Tagged: paritrana

On the Times’ story


Several people have pointed out the [[http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/quickies/1488213.cms|photo-story running in Indiatimes/Economic Times]], provokingly titled “Rang De… in reality”. Through a series of images and captions they have tried to very briefly touch upon Paritrana, the progress they are making and the challenges they are facing.

But people mentioned the story to me for entirely different reasons. It so happens that [[http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/quickies/msid-1488207.cms|one of the pictures]] they’ve used was taken during our annual CSE picnic sometime in the 3rd year. Ah, the nostalgia… so let me throw in some more details.

The picnic had been organized at a resort (does anyone remember the name?) half way between Lucknow and Kanpur on the highway. The picnic had started off disappointingly because a substantial number of our batchmates had absolutely no plans of coming. I remember that morning as a couple of us were banging doors and pleading our colleagues to get out of their beds and come for the picnic. The resort had a swimming pool, pool tables, ample space for //phatta//, and above all, free food. What more did they want?

It turned out to be a pretty fun day eventually. The best part of the day was the water polo-ish sport that we invented and played for quite a while in the pool. The food was ok, the bus ride entertaining. I don’t remember if we played antakshari or not… Anyways, the amusing bit is that none of the IITK folks involved with Paritrana (atleast originally, I don’t know the status now) — Chandrashekhar or Bharat — are in that picture. Wonder where they got it from and why they put in there.

Here are the names of the people in the picture (row-wise, left to right, bottom to top). I don’t remember a lot of the names, so apologies in advance:
* Manikant, Darjan (Abhishek), Deshmukh (Ritesh), GSharma (Gaurav), Supriyo.
* Jyotsna, Me, Bunch of MTech students.
* Ninja (Nitin), Chowgi (Anurag), Madhur, AKVerma, Manish, Vibhanshu, Asim, Priyendra.

Interesting (but disappointing) stats


Website stats have long been a [[http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?id=8325|point of debate]] over at [[http://textdrive.com|Textdrive]]. While its possible to install Awstats, it takes a [[http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?id=3259|non-trivial amount of effort]], and depending on your configuration, it might actually create problems on a shared hosting environment. Google did re-launch [[http://urchin.com|Urchin]] for free later as [[http://google.com/analytics|Google Analytics]], but my initial experiences with it were mostly moderate — I have since abandoned it for no particularly strong reason. [[http://haveamint.com|Mint]] looked good, but I didn’t feel like shelling out 30 bucks, specially since mine is not a commercial website and my interest in stats is purely for curiosity and is not motivated by financial or other reasons. And so for a while now (since November 2005, to be precise), I have been using [[http://wettone.com/|Stephen Wettone's]] excellent [[http://wettone.com/code/slimstat|Slimstat]]. I really like it so far — its almost like mint, its server side (so clients don’t have to load some Javascript sitting on Google) and its free!

Anyhow, back to the subject of this post. I was looking at the aggregate stats for my website (primarily my blog, because I haven’t coded up the static content to be monitored by Slimstat) and the stats were kind of interesting and somewhat disappointing. Interesting because thats the nature of stats — things people (or machines) read most on my blog are not what I expect them to be and such. And disappointing for the same reason.

Here are a few:

* The number of hits and visits to my blog has been slowly but steadily increasing (I’m not putting the exact numbers in here, because they are embarassingly small still :-) )
* The [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2006/01/21/476/|aside on Paritrana]] is the **second most popular** link on my blog. Remember that it was posted **less than a month** back and it was completely devoid of **any** content. I simply linked to a news story. It also happens to be one of the most commented entries on my blog. Furthermore, if you [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2006/01/21/476/#comments|look at the comments]], you will see that majority of the comments ([[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2006/02/01/499/#comments|also on this post]]) don’t seem to come from the regular blog-reader-poster type people. More on why this is interesting later in the post.
* The next most popular page is the page for the [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/tags/movies|tag "movies"]]. This is sort of disappointing because this blog doesn’t even remotely target movies (if at all anything!). All I do is write occasionally about the movies I’ve seen. More interestingly perhaps, the vast majority of these hits come from Google Image search, which is a bit surprising to me. Still don’t fully know how or why.
* I’m happy to see that [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2006/02/09/537/|my post with some Vim7 screenshots]] has quickly risen among the top 10 on my blog
* Among the search strings that led people to my blog, “Partirana” is the most searched keyword and by a **huge** margin. I mean, we’re talking two orders of magnitude here.
* A little sadly, 51% of the viewers of this blog are still using IE. Only about 30% are using Firefox. Come on people, whats wrong with you?

Alright, so about Paritrana. The extremely high level of interest in Paritrana on my blog (and so I infer, elsewhere as well) is interesting for two reasons. One, that it //is// getting a lot of attention — people are regularly Googling for it, which hopefully means that people are interested enough to find out more about the party and the people. Secondly and perhaps more importantly, as the comments on my posts show, this interest seems to be wide spread among not just the “web savvy” people, which I think is very encouraging. A political party has to reach out to the masses, and the number of people who read and comment on blogs in India is a miniscule fraction of the population.

Moreover, the fact that these people took the pains to leave a comment shows that they do want to get involved and are trying to reach out to the party. I hope the folks at Paritrana are aware of this, and that they provide people with the right channels to approach them and let them express their support and enthusiasm. At the same time, it worries me slightly that despite my strongly asserting the fact that I am not involved with Paritrana, a lot of the commenters seemed to not take notice of that and implicitly assume otherwise. I just hope that people will try to read the fine print, slow down and digest the facts and not blindly get on the band wagon.

More on Paritrana


* [[http://desicritics.org/2006/01/28/094921.php|Paritrana, The Ideological Chimera]]
* [[http://indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=86859|Indian Express article]]
* [[http://www.arthshastra.com/archive/paritrana-getting-to-know-a-little-bit-more/|Chandrashekhar's interview]]

Paritrana Update


Seeing how popular my [[http://floatingsun.net/blog/2006/01/21/476/|aside]] on [[http://paritrana.org/|Paritrana]] was, I decided to write a full fledged post and address all the comments in the aforementioned aside.

First of all, **I’m not a Paritrana member** as many of the comments seem to imply/assume. Paritrana first came to my attention because two of my batchmates from IITK are involved in it.

Secondly, someone said (and I agree) that a big deal should not be made out of Paritrana simply because IIT and IIM graduates are involved in it. As others have pointed out, there are/were other such efforts before Paritrana, and all of them should command an equal respect/attention. For instance, there is [[http://www.samudai.org/|Samudai Bharati]] and [[http://bharatudaymission.org/|Bharat Udai Mission]]. However, what //does// distinguish Partirana is that they are already launched and out there.

Third, I want to request the Paritrana founders to kindly put together a decent website. These days its trivial to get a dynamic website up and running (just use WordPress or Drupal). The current website not only doesn’t work properly even in Firefox, it doesn’t even provide the information that most people want. For instance, looking at the comments on my post, it seems that there is a LOT of interest in Paritrana all over India, and if people were able to give feedback and publish their comments on the Paritrana website itself, I think it would have been a huge moral boost for the members as well as give Paritrana greater visibility in the media. Then of course I have minor nitpicks with the Javascript menus and the “Untitled Document” title on every page. I can understand that “putting together a good website” might not be your biggest concern right now, but in the age we’re living in, I think its something you definitely want to seriously consider soon ™.

Finally, if you have questions/comments/suggestions for Paritrana, please direct them at [[info@paritrana.org]] (as their website [[http://paritrana.org/contactus.htm|clearly states]]). They even have a phone number!