Blogging | Blogging news

‘Blank Noise Action Heroes’ is a new blog, which archives stories of resistance.

People are invited to send in testimonials of instances when they resisted street sexual harassment and fought back.

In the ‘I Wish’ campaign, people were asked to send in wish statements for their city.

This online event was directed at women who negotiate the streets of their city, while pushing them to see the city as their own.

This brought in a whole range of responses, ranging from “I wish I could walk down my road, without feeling the weight of a hundred eyes on me,” to “I want to get wet.

Drenched.

All of me wet with rain.

And run...

sit under a tree and read.” It was a telling statement about the gendered nature of our cities and streets, that women find it difficult to do the simplest, most asexual activities such as taking a walk, reading, or just being.

In the ‘Cheap Girls’ campaign, Blank Noise invited people to define words like “cheap, loose, characterless”.

People were encouraged to e-mail us their thoughts on “What’s right?

What’s wrong?

Red lips?

Loose hair?

Short clothes?

A bra strap?

Cleavage?

Tight clothes?

” E-mail responses included things like “Is touching with...

Speaking In Tongues Of India’s Internet users, 44% would prefer Hindi to English on the net.

another 25% want other regional languages.

Chinese search engine Baidu ranks fifth among the world’s most visited sites; India’s Raftaar.com hopes to catch up The Hindi blogosphere, running into something like 500 blogs today, is reminiscent of the formative years of the language when it made the transition from the oral and handwritten mode to the print media.

But the similarity between the two eras and the two technologies ends here.

And, given the Hindi language’s notoriously fraught relationship with technology in general and mass-media in particular, it is not surprising that the Hindi bloggers on the Internet are all young — mostly in their twenties and thirties.

It is almost a given to think of Hindi as an embattled language, but the fact remains that it has managed to erase its arch-rival Urdu, has almost devoured ‘its’ various dialects and has pretty much made peace with the status of English as the post-colonial global language of this country.

Hindiwallahs feel let down by the State, but they have always loathed Commerce equally.

Ironically, it is the content-hungry and numbers-driven media bazaar, in the form of print since the early-19th century...