35 days or so in chennai during the midst of a music season was so liberating. Not because I’m some NRI running around in kakkhi shorts and a sporty sandal. Its ironically true and I will explain why.

I was somewhat faceless, like a nomadic traveller. There was no friend who spotted me when walking in Pondy Bazaar, no mael veettu aathi pinnal ponnu who chuckled at me atleast once a day, no paalakaran who asked when I dropped by, no librarian welcoming me like a bakra to his shop. Ok, a distant distant related maama actually found me in some kutcheri and asked me, ” ambi eppidida padippu poguthu?”. Something he should have asked me 10-12 years ago. That apart, I was a literally anonymous in my own city. And I’m grumpy about it but not then.

While I was enjoying the new found anonymity that I never had in Chennai, I’m irritated that Chennai has lost its small cityness. You know what I mean, more places, more automobiles, more people, more everything. This again sounds like a desi rant or cheran’s nostalgic movie episode but its very true.

Anyway, I find travelling so invigorating and its because of this anonymity but not in my own city. No.

Picked up a dozen packs of Milk Bikis from the local Indian store. It was in a new wrapper. I was shocked. While tripping in Chennai, I bought a Milk Bikis pack in a totally new packaging and found the design of biscuit completely changed. Instead of Britannia embossed in the middle and surrounded by flower patterns, it had squares all over the biscuit. That wasn’t the biscuit design thats imprinted in me. After all its probably the only biscuit of choice on any given day followed by Bourbon by the same company. Even though it had the same taste, it felt like a different biscuit.

So I was indeed shocked looking at the new pack today. When opened, to my relief, I found it had the same design. Somehow they haven’t changed the design, atleast yet, for the exports. So that’s good. And that’s how I got my biscuit back.

More Biki love, here and here.

I always believed it was the things you don’t choose that makes you who you are. Your city, your neighborhood, your family. People here take pride in these things, like it was something they’d accomplished. The bodies around their souls, the cities wrapped around those.

I wanted to quote this from Gone Baby Gone, when I read this post from Krish. BTW, GBG was a well written directorial debut from Ben Affleck. Yes, Ben Affleck as in Bennifer(Ben+Jennifer Lopez).

Where are these so-called-kings ? The Super Kings of Chennai. Chennai Super Kings‘ site still throws a – The page cannot be found. Khan’s Kolkatta team has their site atleast half-built.

There is a huge opportunity to blog this IPL cricket fever. Afterall movies and cricket unite us more than anything else. I’m sure there are companies out there cracking their minds to build sites and business models around this. Blogging will certainly play a huge role as the crowd becomes information hungry.

It’s not a stock market. No one is going to be benifitted on the short run. Only blogs that have a regular postings, great user interface, less ad-blocks and bite-size information will sustain the long run. But if you are crazy about cricket and would like to have your say on this arena of the blogosphere, just book your domain and start typing. If you are smart, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to start a IPL cricket blog on wordpress.com or blogger.com which are mere sub-domains. It’s already over-crowded there.

If you are bunch of college grads and would like to start a cool company around this IPL phenomenon, a blogging network, which hosts a blog/micro-news-site for each of the teams would make a great deal of sense. You don’t need tons of money to start this. All you need would be one hosting account these days, to host numerous sites.

As IPL grips India, the early birds to this IPL blogging will have a great say. So if you would want to start, today is the day.

P.S – BTW, I recently booked Go Chennai Super Kings !! [Go CSK] just so some damn domain squatter doesn’t walk away with this golden domain. I’m probably not going to do anything with it so if in case you really want to create a blog around this domain, I can certainly part with it.

Yahoo India Maps has a new(don’t know how new it is) feature which can show the directions in vernacular language(Tamil in Tamilnadu) plus it also gives you the approximate autofare for a particular map. The autofare feature is a joke, atleast in Chennai.

Kalakkal Maa !!

P.S -

Check out this snapshot. Congress Party is probably getting to do a major dharna opposite to Yahoo India Office. Get ready guys.