I was still sursprised I couldn’t find a single mention of the day-long hunger strike in New Delhi by the families of missing people from Jammu and Kashmir on Thursday (22nd). Is there a filter working inside Google India like, say, the one in China? I am not sure!

Gaurav: An editorial in Business Today magazine had given the impression that, ‘depending upon whose version you believe’, you either resigned or was sacked. I wanted to maintain the ambiguity by saying that you had to leave, but in a hurry ended up writing that you were sacked. I maintain the highest respect for your brave conduct when faced with bullying from a powerful, unethical institution. I regret the inconvenience thus caused to you and apologise unconditionally.

Panini: language main bahut gadbad ho jata hain, ky karein, if only I knew some Urdu…

Aman: You raise different and rather interesting issues about our response as readers to anonymous texts. But before I comment, let me say that my article/post was in reaction to the drivel against anonymous blogs I constantly hear from non-bloggers who find anonymous blogging problematic because of issues of ‘hate speech’ ‘abuse’, ‘libel’.

I followed your (first) comment tile the point you say “but the fact that the writer seems to be so divorced from her text unsettles me”. As I see it, the writer in fact come closer to his/her text by anonymous/pseudonymous blogging. Rather than an abdication of responsibility towards one’s written text, it signifies the expression of apprehenmsion that his/her sppech may get him/her in trouble. It’s a result of a desire to say things one can’t.

On your point that “The separation of blogs and mainstream media also seems rather forced to me” – the illustration of why it’s not forced is in front of you on this very page. Sabnis is able to protest on this page, and write a post called “Shivam Vij and journalistic ethics” on his blog (so typical of him!) whereas the Himal page doesn’t even allow comments. I don’t say this as a criticism of Himal, but just as an example of how form dictates content in both cases.

you actually make the blogs sound mainstream and conservative and the indian english media sound alternative and almost cool. (which it isnt of course)

Sometimes I really have felt that way! But I think both have their coolness quotient, and it makes a lot of sense to respect their differences with and from each other even as one notices the similarities. Actually, the intro on the Himal page explains best what I meant: that both blogs and MSM ultimately reflect the “blinkered nature of the middle class”.

Space bar: You will have to read Aman’s comment carefully: he does acknowledge your point but is raising more complex issues.

PP: On your comment “The fact of the matter is that in the anonymity of the blogger, the ‘author’ is finally not only disowned but quite concretely lost” – that’s a fascinating disillusionment, but I don’t think I agree. What we have at hand is Noise – a collection of myriad voices that you have to filter in your own mind. Once you do that, then authorial voice will be concretely ‘found’ :)

Aman: Okay, but so what? Where do we take it from here? Once you have found an anymous blogger’s context and ‘located’ him/her, so what? Are you saying that some blogs do not allow themselves to be located/contextualised? I disagree, because you only have to read them for a while to find that.

P: The “processes of ‘non-authorising states/moments of existence’, historical denials and deferrals” you talk about are, I would argue, actually carried out through the very authorised voices (within and without the blogosphere) that according to you are ‘disowned and concretely lost’. By the way, it’s ‘blogosphere’ and not ‘blog-sphere’!

If, instead of giving myself an obviously “internet -type name” (i use this in the loosest way) like “Ctrl F7″ or something, i call myself “Rohan Jain” in blog – then it is as efficient a cover- or maybe even more so cos u dont expect anyone to rename themselves Rohan Jain – all due apologies to Rohan Jains. So that isnt really my point. In fact, deliberately chosen ids/handles are often more revealing than real names – I am Aman Sethi cos my parents called me that- it is involuntary, but i surf the internet as “Fire wire” or “Ctrl F7″ then it says something about the wy i consciously choose my handle. but i digress.

I am looking at the hypothetical case where one comes across an entirely unreferenced text – maybe while trawling the internet – or perhaps printed on a page that has been re-used to wrap a packet of channa chor-garam. What is the value you accord to that text – there is no previous user history, no reference to anything – nothing that tells me what circumstances this text was written in.
It is only then that i would say it is entirely anonymous.

Riverbend’s blog says “girlblog from iraq” – and that is all i need to know when i read it because i think it makes the same text more interesting if its written by an iraqi in baghdad, than by a concerned, cosmopolitan delhi’ite.

Which brings me to the idea of recovering the author – the author does not have t be the person. the author is often the circumstance. Occupation, isolation, a life-changing experience, becoming the world’s richest man, becoming the first woman in space, being saurav ganguly – these are cirsumstances that make authors out of the most disparate of individuals. And so, when riverbend says “girlblog from iraq” – she is no longer anonymous- she may not be identifiable person – but she is an engageable circumstance.
A.

I hope Shivam will make the change when he gets time. I already got a response from Himal’s editors saying they would be issuing a correction.

Not just the blog-sphere, even the MSM has become boring beyond belief. Rajdeep Sardesai’s “Is hamaam meiN sabhi naNge haiN” is a symptomatic picture of how cliche-ridden and trivial the MSM discourse has become in these post-choleric times. (I wonder if there is some way of taking a bath without bein ‘naNga’ in the ‘hamaam’. Whoever coined this phrase must be a very unhappy wo/man.) Barkha Dutt has lost it somewhere in the middle, in the rhizomatic uncertainty of which road to choose; Karan Thapar frowns and scowls no longer able to trifle with your blood pressure; poor Vinod Dua is tame like a near domesticated lion; Pankaj Pachauri hasn’t completed a simple sentence in Hindi in a long long time in any of his shows; Prabhash Joshi, the lion in winter, is a near retired author; Javed Akhtar and Purshottam Aggarwal predictably too expensive.

Eventually, it is the language that is losing out. The discourse of the common sense abounds and more often than not we have to negotiate the river of tedium and wallow in it for the other end of the trivia is nowhere in sight. As they might say, make hay while river of sand flows. The third world dons now don the first world robes of theory in the ingratiating hope of accomodation in Princetons and NYUs. The political class is in a state of perpetual fight with the state even as no one believes for a second that the state would listen to the PC with even an iota of concern and micro-iota of compassion. Ghalib’s “hota hai shab-o-roz tamaasha” is getting so farcically redefined each passing day.

Within these uneven equations, the blog-sphere has given the blogger an opportunity to revel in her/his endless choreography of the self getting increasingly steeped in the mild hysterium of our barren epochs of 9% growth rate. We know the ground we stand on has lost all water at its core; we know how ‘dry’ all our houses have become and how completely arsenically contaminated; we hear the sound of primeval snow chipping off the glaciers of thought; we feel the undrinkable water of emotions rising and rising. Nobody cries anymore even when driven to the brink. People just fall and die even as the stray bullets of this new hysterium hit them all too predictably.

Aman: blogs, like mail ids, need one to sign in with a username and password; and unless the blog is a collaborative one, there is only one person who can post. Why would you doubt that the content has been posted by the same person?

As you can see, I’m an anonymous blogger; but surely the general tone of my writing remains the same over time? Anyone can gather that from reading a blog over a period of time.

Also, one engages with the text; not with a name. Writers have used pseudonyms even before we thought of the word ‘cyberspace’; and whether or not we ever figured out their ‘real’ names, we engaged with the texts they produced.

The first being the idea of anonymous blogging, and how we approach it as readers – Yes anonymous blogging is indeed a freedom that must be protected – one should have the right to shed one’s identity atleast in “cyberspace” if nowhere else; but how do we, as readers, react to anonymous texts? wdo we priviledge texts that come from an identifiable source – even if that source itself is a psuedonym. So we dont know who riverbend is – but we would like to believe that most posts on her blog, that are signed riverbend, belong to a fixed source.

But where does this come from? perhaps from the fact that a name-whatever it may be- builds a relationship between the reader and the writer – it creates a space where i can engage with the text. This relationship may not always be cordial – there are columnists i read everyweek simply to be outraged by their smugness. This i think is where my anxieties with the blogosphere begin. I agree that is probably the gut reaction of a MSM reporter – but the fact that the writer seems to be so divorced from her text unsettles me.

The separation of blogs and mainstream media also seems rather forced to me. Of course the blog frees you from bosses, deadlines, funding sources and editorial “lines” on things – and this difference cannot be understated – but as you point out in your post – a majority of bloggers have rather predictable and boring takes on things.

so when you say “While the Indian English media is largely dominated by various shades of left-liberal opinion, the fact that much of the BJP-voting middle class does not share it is an uncomfortable truth often reflected in the blogosphere.” – you actually make the blogs sound mainstream and conservative and the indian english media sound alternative and almost cool. (which it isnt of course)

Dear Shivam,

I was not “sacked” by IBM. I resigned. Everyone knows this, especially you, as is evident from this post of yours – http://mallroad.blogspot.com/2005/10/art-of-writing-legal-notices.html
I request you to please make the appropriate change in this post.