My blog is a big bag of bullshit. And I don’t promote it much. People who read my blog often know that very well. I write complete bullshit. Nobody cares. I know that. But my blog does manage to get visitors once in a while because of the few tech stuff that I have in here. Linux buffs like my blog. Select posts if not the whole blog.
Well, Im not the worst. I do know a lot of people who write more bullshit that I do, and keep their blog on the top of the searches. How is that done? SEO. Search Engine Optimization.
Doing it manually is a tough job. It would take a lifetime to optimize one blog manually. And I have 27 blogs, and only 1 life. How do I still stay in business? I have a huge array of seo tools installed in my computer and servers, without which I would have been just another stupid software engineer working at some stupid company making a few hundred thousand rupees a year.
Have I been a spoilt brat that I like only masala movies from Bollywood? Don’t I really recognize a good movie? Well, I did like Aishwarya’s The Mistress of Spices. Infact I would say that it was her best movie. Full of spices and yet no masala. I liked The Namesake, and I did like Fire as well. I admired Shabana Azmi and the role that she played in that movie. So why didn’t I like Slumdog?
Is it because the movie is too realistic? Or is it because I have seen the real India already and don’t see anything new in this movie? Or is it because i knew the story since long.
It is just a love story, and a guy gets lucky and makes a 20 million rupees. Well, if I were lucky, and if I were asked the right questions, I would have surprised Amit ji as well. Or even Shah Rukh.
What is the big deal about this movie? What is the big fuzz? I don’t really see it.
The conference was over on Sunday evening, and as I couldn’t get a low fare plane out of Delhi on Monday, I decided to fly back on Tuesday, and spend Monday looking around Delhi.
I had taken a Pre Paid taxi from the airport in Delhi to Chanakyapuri, where Pondicherry State Guest House is, where I had preferred to stay. The accommodation was good enough. Well, where else would you get a room for Rs 400 a night? Well, this rate is only for the people who book from Pondicherry and have a Pondicherry address.
Managed to visit the Red Fort on Sunday evening itself, and thanks to the lighting conditions (and my deteriorating photography skills), none of the photos came out well.
I booked a tikcet with Panicker’s Travel who had a package that covers Agra Fort, Taj Mahal and the Lord Krishna temple at Mathura. Cost me 750 bucks. The volvo bus started at 6 am, and I had to wake up at 4 am and leave my hotel at around 5. I had a sweater over my shirt, a jerkin over the sweater, and a thick pair of jeans, and I was still shivering thru the auto rickshaw ride to the point of departure of the bus. I don’t know why it took so long, but we reached Agra fort only at around 11 AM, as I would have covered the distance of 200 km in about 3 hours time in a car.
I caught this model at the hotel where we had lunch. They say it is worth 5 lac rupees.
The south gate of The Taj Mahal
I was quite busy photographing this gate, and you may notice that the group with which I was has moved ahead of me. I went near them after a few pics, and listened to the things that the guide said about the place, and passed through the gate.
And this is what I saw when I passed through the gate. First it looked to me like a very high resolution image of the Taj Mahal displayed on the screen the size of the entrance. Well, I have seen the Taj only on photographs in the past. And this just looked to me as a super high resolution image to me. The lighting was perfect. Usually people enter through the west gate, but our guide took us through the south gate. I didn’t ask him the reason.
I strolled around for about 2 hours in there, tried to pay attention to detail, which I am not very good at, and shot as many photos as I could. I am used to taking photographs only with a camera with a view finder, and my year old Olympus digital camera has only got a screen and no view finder, and in the sun, I am unable to get the images clearly, and therefore none of the pics look professional.
Then we came out, went to Mathura, where after visiting the temple, I had a glass of milk. It tasted heavenly. Or perhaps there is a difference between south Indian milk and North Indian milk. But I just loved the taste.
Camera, mobiles or nothing that is electronic is allowed inside the mathura temple.
We left Mathura and reached Delhi by around 10 pm. Had dinner, and went straight to sleep and woke up only at around 10 o clock on tuesday morning. Packed up everything, and left the hotel at 2 pm, reached chennai at 8.30 pm, and reached Pondicherry at around 11 pm.
The day bothered me with several things. Server issues, domain issues, raining outside, no water to drink etc inside etc. I had to cancel a meeting with a very important person, and scheduled it to Saturday at Pondicherry.
I came to my apartment early, and was just passing time while I had a call from my associate at Pondicherry, saying that ITWare Mani is looking for me, and had wanted my address and phone number.
I have heard about ITWare Mani, and that he charges a lot for a pathetic looking websites with all text and no designs. Many of my own clients from Pondicherry have told me that ITWare India Mani from Pondicherry is not doing a good job at all, and at times, once he is paid, he vanishes away, never delivering the website, and after lots of painful followups from the client, he uploads a plain white page website onto the site prepared with Microsoft Word with the content and photos provided by the cleints, and charges 40 to 50 thousand rupees for it. Clients fall for him because claims that he is a monopoly in Salem and Erode website markets, which is he unable to prove. And the post on my blog that seems to have offended him was purely based on that. HERE is the post that says ITWare India, Pondicherry stinks so badly.
After a while I had a call from ITWare Mani Himself. I didnt really recognize his number, but when he called, he asked me if it is Ravi on the other end. I said yes.
“Are you the owner of Ravis Blog?” I said Yes.
“You have written very badly about me and my company, I need your address and phone number to file a Police complaint.”
I said you have my phone number, and gave him my address.
He said he has lots of contacts with Gundas and Rowdys in pondicherry, and with lots of Kooli Padai, and that he himself is a very regular visitor to Pondicherry jail for petty offenses like pick pocket, drunken driving, and stealing luggage from weary passengers waiting in the busstand. And now that he has got my address and phone number, he was going to proceed with the complaint to the police.
I plainly said “Ok”.
He asked “Can’t you just remove it?”
I said “You should have asked this first before giving out your personal profile”.
The line wnet dead.
If a citizen of India has the right to talk, right to comment on anything, and if India is a democratic country, and not something like North Korea, then he can blog as well. And I blogged about what I felt was right to write. And Im not really excited by taking a dumb threat from a barking dog. So why am I writing this post? Well, its just a filler in my blog.
Disclosure : This keywords in this blog post are Intentionally optimized for search engines.
