My experiences with Desipundit

My tryst with Desi Pundit began in the latter half of 2005 at the height of the IIPM vs the rest of the desi blogworld battle. How did I come to know about the site, you may ask? Well, I had this rant against The Hindu for showing too much importance to cricket and pushing the rest of the sports news to an obscure corner of their sports page. That got published in DP. That was a big deal for me. I had started out with 1 measly post in March 2005, took a long hiatus (I was lazy to blog) and was back in August 2005 writing about the Katrina disaster. After my post was linked by DP in Feb 2006, my readership count increased albeit not that much but people came to know about the existence of my blog. When I saw a trackback to my post, I decided to check out DP. My knowledge about DP was limited but I had heard of it's popularity and I decided to check out the site and found a collection of some rather interesting posts collected by a motley group of contributors from different blogs around the Indian blogosphere. Its been 13 months since that rant post and I have had posts of mine linked to and have also been acknowledged for tip offs too.

I tuned in to the DP site on the 16th, like I do everyday and saw this farewell post by Pat. That was unexpected and I decided to visit the blogs of the contributors for more 411 and found posts by Neha, Vulturo, Pat and Ash among others. No mention of this by Amit though. I guess he wanted to keep this off his pro blog. Well Pat has his own reasons to shut down DP and I go by that. But why delete the blog that has made a lot of desis aware of some interesting posts and blogs above all? The one stop shop for the rest of the desi blogosphere - why shut it down? The comments section of that farewell post on Dp has been flooded with comments with a majority of people asking Pat to hand over the reins to an enthusiastic bunch of bloggers who will carry on the good work that has been done so far. I concur with that. will there be quality if that is done? We the readers are there to gauge the quality of the links that come by. DP has been a pioneering blog. Let it remain the way it is supposed to be.

I have kept myself up to date with the happenings in the desi world through DP. DP introduced me to Sepia Mutiny, Gaurav Sabnis, Rashmi Bansal, Amit Varma, the IIPM vs Gaurav Sabnis controversy among others and a great many other blogs. For me, my day in the online world starts with a customary visit to DP and the blogs that have been linked to it. I kid thee not.

So, after all that yawn inducing blah blah, the bottom line of this post is, let DP remain online, don't shut it down, hand over controls to a different set of people and let it remain the way it is supposed to be.

Don't put an end to a legacy.

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