Publicity Gimmicks or Truth

The media has been going overboard with the news and rumours of developments in the relationships of Saif - Kareena - Shahid.

I find it very hard to believe that there is any element of "making or breaking hearts" in break-up between Shahid Kapur and Kareena Kapoor and the reports of formation of a new alliance between Saif Ali Khan and the actress. It appears to be more of professional relationships that suit them and their projects at hand.

The timing for the change of partner by Kareena is a little too obvious to accept the theory that there has been any personal bonding or heart breaking between any of the three.

Shahid and Kareena were moving together while they were working together in the movies. Now that those projects are over it suits them to concentrate on their newer projects and team up with their new project partners. The media has also been talking about Kareena and Saif working together on a movie project.

I feel, that seeing the popular young actress moving around with a different partner caught the attention of some enthusiatic reporter. The interpretation of the coupling may have been done correctly or there may be an error - this is a fact that only the stars themselves can confirm.

Whatever be the case, the media has only been too obliging to provide them and their movie projects so much space and publicity for free. There are other movie projects that are spending mega bucks to get the same kind of of attention from the media, before the release of their movies.

So much coverage is certainly enough to motivate a section of the audience loosen their money bags and venture to the cinema hall to see the movies.

The conservative part of me certainly hopes that no one breaks his or her heart neither any of the famous Bollywood actors nor any of their fans when they find out that there was little truth or depth in the publicity.

Writing Blogs - Its good! Its Fun

I feel I have come a long way since 3rd December 2006 when I wrote my first blog here at Writer's Itch.

The more I write - the more I feel like writing, and believe me I have written a lot.

I may not compare to some of the professional writers who can write page after page without much pause, but still I have written enough original content - mostly research based - in the last 10 odd months. I have enjoyed all that I have written.

Let me summarize - I am presently maintaining about 8 sites, these include websites and weblogs. The way things are moving, I won't be surprized if it becomes 16 before I complete my first year at blogging.

You can find my content here at BlogSpot, then at WordPress. There's a link here that will take you to a blog at Opera.

One of my proud display is "www.merabsp.com" the portal for Information on Bilaspur City. It is been completely done from concept to implementation under my stewardship.

I have submitted articles for magazines - though not all were selected. I have tried my hand at news-writing.

Lets see how things pan out.

Writing here after almost 2 months

Hi!

I am writing here after more than 2 months, but I must say that I have been writing all this while. Internet has enabled me to wear my writer cap and now it just won't come off.

Writing has been my favorite pass-time or you may call it hobby, but I did not know that I would like it so much. I am registered with several sites where I contribute online with my writing. It really gives a lot of satisfaction that your work is being read.

The biggest thing of writing online is that you have a mechanism to gauge the number of times your contribution has been accessed. It lets me decide on which part of my own knowledge base I should dwell on to keep up the readership.

Its pays - a very important consideration. Money is a sign of ones success of his endeavors in life and once you are paid for some work you have done it speaks volumes about your work.

Above all, I am enjoying it.

Hindi transliteration is impressive.

I have been wanting to try the transliteration feature of the editor over here. Lets see how it works, here goes...

अब मैं इंग्लिश मे टाईप कर रह हूँ। जैसे ही मैं स्पस-बार दबाता हूँ तुरंत उसी जगह पर अपनेआप वहाँ पर हिंदी आ जाता है। इसने एक भी गलती नही कि। काफी अच्छा काम किया है इसको बनाने वाले ने।

The developers of this blogger site have really made effective use of technology and I must say I am impressed with this English to Hindi conversion done here.

Off late my contributions here have reduced as I have found a more productive place to write. My team and I have worked to develop the information site of Bilaspur. The development of content in this site allows me to exercise my writing skills.

Moreso, we have added a news section to the site. Though it has still not matured fully, it gives me enought opportunity to write and enter the news. This exercise has specially become exciting because some of the news sites have recognized the place as a news source, which in turn is driving some traffic our direction.

All the excitment of developing content for the site is keeping us busy with little time of write anywhere else. Still the itch to write prevents me from keeping away from this place for a long time.

Writing and Writing Away

This blog has certainly helped me get into the flow of writing.

Obviously the readers of this blog may feel that there is not much that can be seen here that can in any be quantified in terms of my writing work. But, then this is where I write when I just want to write, generally when I get an itch to write.

This blog gives me a vent for letting out some of my emotions and try out my hand at different types of writing. Starting out from here I am maintaining a total of 3 blogs, 2 web-sites as part of my on-line portfolio. I have started contributing to the local newspapers. I have done a couple of small commercial valued writing assignments and a number of ghost writing work for my friends and clients.

Lets see where this itch to writing has in store for me in the near future.

An Opinion on CWC 2007

There was absolutely no enthusiasm amongst the general public in India for the Cricket World Cup 2007 finals. India was an absolute no show and got knocked out in the Group matches, so much so that it could not qualify for the Super 8 Series.

This led to a total change of mood and loss of interest towards the tournament. Nobody was interested in any cricket related news. Within one day the audiences vanished and the channels showing the CWC games had lost their popularity. The public frustration and resentment was at its peak. So much so, that a couple of groups came forward asking the people not to buy the products of the companies who had shown all the high-pitched ads displaying the Indian Team players.

All the ads showing the cricket stars were gone. A couple of companies went to the extent of making public announcements to renounce the cricket players and pledging not to use these players in their ads and publicity material until they showed a marked improvement in their performace.

The cricket players in particular and the cricket board of India (BCCI) as a whole became the favorite topics of the comedy shows. The comedians had a field day encashing on the high-pitched claims made by the players in the ads and their poor performance. The promotors of one of India's leading television channels went to the extent of cooking up a scheme to revamp the entire cricketing and playing format of the game in the country, which was, as expected, promptly rejected by BCCI.

Let's see how the events unfold. Something drastic needs to be done and that too soon to retain the public interest in the game.

Gajendra

India is out of ICC Cricket World Cup 2007

India is almost out of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2007. The only hope left of it making into the Super 8 series is that Bermuda should defeat Bangladesh with a good margin. The way both Bangladesh and Bermuda have performed in the recent past this seems highly unlikely.

This shabby performance of Team India has disappointed us.

Everybody around us is talking of all the bragging that the players shamelessly did in the media. The loud advertisements where the players left no stone unturned to convince the Indians that they would certainly return with the ICC Cricket World Cup 2007. We have also come across a group that is planning to run a pledge campaign where they are asking the people at large to boycott use of the products of the companies that contributed to the media hype that was created throught such advertisement, at least of a short period of time.

It is time the corporate world took notice of the resentment in the market and stops playing with the sentiments of the people. It could lead to a negative impact on the sales of their products.

Meanwhile, our city site has been shifted to its own domain - http://www.merabsp.com. The beta site at http://bilaspur.dataspec.info was receiving decent traffic, we are keeping our fingers crossed and are continually hoping that web site keeps receiving better audience.

Gajendra

Just unable to write.

Since the day I put up my last post, I just am unable to sit up and write.

It feels so strange. One day everything was smooth with me devoting a little time for all the activities lined up for the day then all of a sudden everything goes hay-wire.

Our group decides that we should put up something related to cricket on our site. With the mega event of Cricket - ICC Cricket World Cup 2007 - round the corner it would be inappropriate if the site does not have anything on the issue.

There goes the peace into thin air. Setting the database and the software and compiling the data - phew!! One hell of an assignment and very little time to accomplish all this. However, we did it. The cricket section is up and running fine. There is still lots on our database that can be shown. If you are interested the URL is http://bilaspur.dataspec.info/Cricket.aspx.

Some customers got angry because we had neglected them. But I must say, it certainly did us some good. It has brought some steady traffic to our portal. Some search engine has got us indexed in some good position. Our logs are showing a steady inflow of new hits on the Cricket page of our site.

Now we have to do some thing to maintain these hits after the world cup is over.

Gajendra

Blog on my experiences as a portal developer

Its done. I have launched a new blog to document my experiences in leading the development of the city portal for Bilaspur.

The link for the new portal is http://my.opera.com/WebDevMan/blog.

I look forward to pen down my experiences and share them with the development community at large.

I only hope I enjoy posting in the new blog as I have over here.

Development of a Portal

I have been working on web-sites for more than 5 years now. I have developed several dynamic and static web sites hosted on the Internet and on intranets. I have always enjoyed the experience of delivering information to people in distant locations on the click of a mouse.

All the sites done so far were for clients - on order - where neither the nature of content nor its quality and quantity were in my control. But, leading the development of our own web-site - an intended portal in the long run - is a different experience altogether. There is so much that can be done with web-sites.

I think, I shall start a new blog to publish my experiences in this line of work.

Meanwhile, my team have started gearing up the site for the upcoming Cricket World Cup 2007 schedule to start in March 2007 in the West Indies. The list of teams and schedule is already up. We are waiting for the teams to be announced.

We hope to provide easy to access, rich, cross-linked reporting on the event.

Information Site for Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, India

I would like to alter the old adage "practise makes perfect" to "practise makes confident".

Well! It is certainly so. Thanks to this blog - gajendhir.blogspot.com. It is here that I started all out on my writing spree.

Don't judge me by the amount of posting you see here. I agree it may not seem enough to many. I have done much more writing beyond this site. I am personally satisfied with the amount of writing work that I have already done and it is just the beginning.

Very little of my writing is on-line, some can be seen at...

• retailsurvive.blogspot.com
• My official web-site

Each page I write, my confidence is increasing.

Meanwhile, I have started work on one more web-site last fort-night. It is an Information Site for Bilaspur. Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh, India is where I live and this site is devoted at providing on-line information about the region. Presently the beta can be seen as a sub-domain of my official web-site.

We are targetting at providing a complete picture about the district covering all aspects including...

• Administration
• Commerce
• Education
• Health Care
• Tourism
et al

We are receiving good feedback from the local population and are sure to come up with an useful, informative site.

The site is fast taking shape and soon it will be ready to be transfered to its own domain.

I have completed my first paid writing job

Writing has always fascinated me. I have always been impressed by people whose work has been published. I have been regularly trying my hand at writing and have been published several times. All of the writing work that I have done so far has been for free.

Let me try to list out the different types of writting works that I have done so far. I have...

• Done translation work for a local newspaper - translating articles and news from English to Hindi and vice-versa.
• Written technical articles on the Internet.
• Done ghost writing
• Written and published my own book - titled "Community Based Rehabilitation - An Introduction" - in Hindi.

I have nurtured the love for writing for quite sometime now.

Last week was different. It was the first time I did freelance writing work for which the writing fees were negotiated and finalized before the work was started. Though the amount was not much - still it is important because it was the first time I had taken up an assignment for writing on a commercial basis.

The work was a small one page article for a local business who wanted copy a brochure that he wants to get printed. The work has been duly completed, submitted and submitted. I can attribute part of my confidence in taking up this assignment to this blog. It has given me an opportunity to write out to my heart's content and get over the mental block.

I now await the payment and hope I get it before the excitement for it subsides.

I am really excited and looking out for more such assignments.

The bungle has been resolved.

I would like to dedicate this blog entry to all those who wished me luck in resolving the problem I had got myself into last time. (See previous post for details.)

The issue has been resolved. The web-site is up and running fine. The new feature that was the source of the problem is also up and working as planned and anticipated on the drawing board. In fact, now I am in a position where I would say that the error was a blessing in disguise. But for the problem, I would not have explored and research ASP.NET, the development platform used, to the extent I did, at least not in the near foreseeable future.

Once again thanks to all my well-wishers.

Today, has been a bad day at work.

Yes!

I spent more than 4 hours at a stretch sitting in front of my computer trying to update an existing feature on a web-site developed by my company. The targeted exercise was supposed to be a minor tweak that was to be completed in 10-20 minutes. It was actually a programming short-cut aimed at optimizing the code to reducing system overheads and that in-turn would improve performance.

Now, after spending so much time I am back to square -1. Yes -1. The feature that was working fine is not working any more. I think I have bungled up in a big way. The bungle is very big because it has effected the working of the entire site. Many features are not working now. To top it, I don't have backup.

I think, I have tweaked some common system setting of the site and I don't remember which. Out of the 4 hours I have spent the last 2 trying figure out what went wrong.

I am going to quit for the day and go home to my wife and kid. Hope the change will rejuvenate me and refuel me for the debugging session tomorrow.

I really hope I don't have to start from scratch. Wish me luck. I am going to need lots of it.

How to make money online?

It has been some time since I have written on this blog. Almost two weeks!

Well! I have been busy. I have been exploring ways for making money on the internet. There is certainly a lot of material in free float that discusses on this topic. Some of the content on this topic is so loud that it certainly has made me skeptic and suspicious.

From the very beginning I have been taught the value of money and how one must offer some product or service of equivalent value in exchange for money. There are some folks promising that you will make money, and that too lots of it, online without having anything of equivalent value to deliver in exchange. I agree that valuation is a relative concept. Different people may have different parameters of measurement and arrive at different values for the same product or service. These ideas certainly did not measure up to the desired mark in terms of value. Some of the ideas that I came across sounded and felt like a scam; even if they may be well within the legal framework they sure as hell will not be sustainable over a period of time.

I must hasten to add that not all the discussion on this topic was suspicious or dubious in appearance. There were some ideas that sounded fair and square. But, they did not appeal to my line and style of work so I have filed them away for future reference.

Meanwhile, I think, I must keep exploring until I come up with something of sustainable value, plausible and easy to delivery in exchange of the money that will be earned.