India Uncut

Debashish Chakrabarty, the organiser of the Indibloggies, got in touch with me recently to say that prior to this year's awards, he was planning to run a series called "Hum Blogistani" that would feature various Indian bloggers talking about what he terms the "Indi-blogosphere." He wanted me to start off the series, and my piece, "A tool for social change," is up on Indibloggies now. He introduces the concept of the series in the first three paras, after which my piece begins.

Debashish requested that the piece be available exclusively on his site, so I'm not cross-posting it here. But I'm allowed to excerpt from it, so here's the last bit of the piece, my justification for the prediction that "the most influential Indian blogs of the next ten years will be those written in Indian languages":

Most of India does not speak English, and for too long the elites have condescended to them. This will change. As internet access becomes ubiquitous, more and more people will want to read content in their own languages. And while the regional papers, set in their fixed ways, will largely disappoint them, bloggers will not. Language software today is easily available and easy to use, and a whole generation of free thinkers and fearless writers will emerge. They will write in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati, Urdu, Oriya and every other language and dialect of this country. They will reach out to an audience of hundreds of millions of people, not the mere tens of thousands we bloggers in English have access to right now. They will truly do what some us vainly and bombasticly speak of sometimes: they will change the country.

It will take years, but it will happen.

You can read the full piece here.