Author: navin

How to get (old) Media Publicity for your blog

Hobbit Hob from has an interesting article on the IndiaPRBlog where he gives ideas on how you can get some publicity for your blog or for yourself in the old media (newspapers, etc). I obviously have no experience with this myself, but it does appear to be useful advice. Also, what I do know is that many people would never even consider something like this, basically because it appears to be too difficult, or out of their league. But these are fairly easy to achieve if you take time to do your homework and take a disciplined approach.

For bloggers who are engaged in blogging as a profession or are aiming to build up a high profile through blogging, getting covered in the traditional media can be the next big achievement after making a presence in the blogosphere and among the blogging community.

[…]
It’s difficult but not impossible to achieve. With an understanding of how the media works, bloggers can do their own PR and chart out a plan for their own media-image building exercises.

Here are the top 5 steps that bloggers need to take.

Link. (found on DesiCritics.)

79 Percent Of Americans Missing The Point Entirely | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

The Onion (America’s Finest News Source) has a great article on how most Americans are missing the point entirely on a fairly wide array of issues that they consider important:

“From the overweight housewife who eats bag after bag of reduced-fat Ruffles, to the school board that bans Huckleberry Finn for using the word ‘nigger,’ to the Manhattan stockbroker who uses recycled-paper checks to pay for gas for his behemoth SUV, the tendency of Americans to really just not get it transcends all boundaries of class, color, religion, sexual orientation, and political persuasion,” said Dr. Ronald Shaw of Georgetown’s Center For American Studies.

See full article.

If you haven’t really been reading The Onion, you should. It is amazing. The best coverage of the 9/11 bombings and the ensuing American reaction was in The Onion. Almost every article in that issue was spot on – from “Hijackers surprised to find selves in hell” (they were expecting 72 virgins) to “US vows to defeat whoever it is we are at war with” (be it Osama, or Saddam, or Taliban, or whoever). I have been a fan of the Onion for over 15 years. This was when it was just a small, local, print newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin (where I spent 8 years), before the web really existed, and before the Onion hit the big time with a #1 bestseller.

Can India afford its villages?

An editorial in livemint puts forth the thesis that the answer to rural India’s problems does not lie in the development of the villages, but rather in the development of the villagers. And they claim, paradoxically, that the best way to do that is to convert them into city dwellers.

There has been a general tendency to romanticize village life as a return to our roots. What is noticeable, though, is that most people who romanticize village life in India tend to live in cities—in India, or elsewhere. They also seem incapable of noticing the irony implicit in this romanticization, since their forefathers, too, were once villagers —who migrated to cities for good reason.

The main problem they see with development of villages is that a typical village is too small to allow efficient delivery of (at least some important) goods and services. Like electricity.

The economics of power generation and distribution do not allow decentralization to the level of villages that are home to a few hundred people. The average cost of per unit of power makes it prohibitive. The only way for a small 1-2MW decentralized plant to provide power for a village of 1,000 people is for the villagers to pay substantial premiums—which is highly improbable.

However, an earlier post on the Indian Economy blog suggests an alternative way to fix this without giving up on the villages:

Given that rural populations are very poor, it is reasonable to expect that the aggregate demand of a single village for any single service will be very low. However, the aggregate demand for, say, a 100 villages for a single service could be significant. Aggregating the demand for many different kinds of services of the same 100 villages would translate into lot of services. These services would require infrastructural inputs which can be commercially and sustainably supplied. Thus, a RISC would supply to the needs of about 100 surrounding villages.

Considering that Atanu Dey is a co-author of both the above posts, I am not sure why the livemint editorial does not have any reference to the RISC idea.

In any case, it is very common for people to subscribe to the “village life is great” philosophy without really putting too much thought into it. And these two articles should go some way in ensuring that you understand the issues a little bit more.