley in a yahoo conference. I had to leave to attend an internal office meeting. Here’s a snippet of the chat at that time.
Yazad: and i’m about to go for my bi-weekly office meeting
MadMan: bi-weekly? Is that a weekly meeting of bisexual people?
Kingsley: is […]

We need to meet more bloggers and meet more often. While writing up on the last blog meet, I’d proposed January 30th. How does the Chowpatty Cafe Coffee Day at 4 pm sound? It’s large and 4 pm is a time when I assume it’ll be empty. Plus if more bloggers come out of the […]

The great tradition of bad jokes from the cartel’s blogs continues. New member Amit Varma pitches in.

Ok. This is a rant. I can be nice when I want to, but this time I want to vent some steam about last Sunday’s piece on blogging in the Indian Express.
The very first thing that hit me about Murali Menon is that he didn’t know anything whatsoever about blogs and worse he hadn’t […]

Article in the Indian Express on Blogging. Nice pic of “boyish looking 32 year old” posing for Rodin.
From Yazad: Badly written article. I was hoping it would be ignored but as it is not, I shall post later today on why I think it was badly written. Today’s Express has a much much better piece […]

It’s ok to be chatty and anecdotal when you have just a basic understanding of a topic under discussion. But not when you’re a scientist who specialises in the area. In this front page TOI article, Sanjay Limaye claims to observe the monsoon in Mumbai, but all he does is make general statements like
I have […]

In Defence of the Youth, and the young girl in particular
Methinks the unfortunate girl from Delhi Public School whose “boyfriend” – if he deserves the title – turned out to be a real nasty piece of works, is the “victim” in the much publicized MMS case. And no one is considering how she can […]

Mediaah! was the best “one topic” blog I’d seen with superb commentary on the Indian media, till it closed down around a year back. Pradyuman Maheshwari seems to have got his act back on track. I’m going to enjoy his analyses — here’s one on the battle for business channels
And why is it back? Ask […]

We keep getting stray references to the libertarian cartel. Here is my original post on it. Looking at it six months down the line, the list of Indian bloggers who fit the bill has increased. (There are many libertarian blogs around the world, but few which focus on India). If you think you too […]

As mentioned earlier, Selective Amnesia will be hosting the next blog mela and he has a special request:
Let’s be a little experimental shall we? Let’s nominate posts from blogs we haven’t heard or seen before yet! Let’s get some new people into this. Which means, the cartel stays away a bit. ;)
As head bottle washer […]

Dilip D’Souza’s comment on an earlier post provoked me to search for Fred Cuny. What a man and what a life led!
Here’s an introduction from onlineethics.org
Fred Cuny was a disaster relief specialist who used his training in engineering to do humanitarian work. He worked in countries such as Biafra, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Iraq, Somalia, and Bosnia. […]

Prasenjeet Datta over at Chaoszone has complied a fabulous blog mela. Apart from the wide range of topics he’s opened up (from insults on radio to rice as nirvana), he’s also taken the trouble to provide external links at certain places.
Note to all those wanting to host: this is what a mela should look […]

This is why I like the Mid-Day. They actually get their journalists to go out on the “field.” Bravo!
The story itself is one of the reasons why I like Bombay. The city gives people a chance to make money and improve their lot. The piece also gives clues on who all come in the way. […]