#IndiCal Blogger Meetup

I attended the Indiblogger meet up that was organized by Indiblogger in collaboration with Akshaya Patra and others in Kolkata, at the Suresh Neotia Center for Excellence in Leadership last Sunday. Here are some of the memories as captured by my Blogger Buddy Nipon, himself a doctor, with his mobicam.

The meet was attended by 100 odd folks from various walks of life. From Sukanya, who had started blogging in 2003, to a guy who had started just 15 days ago, there was an entire spectrum of bloggers. The largest demography, it seemed, was the tech guys: mostly studying engineering in colleges in and around the city. There were a few professional tech folks, and some city-based eclectic bloggers. There were no sports bloggers or science bloggers (except for me, if  you consider mine to be a science blog!). My friend Nipon is also a tech blogger, though he is a doc, so he doesn’t really count. I had expected that all of the meet-ers would be young and college goers or recent grads. I was surprised to see some older bloggers (no offense please!). One who stood out was Mrs. Muffet, who started blogging after her daughter got married and left their “nest”. Then there was Vineet Arora, who distributed customized cards with the blog details on it. Guerilla marketing, as he put it. I had planned something like that, making a tee with the following message smeared on it:

However, things did not quite work out for me mainly because I was stuck in the hospital for so long that I could not get it done on time. Anyways. As I was saying: the people were fantastic, and before we went to the meet, both Nipon and myself were concerned that it would be a “Guys Only” kinda thing, since girls, as we know, are mostly not the bloggy type! Surprisingly, we were proved to be wrong, since there were several representatives from the fairer sex and some of them clearly knew what they were after! So, in this session where we had to scribble comments on a sheet hung on everyone’s backs, this cute chica came up to me and asked for a comment, and the clever clusterbumbler that I am, I scribbled “Don’t turn your BACK on me”. Ahem. I know. A poor pun, hard to resist.

Some other, family-blogworthy, non-NSFW type puns I made were Back-alaureate of Medicine (on Nipon’s back, cause you see, he’s a doctor, a baccalaureate of medicine!), Servants of BACK-us (on Renie’s back, I think: Bacchus, the God of Booze, see!). OK. I’m stopping here. No need for the dirty looks.

Although I believe I have fairly broad spectrum interests in Music, I somehow did not take much of a shine for the Five Little Indians, who rocked the show after we were done geeking over our blogs. It seemed that the crowd there had heard them perform before and were chanting along, but, then again, since they were mostly belting out rock-ey stuff, generic head banging and growling in accompaniment with the air guitar strumming would have been good enough. Before the Indifans decide to launch a DDoS on my blog, I better stop here.

Akshay Patra held center stage for some time to showcase their worthy endeavor, and in this post I will just limit myself to saying that I will be blogging more about the AP campaign over the next few days. It is indeed a wonderful project which feeds 1.3 million children everyday all over India and are helping children choose in the dilemma of books vs bread. It is an effort to which I have pledged my support, monetarily and time wise, as also endoresement from this blog. I am usually skeptical about NGOs running programs which complement Government run programs (like Mid Day Meal program in this case). My experience (albeit limited) shows that they often hijack the (very little) good work done by the Governmental programs, since the behemoth of bureaucracy is blind to PR gimmicks. However, the Akshaya Patra people were very open and cordial and invited a bunch of us to visit their kitchens and over see the entire process at their own expenses!

Did I mention that we all were given free tees at the do? Yeah, we were!

And finally, there had to be a downer in all of this. How can I expect a day to go as smoothly as this and not throw up a tantrum at the very end? My car had been acting all moody of late, and it was during my departure that I realized that the battery was dead, thanks to my endless music blaring and not checking for water and stuff. While a push and a shove was needed to get the cranky beauty moving, thankfully, it got all sorted out thereafter, when the turbines kicked in (yo engineering dudes, gimme a break already!). Anyways, with the car acting all moody and myself so worn out after the Indiawesomeness, I decided to skip the Kolkata Blogger Meet 2011, being organized not far from there.

Sigh. Great day came to a close. Met some great people. Major connecting and stuff. Now, to see if any of them give any attention to my blog: some hitz would be welcome, folks!