For those of you who read Hindi, there is a feast waiting to be devoured. Over the last couple of years, the world of Hindi blogs has witnessed a mini revolution. The quality of writing, the variety of fare and the freshness of the style has left the world of traditional Hindi letters far behind. This page lists a total of over 300 blogs and it is by no means exhaustive.

Many of these blogs are run by television journalists. Those of us who have ranted endlessly about the degeneration of Hindi TV news would be surprised by this. While TV news seems to have left no space for serious analysis or comment, the world of Hindi blogs is awash with biting pieces about news as well as the production of news. The viewers loss has been the readers’ gain.

One such blog is called naisadak run by NDTV reporter Ravish Kumar. Those who have seen his special reports on NDTV India would recall him as a serious reporter with a slightly satirical bent. His reports on social and cultural issues were always enjoyable, and his content memorable. But the level of his frustration with his profession needs to be witnessed on his blog, where he writes daily and on all manner of things.

The Khairlanji Dalit killings prompted him to produce a passionate critique of Dalit reporting in the media, where he takes the style of reporting to the cleaners with his biting wit. His assertion is that the media forever presents Dalits as the oppressed rural citizens, overloading us with bleeding heart images, but it rarely interrogates upper caste savarnas, who perpetrate atrocities on Dalits.

When he did a show portraying problems faced by urban, well to do Dalits many, even sympathetic, viewers reacted by saying that the people showed by him did not look like Dalits. Ravish’s point is that dalits live in cities too and are also people like us, but are they allowed to remain people like us?

Writing everyday, says Ravish, is an easy and great thing. It would be facile to say that Ravish can say what he wants to on the blog and that this is a way for him to sublimate his everyday angst. But the blog allows Ravish to do things besides venting his journalistic frustration. It allows him to produce good quality writing spontaneously and, going by the number of comments he receives, connect with an online community of readers who respond instantaneously to his pieces.

As he claims in one of his pieces he is writing classics by the day and in the very ephemeral nature of his writing, he writes a post everyday, he sees an escape from the compulsion of waiting for posterity’s judgment.

The great triumph of the blogosphere lies in the creation of this alternate Hindi community. Since it is powered by media-savvy people, there is a familiarity with English and indeed with global trends, that is not so easily available to Hindi print media, for instance.

Moreover, it embraces popular culture in a manner that is not amenable to the Hindi literary community. One of the links provided by Ravish is to Pramod Singh’s Cinema Cinema. Pramod’s blog reviews films of a very wide range, from Omkara to The Last King of Scotland to Yousuf Saeed’s celebrated documentary on the classical music scene in Pakistan.

There is also Mohalla run by another TV journalist and Ravi Ratlami’s blog, the veteran among Hindi bloggers.

A few months ago, the famous Hindi literary periodical Hans had brought out a special issue on TV news channels. Containing stories and essays by almost all the leading TV editors, managers and reporters. What stuck me strongly when I read the stories was the similar anguish and frustration felt by TV reporters. Almost all the stories describe how pretty young girls get easy advancements and how mindless reporting numbs one’s senses. Frankly, I was a little disappointed with the quality of analysis reflected in the stories, which rarely advanced beyond the stereotypes of gender and levity. But reading these blogs has restored my faith in the creativity of Hindi reporters.

The world of Hindi blogs, unlike that of news television, is not overwhelmingly dominated by bhaiyyas from UP and Bihar. I sometimes feel that Hindi TV news is what it is because there are too many of us bhaiyyas, who have grown up in such a desensitised and culturally impoverished world, that we have no qualms about offloading rubbish on people’s head. Cynicism and politics has been the mainstay of UP and Bihar since 1857.

Therefore, I say, thank God for blogs.

You can get an idea of the variety and the vibrancy of this world from Hindiblogs.com

Or go to Neelima Chauhan’s blog, which contains passages from her ongoing research into Hindi blogs as an independent fellow at Sarai-CSDS.

[First published in Mid-Day.]