15 February, 2007

Welcome to India Uncut

After much delay, let me finally welcome you to India Uncut!

I first discussed the blueprint of this site with MadMan, who has designed and programmed it, in March last year. Immense procrastination ensued, largely on my part, but we finally got round to working on it a couple of months ago. A brief introduction to each of its sections follows below, taken from my detailed note on how this site came to be and what it contains, ”About India Uncut.”

1] The India Uncut Blog: This will be, for all practical purposes, a continuation of the original India Uncut, with fewer links posts, and more comment and personal blogging. I continue to be its sole author.

2] Linkastic: This is a filter blog, whose purpose is to save you time by bringing you some of the most interesting stuff to read on the internet, across a range of categories. The idea: if you come here three times every day, you will find many new things to read every time. If even one of them interests you, your visit is worthwhile.

This will be a group blog, and besides myself, its contributors are Gautam, MadMan, Prabhu and Sanjeev Naik. I intend to expand the list to around eight to ten people.

3] Rave Out: In this blog, the contributors write short, succinct pieces on books or films or albums, focussing only on what they love. Life is too short to write negative things about stuff we don’t like, and there’ll be none of that here. Only the most joyous, uplifting, enlightening, thought-provoking, sexy works of art will be written about here, purely for the pleasure of being able to share something one feels passionate about.

The contributors, besides me, are Arun Simha, Chandrahas Choudhury, Falstaff, Jai Arjun Singh, KM, Nilanjana S Roy, PrufrockTwo and Sonia Faleiro. This list will also expand a bit.

4] Workoutable: Quizzing is one of my passions, though I’m not particularly good at it. I believe, as do many many fellow quizzers on at least the Mumbai and Pune circuits, that a good quiz question isn’t just about knowledge, but about problem-solving. Even if you don’t know the answer to a particular question, you should have a chance of working it out from clues given in the question. Every day we shall feature a question of that sort in this section. Its contributors include many stalwarts from the Mumbai and Pune quizzing circuits, and once a group of regulars firms up, I shall post the names here.

5] Extrowords: I enjoy making crosswords, and will be doing daily crosswords—barring Sundays—in this section. They will be themed crosswords, with themed words highlighted in each puzzle, and will be generally easy to solve. You need Java for this section, and if you don’t already have it on your computer, you can download it here. The first installment of Extrowords is themed around Indian bloggers, so go solve it!

Phew. The Blogspot version of India Uncut had a hard-to-achieve Pagerank of 7, which will no doubt take some time to reach on the new site. Also, I have no idea how this will impact my top position on the Blogstreet charts. But I’m excited, and I hope you like this development. If you’re reading this on your RSS feed, please do visit the new site and check it out. Do add me to your blogroll or update the existing link—I need to prepare a blogroll for my site as well, which is one of the pendings tasks I have. This site will be in Beta for a while, and we’ll still be adding stuff to it.

Feel free to write in with your feedback, immense joy will come!

If you desire to show your appreciation for the old India Uncut, and these glorious, cow-filled days now gone by, feel free to vote for it in the Indibloggies, where it’s been nominated for Indiblog of the year. You don’t need to have a blog to vote—that field is optional—so go right ahead!