Bloggers Lunch Pune

The beautiful city of Pune makes me wonder why am I not staying there? Everytime I visit that place I find more reasons to love it. This time there were 15 more reasons, the 15 amazing bloggers I met at the Bloggers Lunch Pune. I knew I had to be in Pune this weekend so, I called up Rohit and asked him if we can meet over lunch and rest of the bloggers friends as well. The geek that he is, put up a wiki and set the scene. We decided that we should not spam whole of pune but tell about the lunch only to close friends and the bloggers that we met at the last meet. Priyank arranged the venue and we were all set.

The lunch was good and the high point was meeting everyone. Among them were some of the best bloggers of Pune. Though I got bit late, but was there on time for the lunch (gave another chance to Rohit for saying "Tarun is never late for the lunch").

Lets follow the rest of the events in the pics. As they say picture is worth thousand words and I have added few more.

Meetu, Sumit and Prasoon.

Jasleen and Bhavya

The bunch of bloggers at the lunch for bloggers.



Rest of the pics

It was pleasure to meet Rohit (partner in this crime like most other), Priyank (arranged for the venue and lunch, always enthusiastic about implementing the ideas), Meetu (great movie reviewer and always fun to talk to... Meetu remember that you have promised me a tea for the next time), Bhavya (great girl, loves to do a lot of things. Got to know that she is an excellent driver just like most other girls :)), Sumit (the best photographer and loves sharing his wisdom with others for example remove the lens cover before shooting.), Prasoon (got to meet him for the first time, nice guy), Sachin (met him for the first time but sounded like a very resourceful guy. If you are looking to go out for lunch or dinner contact him he can book a place for you anywhere is Pune), Pramila (met her first at the blogcamp pune last year she was with Purplenova then, now she is with ITVidya. Always a pleasure to meet her.), Harsha (this dude is amazing, walked for 40 mins to come to the meet not only talks but lives a green life. This was probably our last meeting in Pune as he will be leaving Pune soon.), Krishna (met him for the first time, nice guy), Amit (he is a php pro. It is always a pleasure to meet him), Ramana (one of the latest person to join the blogging bandwagon. Very enthusiastic and keen to learn, wish you good luck for your blog journey sir), Jasleen (works for Great foundation) , Krity (is the one who designed the blogcamp mumbai style logo, she is always ready to help us with designs. Very nice girl.) and Isha (met her for the first time, she is Krity's sister). Looking forward to more such fun meetings.

For rest of the pics please visit my picasa album.
Visit Priyank's blog for details about the meet.
If you missed this meet and want to be part of such meets in future or if you are a Pune blogger then you can join the Pune Bloggers Google Group.

Updates:
Another good coverage of the meet at Bhavya's Blog.
Pune Mirror of Times Group, covered the Bloggers meet :

Special thanks to my friend Deepak Patil for this picture.

Tarun Chandel
Blogging, Eating and Meeting

A movie, bloggers meet and a nice evening

I am just coming back from Eros Cinema in Mumbai where I went for a bloggers special preview screening of "21", a movie from the Sony Pictures. Yes you read it right, this was a special screening for the bloggers. 21 is a good movie do watch it if you get a chance.

If you are smart then why aren't you rich? May be that's what those six students thought. 21 is based on a true story of six MIT students. Ben Campbell, Jim Sturgess, is a super smart guy with perfect GPA of 4 and dreams of getting in the Harvard Medical School but needs a scholarship badly. Micky Rosa, Kavin Spacey, a Linear Equation professor discovers the talent of his smartest student and puts it to use, that will make them rich. Then unfolds a series of events that make them see the highest of high followed by lowest of low. I don't want to spoil your fun by revealing the story any further. The plot of the movie keeps you gripped to your seats almost all the time. The slapstick humor is appropriately timed. The biggest plus is the background music which keeps you close to the action. The story flows very nicely and at no time you feel that it is too fast or dragging slowly. Jim Sturgess looks like a fresh college student and pulls all his scenes very effectively. Kevin Spacey is a pro and that shows as he plays part with ease. Laurence Fishburne has grown too bulky and looks bit odd but that may be because of his morpheus image, otherwise he played his character well. The movie is worth your time and money.

After the movie we headed for Cafe Mondegar in Kolaba and had a good time there. Got to catch up with Ideasmithy, Gaurav, Melody, Sakshi, Kanishka, Avantika, Vivek and a bunch of other fellow bloggers. It was a nice evening out. While returning back we stopped in Matunga for a Mango Sunday (amazing ice creme). By the time I reached home it was midnight and it was raining like crazy. Though I have a pair of wet shoes in my living room still it feels nice to have the rains in Mumbai.

A special thanks to Moksh for arranging a special screening of movie for the bloggers. I think this is an important step towards bloggers getting same treatment as main stream media. In India, I feel, there is still a huge gap between the rights of media (read main stream media) and bloggers. A change in attitude is must and for any change a catalyst is needed and Moksh has acted as that catalyst, incidentally he calls himself a Social Media Catalyst. I hope that more such initiatives will be taken up by others as well.

Tarun Chandel
Blogging, all the matters and more

Welcome Yuva Vividha Audience

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I was speaking at the Yuva Vividha Seminar at the St. Stanislaus High School Campus, Bandra, Mumbai. The aim of the seminar was to introduce children, teachers and school administrators to the world of ICT by relating it to their school studies and their environment. My session was about Writing and Creating content on the Internet and I talked about it from the bloggers perspective. It was very interesting to mentor and guide people to blogging. The session was very interactive thanks to the ever inquisitive audience.

As it was a working day, I attended the later half of the seminar. The other sessions were also very good and informative. Freeman was also present at the seminar and he talked about how we can use internet and how Google is the new university. The other session I attended was about a very interesting project named She Creates, where a bunch of people are helping poor girls to highlight their issues by creating movies. Overall the seminar was highly interactive and the sessions were very interesting, I would suggest more and more schools and institutes should have such seminars.

Thanks to Chandita of Comet Media for inviting me to the seminar and her warm hearted hospitality. I really enjoyed the whole event.

Tarun Chandel
Blogging, Passion and Interaction

Bloggers get ready for the Marathon

This is a treat for the blogger in you. Blogathon is an online event where all the bloggers blog on a particular topic, daily, for a week. Blogathon is going to start on 20th of April so hurry up put on your marathon shoes or (blogathon) gloves.

Here is the list of topics:

Infrastructure: Sunday, 20th April 2008
How can we improve the traffic condition in our city?

Politics: Monday, 21st April 2008
How do we change the focus of politics from caste/religion to grassroot issues?

Entertainment: Tuesday, 22nd April 2008
Does Bollywood overshadow regional cinema in India?

Media: Wednesday, 23rd April 2008
Why are Indian news broadcast channels not as mature as their International counterparts?

Gender: Thursday, 24th April 2008
What are the challenges that society faces in accepting the concept of alternate sexuality? How can we address them?

Sport: Friday, 25th April 2008
Are ‘media’ and ‘commercial interests’ in cricket the only reason that are killing other sports in India?

Lets all blog together for a cause. For more details about the Blogathon please visit Blogathon Site.

Tarun Chandel
For the love of Blogging

The Power of Blogging

We walked out of the Blogcamp Hall after a session on Podcasting. One of the camper at the lunch time asked me Tarun what do you think is going to be the next big innovation in Blogging. Blogcamp was covering a lot of aspects of blogging (be it writing, podcasting, regional languages, micro blogging, video blogging etc.) and this question was very relevant in the given context. After thinking for a while I said, I don't think there is going to be any. I think we are still trying to make sense of the last big thing, blogging. The ability or the freedom to express yourself freely, it will take a generation to understand the true impact of it. We are still trying to understand the web or the effect of technology and I think its not wise to leap on when you are not sure what you are on. We all are executing the ideas that were invented long back, process of web logging started in pre dot com bust era. Yes there are a lot of innovation taking and have taken place but that is all because of the promise made by the basic platform.

The ability or the freedom to express yourself freely, it will take a generation to understand the true impact of it.

History is written by the victors, industries are known by the big companies in that space. And this mindset always makes us judge the success by the size. What is the success of blogging, number of hits, amount of money you make, ranking in technorati ??? But think about it the true power of blogging is that it has given the distribution channel to all of us small people who would have been lost. We are small but we sure have unique insights and unique ideas and using this platform we can share these with those who seek such unique things.

Think about it, 10 years ago the only way of distribution was broadcasting. The basic idea behind that was or still is, one thing fits all or to have content that majority of people like. But with this new medium we can have a narrowcast, you can make content for specific audience. The mindset is turning around. We are the people who propagate one size fits one or fits few.

There has been a lot of debate about traditional media Vs the new media. There have been a continuous tussle between the two. I think the reason is that ... or let me put it this way, people who are older than 40 - 45 years they have spend better years of their life getting to know about world and other things through TOI (newpapers) or other magazines, so most of them dismiss new media. People of my generations have spend a mixed time on getting updates through traditional and new media, so there is a tussle. We have to accept that we are part traditional and part new in our approach and in our upbringing. If you talk to youngsters and kids they hardly read newspaper or follow TV, that in the generation of broadband, online games, online streaming and they follow the world online. For them traditional media is too slow and not up to their unique taste.

Coming back to blogging as I said at the start that we all are trying to make sense out of this big phenomenon. People keep scratching this surface in their unique ways. A lot of people have found ways to make money out of this platform and they keep innovating. Innovation has not only been in the ways to make money but in the way to interpret this phenomenon and thats why we have different flavors like photo blogs, Podcasts, video blogs and latest of all micro blogs and mobile blogs.

We always tend to look at big blogs and stigmatize small successes. If your blog gets 10 hits a day you will be labeled as failure. But isn't it a nice thing that you are able to share your thoughts with 10 people, 10 right people, who actually want to read what you write. That's the magic magic of blogging where you can be yourself. As the number of reader grows on your blog you tend to become generalist saying things so as to suit the masses. I think most of the bloggers here would agree that they wrote best when they wrote for themselves or for those few who cared.

This is all I had in my mind and it stayed in my mind. One tip to myself never stand up to talk unless you have sorted things out in your mind :) Life has its unique ways to make you learn!

Updated:
You can find a good coverage of Blogcamp Mumbai Style on Deep's Blog.

Tarun Chandel
Life, Learning and Technology

Pune Bloggers Meet

Yesterday I was in Pune for the Pune Bloggers meet. The event was very good as I got to meet a lot of interesting people. Also it was good to catch up with some of the bloggers who were at Blogcamp Pune as well.

The meeting started with an interesting video about bloggers (a question to organizers: is that video available on YouTube??). It was followed by a round of introductions where everyone got to show their blog and believe me Pune has some amazing bloggers. Post introductions IndiBloggers team had a very interesting session where they read out comment from somebody's blog and the blogger was suppose to do a small jig if it was a comment from his/her blog, very nice idea! Then there was a Pizza break and during this time I could talk to some of the bloggers. After the quick Pizza break we had a session from Microsoft on Live Writer (makes it easy to blog while you are off line but doesn't have a Mac version :( so of no use to me). There was an interesting skit by the IndiBloggers team before we wrapped for the day.

There were some really good bloggers I got to meet like Harsha (I follow his blog and it was nice to meet him in person), Vineet (another member of our Symbiosis family), Sandhya (nice to see an evangelist from Microsoft), Karamveer (he knows how to make money from blogging and also a very sporty guy), Anwin (one of the guys behind IndiBlogger), Prashant (always nice to see him around), Renie (the super cool IndiBlogger founder), Aparajita (nice to meet another blogger from Symbiosis family), Divya (did not get to talk him but very nice blog) , Maltesh, Meetu (Entertainment and Movie blogger), Navin (Tech Blogger) and many more.

All for the love of Blogging :)

The event was very nice though I would have liked little more time to meet the bloggers. I think the Pizza break was very small. I couldn't meet a lot of people I really wanted to meet, as the time was very less. This is one of the thing we will have to keep in mind during the Blogcamp Mumbai, to give more time and space for bloggers to meet each other.

I always like to visit Pune and If I get to spend time with good people and have nice food it just makes the travel worthwhile. Thanks to Moksh for his company in the morning and delicious Misal Pav on our way to Pune. Thanks to Rohit for delicious lunch and the Blogcamp Pune T-Shirt (yes I finally got one). Thanks to Vineet (the guy behind the show), IndiBloggers team and Microsoft.

Tarun Chandel
Life, Learning and Technology