To make it sweet and short, i won't be updating this blog again after this post. The geek and business blogging from this site will be continue over to the company blog and I will be resuming my personal blogging on the personal domain, mostly on the lines of what used to be here. I won't be transferring this blog's content to either of the two, but content on this domain won't be updated after this.

Sometime later today I will do a 301 redirect on the RSS feed here to pick up the blog feed there. If you want to, you can manually add it by subscribing to it directly. Even if you don't, the transition should be seamless for most of the well-behaved RSS readers.

p.s: There is a bit of an issue with the blog feed not outputting full text feeds. I am working on it. Sorry about that. Fixed

Is what it will pretty soon be after I uprooted myself from where I am these days, in Trivandrum, to move to Delhi. It is sort of hard to believe that it has been that long, or that a lot has happened since, but every now and then age and memories show up in the least expected of places and manner. It is strange to live so many different lives in the same life. Perception maybe a flawed vocabulary for expressing life, but it is the only available out there.

It is hard to believe that I once called this place home, which I still do, more as a verbal familiarity and as a preemptive strike against useless chatter than anything else. I know the places, concepts and things I am supposed to know, but beyond that there is little connect. I still need tangible artifacts from my present to trace and establish my identity. Here, shining a light inwards yields only more darkness. Some tunnels are not meant to see any light ever.

The thing about being unrooted is that you first fear it, then you fight it and then you learn to make your peace with it. It is a seismic shift in understanding that requires you to wear your inside out, destroy all protective fencing and face the day in its full glory, be it even with scorched skies and a merciless sun. To be unrooted is to have nowhere to run to. To be unrooted is to find the same answers everywhere. There is no escape, there is nowhere to hide. To be unrooted is to choose to live, even after knowing all that.

Yet, should this come across as a lament, or as a statement of ire, disenchantment or anything similar, it would be untrue. The commonality of life's 99% is intrinsically tied at the hip and soldered together with its uncommon 1%. The whole is neither this, nor that. It is just a continuum of nows that could either be common or uncommon. Light (itself fairly common) lends no value to itself till it reflects beauty (which is fairly uncommon). The other does not exist till there exists this.

When 2009 kicked in, one of the first things I did was to cut down on my absolutely horrendous volume of information consumed. As laid out earlier, this entailed drastic cuts in the number (feeds and people) and the volume (items and tweets) of sources and information consumed through them, over and above the rather drastic step of being almost off instant messaging itself. Those measures have helped quite a bit and I will detail them out in a later post, but that is not what I wanted to say with this post.

On Saturday morning I headed out with my girlfriend to Bikaner. It is a nice little town about 490-520 kilometers (depending on which road you choose to take) away from Delhi. I had intended to use the trip also to test out a new GPS service provider for my Nokia E71 - the Wayfinder and Mapmyindia combo. In a rather interesting twist of fate Airtel had decided, on their own, that they should disable my domestic roaming while they were carrying out my instructions to disable only international roaming.

This had an unintended consequence of my phone being pretty much useless once we crossed the telecom circle from Airtel NCR, to Airtel Haryana. Unfortunately, all of the phone-based GPS units need a working GPRS connection to get going and that meant I could not test the unit out. The shorter version of the story is that I could not be online or be reached easily for most of the 24th, following which I had decided to really get as much as possible off the grid. The only exceptions were a couple of tweets to broadcast where I was and a handful of absolutely necessary phone calls and messages.

In these troubled times, we should not forget the good times we have had during build up to the burst of Bubble 2.0.

There are many fond memories, plans and grand dreams that marked it.

I am paying my tribute to all of those with a song titled, We Shall Monetize, since monetization has been THE hope that kept the dream alive, and killed it too, in the end.

Please sing along to the tune of 'We Shall Overcome'.
We shall monetize
We shall monetize, we shall monetize
We shall monetize some day
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
We shall monetize some day

Advertising will see us through, subscriptions will see us through
Some sucker will see us through some day
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
The exit will meet us some day

We will be on to an IPO, we will be on to an IPO
We will be on to an IPO some day
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
We will be on to an IPO some day

We will merge with a stronger brand, we’ll walk hand in hand
We will merge with a stronger brand some day
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
We will merge with a stronger brand some day

We are not afraid, we are not afraid
We are not afraid today
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
We are not afraid today

The hype shall make us free, the hype shall make us free
The hype shall make us free some day
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
The hype shall make us free some day

They shall overvalue in peace,
They shall overvalue in peace
They shall overvalue in peace some day
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe
They shall overvalue in peace some day

Once upon a time, I used to work in a company called Times Internet Limited. For the uninitiated, TIL runs the content part of the business for Bennett Coleman & Co Limited, which runs websites like Indiatimes, Timesofindia.com, economictimes.com and so on.

During my time there I had started a couple of things like the blogging service o3, RSS feeds and run some other nicknacks. The reason for this post? Well, I happened to stumble on one of the pages I used to maintain there -- on RSS services available on the website, which is hosted here: http://info.indiatimes.com/rss/ .

The page has largely remained the same, including design and content since 2005, when it was launched, until sometime this year (post February 2008) when the considerably expanded Terms of Use and other legalese were added to it. This may have something to do with the incident, where TIL wound up blocking all crawlers and it is likely that they wanted to add the clauses to cite violations. I have to clarify, though, that there is no foolproof way to determine the dates involved in the changes.

But, this post is really not about practices in the internet industry in India, I have ranted enough and more about in previous posts. This is more about some of your more, let us say, 'interesting' parts of online history staying there forever.

And if you though that page was bad, you should check this out: http://careers.indiatimes.com/ . I really do have a bit of trouble explaining the copy on those pages. There are things you do and then there things you do!