Other people's blogs

I saw a comic strip recently, I think it was in the New York Times, in which the joke ran along the following lines:

Man A is at a computer, gazing riveted at the screen. Man B approaches, asks “What are you doing?”
Man A: “I’m blogging.”
Man B: “What’s a blog?”
Man A: “Oh, it’s an online diary. I use it to record whatever I do all day.”
Man B: “And what do you do all day?”
Man A: “I read other people’s blogs.”

Determined to take a break, I spent an unprecedented two consecutive days at home, doing nothing major outside of reading (and gazing sadly at my dust-laden DVDs). Finished two Artemis Fowls, three Lemony Snickets, a Dilbert anthology, half of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate and a few stories from Penguin’s new anthology of “new writing from India”, First Proof. (Recommended: Jerry Pinto’s piece on the vamp in Hindi cinema, “The Woman Who Could Not Care”, with some provocative, unselfconscious writing on movies that many of us don’t believe are even worth thinking about, let alone writing about.)

For once, I also spent more time checking other people’s blogs than adding to my own. This was partly laziness and partly a version of Joey’s malaise in that Friends episode: “I tried to write down my thoughts, but you know what, it turns out I don’t have as many thoughts as you’d think.”

So I'll take the easy way out with some quick observations on developments in the blogosphere:

- Two of the most prolific readers/reviewers I know of have restarted their sites after cruelly long hiatuses. A big “Thank heavens you’re back!” to Kitabkhana’s Hurree Babu (whose offline identity was recently “outed” in India Today’s surprisingly tolerant story on blogging). See this post on lit-bloggers trying to change the world. Meanwhile, Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta has put up an eye-poppingly large number of posts since I last checked Indian Writing, including these ones on the Marine Drive rape and this oneon pavement bookshops.

- On India Uncut, Amit Varma continues to make pointed observations about the state of the nation and its many clowns in pithy posts like this one on K S Sudershan and this one on posthumous awards.

- Rahul Bhatia travels to Old Meerut.

- Among the more personal blogs, Samit Basu has this hilarious take on the Pepsi Bubbly song.

- And The Letterhead has returned from Paris, Venice, Rome and Florence and posted a number of snapshots that make me want to rush out and start a photo blog pronto.

There’s probably a lot that I’ve missed, but until I get around to using Bloglines (which allows you to see updates on various people’s blogs at one go), this will have to do.