This time, however, the Bongs have gone too far, according to Penguin India. They are suing a Bong group for creating a massive Durga statue set in an intricately-made Hogwarts (that’s from Harry Potter, for those who are living in caves).

The community group is being targeted by lawyers representing Penguin India on behalf of JK Rowling and Warner Brothers who hold the rights to Harry Potter in India. Members say that they make a different model every year – in the past they have built the Titanic.This year they chose Hogwarts School – as well as life-size models of Harry Potter and his friends. Organisers said a mock steam engine train is also being constructed next to it, to resemble Hogwarts Express. Correspondents say the construction is nearing completion and is expected to cost around 1.2 million Indian rupees ($30,000). [link]

Ok, correct me if I’m wrong, but these things are usually the result of people going around door-to-door, collecting money and then using that money to build the mandaps (which is what these imaginative settings for the idol are called). So who exactly are they suing? Is it the lane or apartment building from which the money was collected? And I’m not even sure if these things make a profit. Generally, people give some money when they pray, but it’s not exactly commercially-viable. It’s more like a goodwill thing. Anyhow, apparently the High Court disagrees with me, as does Warner Brothers.

Penguin India’s spokeswoman Nirmalya Roychowdhury told the Associated Press news agency that Delhi High Court has already ruled that the organisers of the Durga Puja festival must remove the display or pay the fine for copyright violation.

“Sadly, the organizers of this large-scale commercially sponsored event did not approach us for permission to go ahead,” Warner Brothers said in a statement in London.

“This event falls outside the guidelines set up by Warner Bros., JK Rowling and her publishers to help charitable and not-for-profit organizations to run small-scale themed events that protect fans and allow everyone to enjoy Harry Potter books, films and events in the spirit in which they were created,” the statement said. [link]

Seems to be one in a long line of frivolous lawsuits that are on the increase in India. Is it a consequence of economic growth? Or is it just another example of the corporate bigwigs frustrated by media piracy, and taking it out on the little guy?

Update: Good news – looks like the courts in India rule in favor of the little guy. Read this:

Indian fans of Harry Potter books welcomed Saturday a court verdict that gave the go-ahead to organisers of a religious event to build a life-size replica of the fictional Hogwarts Castle.

The Delhi High Court threw out on Friday a claim by author J.K. Rowling that the giant structure constructed in the city of Kolkata infringed copyright.

Organisers now have permission to keep the papier mache and bamboo castle in place until Durga Puja, the biggest Hindu religious event in eastern India, on October 26. [link]

… the air is heavy with the smell of gasoline and flowers, you are approached by women begging for money and food. Men shout invitations to enter their carpet shops or purchase wares…

…[Y]ou enter a courtyard where an old man sits wearing a black security uniform. He speaks no English … [and] points toward a flight of wood stairs… At the top, a door is opened by a barefoot woman in a scarlet sari. Behind her is an art gallery as white and sleek as any space in Chelsea.

These contradictions do not arise from any calculated exoticism. This is simply the new India. [link]

Now that’s a line and a half. We are like this only, and all that. The money quote comes from Usha Mirchandani, who also happens to be a close family friend.

“It isn’t as if we are not aware of what is happening in New York or Berlin or in China,” the dealer Usha Mirchandani said in an interview at the gallery. “It is just that we find ourselves in a new position, and we must find our own way.

“We are an old civilization. We have untold treasures. But what has happened here in the last year and a half has changed things, with the economy booming and so much art being sold and the prices just going off the graph.” [link]

True enough. The article goes on to talk about skyrocketing art prices, growing art galleries and all that good stuff. A lot of the money, it seems, is coming from the NRI’s.

Money pouring into the art world from nonresident Indians who have made their fortunes in the United States and Europe, along with the racing engine of India?s $4 trillion economy, has enabled artists to travel abroad far more often than they did before. [link]

But not everything is rosy. There is trouble in paradise…

Nikhil Chopra, a young performance artist in Mumbai, said: “I can’t believe we’re a country of a billion people that doesn’t have more than a couple of decent art schools, no contemporary art museum, no real funding, no group of trained curators fluent in contemporary art, no art criticism in the newspapers, just one serious art magazine, Art India, and only a few major collectors of contemporary work. In other words, no real infrastructure at all.” [link]

Well, there we have the “i” word again. It seems to be on everybody’s mind. Unfortunately, methinks that any sort of serious public infrastructure for supporting art is going to be the last recipient of our thriving economy. It’s only after the 40% or so of our below-poverty population gets above it, and enough people are wealthy enough to be able to enjoy art, that there will be any kind of mass movement to support artists. Of course, there’s a fair amount of support coming in from the private sector, and for better or worse, that’s how it’s going to be for a while.

Mr. Premji’s rise is already inspiring some Indian Muslims to embrace the modern, globalized world…[But t]hough the country’s economy is growing at 9% a year, the vast majority of India’s estimated 150 million Muslims — the largest Islamic population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan — remain socially marginalized, badly educated and mired in deep poverty.

How badly are the Muslims faring? The answer is minutes away from Premji’s home in Bangalore.

A Muslim school a half-hour’s drive from Mr. Premji’s Bangalore home reveals the chasm between this globalist success story and the country’s Muslim masses. Students sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Masjid e Takwa madrassa spend their days memorizing the Quran in Arabic — a language that neither they nor their teacher understand.

But Premji is not affected by these things.

Mr. Premji bristles impatiently when the plight of the broader Muslim populace is cited. “This whole issue of Hindu-Muslim in India is completely overhyped,” the 62-year-old executive says.

He is, in fact, quite removed from religion entirely.

Mr. Premji has mentioned his Muslim background so rarely in public that many Indian Muslims don’t even know he shares their heritage.

…Mr. Premji scoffed at the idea he should display his Muslim identity or champion the cause of Muslim advancement in India. “We’ve always seen ourselves as Indian. We’ve never seen ourselves as Hindus, or Muslims, or Christians or Buddhists,” he said.

How does that show up in his company?

None of Wipro?s senior managers aside from Mr. Premji himself are Muslims. The company maintains normal working hours on Islamic high holidays. Among its 70,000 employees, there?s only a ?sprinkling? of Muslims, according to Sudip Banerjee, president of a division that accounts for a third of revenue.

Yet, the company balks when discrimination is mentioned.

…company officials say they seek to hire the best regardless of creed. They say that among the reasons few Indian Muslims meet Wipro’s stringent standards is that they often study in Urdu rather than English, and rarely pursue engineering degrees. Urdu, which is also the official language of Pakistan, is intertwined with Islamic identity on the subcontinent. In southern India, where most of the country’s technology industry is based, Hindus speak a number of regional languages and are more likely to study English.

“All our hiring staff are trained to interview in English,” Mr. Premji says. “They’re trained to look for Westernized segments because we deal with global customers.” Out of every 100 r?sum?s received, only one or two usually come from Muslim applicants, according to a former manager in Wipro’s human-resources department. [link]

I don’t think Wipro is discriminating against Muslims, but I do think that there are fewer opportunities available to them, which prevents them from obtaining a job in one of India’s top companies.

Besides, I think two inequities are highlighted here. First off, is the obvious Hindu-Muslim imbalance. But then, there’s also the rich-poor divide. Obviously, Premji’s family wealth gave him his education (St. Mary’s school + Electrical Engineering at Stanford) which, in turn, gave him him access to a plethora of opportunities to which other poorer Indians, and Muslim Indians in particular, have no access. And that has also led to his secular outlook on life in India, and his belief that the “whole issue of Hindu-Muslim in India is completely overhyped”. I disagree with that particular statement – the Hindu-Muslim issue needs to be brought up to the surface, and not pushed further down. But I applaud his secular view and his position as India’s richest Muslim is a great place from which to perpetuate it.

Yet, it seems more and more to me that just as literacy was a huge issue for India in the twentieth century, income inequality (between, as well as amongst, Hindus and Muslims) will be the next big problem to resolve for the twenty-first century. Here’s the last paragraph of the article:

Many [Al-Ameen college, a progressive Islamic school] graduates have already gotten jobs at companies like Wipro and Infosys, says the college’s principal, Mr. Javeed, and have started to earn salaries well above those offered outside the booming technology industry. “This has brought awareness to the Muslim community about the need to pursue higher education,” he says. “People are beginning to realize that education is power, that education is money, that education is an opportunity.”

We had quite a scare last week, when it was sunny and hot. I thought the heat would never end. I could actually walk outside in shorts for extended periods of time. We had to open all the windows in our apartment, it was so hot. I got tan lines from running outside, dammit! Since when did San Francisco become L.A.? What’s next, an epidemic of breast implants?

When I first got to Wisconsin from sunny Bombay many years ago, I missed the sun and the warmth during those nine-month-long, subzero-wind-chill Wisconsin winters. Now having lived here in San Francisco for the past year or so, the sun has begun to annoy me. I mean, I still respect photosynthesis and all, but do we really have to see it in action? When the sun comes out, it forces everyone to be cheery, and I hate to break it to you, but I don’t want to be happy. I like it cold and foggy. Please donate my Prozac ration to someone who needs it.

I figure that the reason I like this weather so much is the subliminal coercing from the British Raj days. You know, when they tried to hypnotize every Indian into liking British weather. I guess it skipped a generation (or two) and worked on me. Just something to think about.

Anyway, all I have to say is: I’m looking forward to the rest of the week.

And oh yeah, if you’re planning on visiting, remember to bring a sweatshirt.

So Nikhil left a comment on my post about Apu and the 7-Eleven/Kwik-E-Mart promotion. He said:

I see your point about the negative stereotypes, but that’s the whole point isn’t it? Aren’t all the characters stereotypes? Yes, the accent is inaccurate, and the character is two-dimensional, but….it’s a cartoon (one of the definitions of which – from Webster’s dictionary- is “a ludicrously simplistic, unrealistic, or one-dimensional portrayal”.

Maybe I’m not analyzing this intellectually enough, but I just don’t understand why people are offended. I seriously doubt this is going to take us back to “Jim Crow’s America”, as Manish thinks it will. [link]

I’m really glad he left this comment. I mentioned briefly in the original post that the point of the cartoon (and satire, in general) is to exaggerate the ridiculous. When I began to elaborate, I found I was writing enough for another post. So here goes.

It is not so much the cartoon itself that I am offended by. In fact, I used to watch The Simpsons back home in India and even in my early years here, and I never thought twice about Apu. It is only later on that he started to annoy and then offend me. And it is not so much the character itself that began to get my goat. It was more in the way that I saw Americans perceive him – as this funny-talking, dirty, dishonest “Hindi” (sic) who worships funny-looking, blue creatures with many arms. This perception of the cartoon character began to replace reality, and Americans who claimed to be my friends (and some who were my enemies) came up to me spouting “Thank you, come again!” in that bud bud ding ding accent. This is when it really began to tick me off. And, to clarify, it’s not so much the phrase itself, but the manner in which it’s been used that’s my peeve.

I think the point is best illustrated by something I read on Greatbong‘s post about this whole thing.

…a few weeks ago I was watching ?Transformers? in a packed theater with the raucous crowd that was laughing and cheering at every point. Well nothing got them as going as the bit where one of the heroes saving the world from the Decepticon scorpion makes a call and gets stuck with an Indian call center worker who with his Apu-type accent and indecipherable mumblings keeps delaying the hero. The entire crowd exploded at presumably this ?subtle bit of racial humor? and I would have also been laughing (being someone who understands ?sarcasm?) when a voice rose above the din with a boisterous ?Motherf**** dothead?.

And then it happened.

As the connection with the call center operator was terminated by the impatient hero, someone to my right laughed out:

“Thank you, come again.” [link]

Now, I’m inclined to give Groening the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume that he was unaware that this would be the reaction to his caricature. So let’s overlook the Computer Science Ph.D. and assume that it’s not deliberate stereotyping.

Moving on to the 7-Eleven/Kwik-E-Mart promotion. Given that we know now that this phrase is used in everyday language to ridicule and deride desis, I cannot help but be absolutely repulsed by the fact that 7-Eleven is actually paying Indians to say, “Thank you, come again”. The repercussions of this on how the desi community is perceived by American mainstream society will be extremely damaging. It’s almost equivalent to paying a member of any minority – be it Black-American, Asian-American or whatever – to have themselves say to a customer “Sir, please call me [insert racial slur here]“.

I could just overlook the issue and say that it’s just a cartoon, and a satire. And, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t be wrong. But given that I know all this, and have borne the brunt of it, I feel compelled to write something about it and, if nothing else, at least raise some awareness about it.

Seems like everywhere I look, people are talking about the 7-Elevens that are turning themselves into Kwik-E-Marts as a promotion for the upcoming Simpsons movie. Manish at Ultrabrown is far and above at the forefront of the opposition movement to this conversion. Kudos to him. I highly recommend you read what he’s written, particularly his piece for The Guardian blog.

Normally, I don’t have too much to say about these kinds of things. This time though, it’s got me thinking. Perhaps it’s because throughout my college years I had irritating American kids come up to me and quote Apu expecting me to applaud their brilliant wit. Perhaps also, it’s because I saw some of my desi friends rationalize it, and others pretend they were being enlightened by laughing at it, but always a little extra loud. Or perhaps it’s because I always felt something was amiss and never really did anything back then. It could be any, all or none of the three – I’m not quite sure. I should also add I did regularly watch The Simpsons and other than those aspects of Apu that ticked me off, I did enjoy it. Lately though, the show seems to have lost its edge and the humor has stopped outweighing the negative stereotyping.

To begin with, there is little doubt in my mind that immigrants are being exploited for the promotion. This starts with the character of Apu itself, who was created to exploit and exaggerate desi immigrants’ (sometimes nonexistent) characteristics to get a quick, easy and insensitive laugh. The accent is inaccurate and Apu is two-dimensional, badly researched and the worst of it is that he perpetuates negative and inaccurate stereotypes. Yes, Apu has a Ph.D. which is somewhat redeeming, but Groening gives him one in computer science because that’s all desis can do – I.T. And run Kwik-E-Marts, of course.

Now, one can argue that this is a cartoon and a satire. And that the whole point is to exaggerate the ridiculous to satirize society. But having wracked my brains, I can’t see what is being lampooned by creating this character as such, other than the fact that immigrants “talk funny” which adds great value to the general culture, I’m sure. As an Indian in America, it’s hard enough having to fight to be taken seriously in mainstream society. These irritating obstacles certainly don’t make that task any easier.

Even if we assume for one second that Apu is nothing more than a bad joke, should we really take this joke into the real world? I think not. That the 7-Eleven company has actually done it and further, paid desis to say “Thank you, come again” and other silly lines is downright repulsive. Manish compares it to Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben.

Pancake mascot Aunt Jemima and rice maven Uncle Ben survived only after being softened and morphed into avuncular friends. Apu too has been grandfathered into America?s affections after 19 years on television. But as Slate magazine wrote, ?It?s worth remembering what these spokescharacters truly are: a final, living vestige of Jim Crow America.? [link]

I don’t know if I would go that far, but I do shudder to think of the consequences. And while several desi store-owners are enjoying the increased profits of the promotions, not all have agreed to convert their stores to Kwik-E-Marts.

Back home in India, you get quite used to hearing about these sorts of inequities and exploitations in society, but I was under the impression that we were in the “enlightened West”. At times like these, I can only remember Mahatma Gandhi’s response when he was asked what he thought of Western civilization. He said, “I think it would be a very good idea.”

…or “the puckish humor of Pop Art [combined] with the serene and cerebral qualities of Minimalism” [link] depending on your point of view.

Stingel’s Buddha

An article in last Sunday’s Times talks about Italian artist Rudolf Stingel and his association with Buddha and India:

Mr. Stingel?s associations with Buddha are longstanding. As a boy in northern Italy, he played with the Buddha figurines that his father, who traveled to India for work, brought home as souvenirs. As a rebellious young man in the early ?70s, it was mandatory, he said, to profess an affinity for Buddhist practices: namely, to have a little shrine and practice meditation.

?You had to do it if you wanted to be cool,? he said. ?But we all faked it. It was all a lie ? no one ever really meditated.?

And, he added, ?I have a problem sitting cross-legged, anyway.? [link]

To lampoon those pseudo-Buddhists or “elite Buddhists” (a term coined by prominent Buddhologist Charles S. Prebish) Stingel created a series of east-meets-east sculptures:

…that blended the meditative Buddha with many-armed Hindu deities like Siva or Vishnu. In this new deity?s six hands, Mr. Stingel placed the implements he cited in his earlier D.I.Y. manual: a brush, a squeegee, a scissors, a mixer and so on. Cast in rubber and made in 24 candy-bright colors, these gods of Stingelian creation became themselves an instant style-set collectible. [link]

I’ve talked about this kind of thing before, and the jury is still out on this one. I can’t seem to decide whether appropriating these images and modifying them to suit one’s purpose (whatever it may be) is disrespectful or not. In the U.S., showing irreverence to age-old concepts is applauded and thus, encouraged. However, in eastern countries, that is not the case. This is not to say that Indians couldn’t do with a little irreverence, but at what point is it all right to get outraged?

This doesn’t come from nowhere. I have an amateur artist friend who has a few paintings similar to Stingel’s art and, knowing him as well as I do, I know that he has little or no understanding of the significance of what he’s appropriating other than “Hey! This would look good over here”. Even I myself have dabbled in the arts and freely used Indian images from time to time in my own (somewhat limited) creations. And of course, I have appropriated the name of my favorite deity.

The answer, I suppose, lies in Stingel’s Buddha or specifically, Buddhism’s middle way. It’s ok to appropriate these images as long as it is done with a reasonable intent, and with a certain amount of understanding and respect. Now, what constitutes “reasonable intent” and “certain amount of understanding and respect”? Well, the answer to that depends on the situation and this brings us back to square one.

In my earlier posting, I quoted from Subhamoy Das‘ About.com article on the subject. I think he answers the question well, so to end this posting, I’ll quote him again:

…the entire concept of judging works of art is quite relative… [I]s it morally right to reap creative benefits at the cost of maligning the cultural and religious sentiments of another sect? [I]t remains an open debate… But the bottom line is that it’s not as easy to understand the culture, symbols and essence of Hinduism as finding them colourful enough for use in films or fashion. [link]

I’m a big fan of Emmanuel Derman. Both he and I are in the same field (quantitative finance) and he’s a much accomplished and widely published academic and quant, who’s at the top of his field. He gives good reason to us young ‘uns to look up to him.

Regardless of that though, I was reading his blog this morning and came across an interesting post entitled ’10cc of H2O’. He says:

I have a hard time dealing with these kinds of contradictions, when someone tells you something that is both half-true and half-nonsense. …. I like things and people to be clear cut; people should be either obviously smart or clearly bullshit artists. [link]

This got me thinking. I have rarely come across anything in my life that has been so clear-cut. The only exception to that is (possibly) my work, which is purely theoretical mathematics, but that exists only in one’s imagination, so I’m not sure if it really counts.

While it would be nice to have the world neatly divided into black and white, it has never been that simple for me. Take, for example, the US. When I first got here, I was a teenager, and pretty much everything about this country looked nice, shiny and bright. But beneath that gleaming surface (a consequence of the image it exports) were things that were neither gleaming nor bright. People were ignorant. Sometimes, more ignorant than those I had encountered back home. Life was fairly individualistic, which is nice for a while, but has its negative consequences (isolation, a spiritual void). And, from time to time, I was discriminated against. Nothing serious, but enough to remind me -when I was aware of it- that I didn’t quite belong here.

My point is that the country, while once The Best Place In The World for me, suddenly was no longer so great. Don’t get me wrong, the US has a lot to offer, but nothing in life is so black and white. Everything has its pros and cons.

Derman also talks about the movie, The Lives of Others, where a Stasi (the then-East German equivalent of the KGB) agent starts off being clear-cut about his role in the agency, and his purpose in life. He’s an up-and-coming agent at the top of his game and has few questions about what he’s doing. Life, for him, is black and white. Either you are a dissident or you’re not. There’s no gray area. That is, until he’s assigned to spy on a so-called dissident writer whom, the Stasi agent quickly realizes, is not quite a dissident. And that the entire assignment originated in the selfish motives of a senior officer, and not the so-called ‘good of the country’. His realization that life is not so black and white is what the movie is all about, and he pays for this realization dearly.

If there’s one thing that’s clear-cut, it’s that life, people and things are never black and white. In the Economics courses that I’ve both, taken and taught, the mantra “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” gets repeated endlessly. So perhaps life is something like that – you can’t have the good without the bad. You can’t have the pros without the cons. And anything that’s too good is, at the cost of writing a cliche, too good to be true.

First off, we had a woman get frantic about the people circling her streets in vans while taking pictures of her cat. Sounds like 24? Well, think again. Here’s what she wrote to BoingBoing:

I’m all for mapping, but this feature literally gives me the shakes. I feel like I need to close all my curtains now. I’m going to look into whether it’s possible for a person to have pictures of their home removed from Google Maps. Meanwhile, I’m happy to show bb readers the photo in the interest of illustrating creepy privacy violations. Heck, the whole world can see him anyway. [link]

And here’s a picture of her cat.

[link]

Then there’s this article in the NYT about the woman, Mary Kalin-Casey, and how Google has invaded her privacy. If you ask me, the whole “privacy” thing is something Americans are obsessed with. Don’t ask me why because it is beyond me. To us desis, the concept of privacy is something that we never really gave much importance. And given the choice of being alone most of the time and having people around and poking their nose in my business, I prefer the latter. Maybe I’m biased. No, scratch that. I am biased. Privacy is nice, but the obsession with it is a little over the top. Something people with lots of time on their hands can indulge themselves in. Well, more power to you. Just let me take my showers in peace and you can look at anyone’s pussy cat all you want. [Apologies: I couldn't resist that one]

Ok, that’s all well and good. Then I come across a post on the Wired blog which has user-contributed images from the Street View feature. Here’s an interesting one – the Google van reflected in an office building’s window, while its taking its picture:

[link]

Then we have this post on Mashable.com with the Top 15 Street View sightings. Here’s one of my favorites – seems she has only half a face:

[link]

And finally to the source of it all. The Google VW Beetle. Well, it’s not really Google’s, it belongs to Immersive Media, but it’s still pretty cool. Click on the link below the image for the blog-post by PR. Differently (the image source) with a close-up of the patented (by Immersive Media) eleven-lens camera. [via]

[link]

When you come to the end of all the light you know, and it’s time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: Either you will be given something solid to stand on or you will be taught to fly. -Edward Teller.

For the last half-decade or so, a slow but steady transition has been taking place: A part of the internet has been moving from the confines of the static webpage to the freedom of a dynamic, interactive medium. Blogging has been at the forefront of these changes, as bloggers catalogue the changes and blogs showcase them, venturing into a heretofore unknown medium. While it is true that blogging is in its embryonic stages and has not defined itself yet, it is also the case that it is several things all at once and so defies categorization. Its etymological roots are easy to explain: It is short for weblog. Some early bloggers split the word ‘weblog’ unconventionally into ‘we blog’, and a new word entered into the English language lexicon. A word, incidentally, that was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2004. So by definition, a blog is an online log, a diary, a catalogue of one’s thoughts. And not unlike our thoughts, the types of blogs run the gamut from the political to the poetic; and from the perverse to the picturesque.

Andrew Sullivan – a now-famous political blogger and journalist for Time magazine – describes a blog as “somewhere between writing a column and talk radio.” A blog could be as base as daytime television or as stimulating as an in-depth PBS documentary. A blog is a journalistic report of an event, a well-thought-out opinion piece, the errant ramblings of an old man, and the dull journaling of a teenager’s daily activities. While it is easy to label blogs as extensions of newspaper or other journalistic media, this is falling prey to shaping the unknown into what is familiar. Yes, there are several similarities, but there are more differences. This categorization also partly follows from the fact that it is mainly the political blogs which have transcended from the underground into the mainstream media. But it is the ones that go unnoticed by the mainstream that are the most intriguing. There are photo blogs, on which amateur photographers post some of the most beautiful images; there are audio blogs where people post audio (also known as podcasts); there are blogs in which people who can barely speak English write the most lyrical prose, in English no less; and there are blogs focused on particular topics, usually started by people who are experts (sometimes real, at other times, self-imagined) in the field. The only universal statement that one can make about blogs is about their format: dated entries which are reverse-chronologically ordered and have a space for readers to comment on them.

At its best, blogging is an art. And just like any work of art, be it Nabokov’s Lolita or Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, it can be subtle and expressive at once. A good blog post can stir up anger, elation and grief. It appeals to everyone and incites passionate discussion. It can create trends or destroy them. Like art, a blog post has its roots in the banalities of everyday existence. A good blogger can elevate the mundane to the resplendent, and can debase the divine to the unholy. A good blogger must create his own personal villains, orchestrate conflict, and through that, drama. A good blog post can be fiction, non-fiction or somewhere in between. A good blog post is like a well-written op-ed piece, but written in less time and with less thought. No, that’s not a typo – less thinking is one of the things that sets blogging apart from any of the traditional media. The technology-enabled facility of quick publishing gives blog posts (and their responses) what can be loosely described as a stream of consciousness style. The immediateness creates a sense of intimacy with the audience, and motivates them to interact with the blogger.

This interactive aspect of a blog is another unique characteristic of this medium. A blog post is not only incomplete without its comments but they are an integral part of it. Comments allow a blogger to clarify, argue, converse or just observe his audience. Unlike traditional works of art, this enables a blogger to look inside his audience’s minds and digest and internalize what they are saying. This knowledge will, in turn, show up in the next post, where readers can comment again, and the cycle continues. The interaction makes blogging a largely synergistic activity and makes blogger and audience interdependent on one other, in a more explicit way. Of course, there is interaction between artist and audience in other media as well, but it is not nearly as intimate, and is not incorporated into the artist’s work as quickly as with a blog.

By giving people the freedom to write about what they want, when they want, along with a more-or-less automatic readership, countless souls (including myself) have found their ‘inner writer’. Inherent to its very nature as a new medium, blogging is allowing people to create a new style of writing, with its own set of rules. As more and more people join the blogging bandwagon, it is increasingly difficult to ignore it, and as it gains more exposure, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that blogging, at its best, is indeed a new art form.