What are Indian Bloggers Talking About? · Global Voices
Kamla Bhatt

The recent Readers Digest Survey about which city was polite yielded some rather interesting results: New York topped the list and Mumbai came at the bottom, in other words Mumbai was the rudest city in the world. The results came as a mild shock to many denizens of this chaotic and wonderful city by the sea. Interestingly like NYC, Bombay/Mumbai is also a city if islands and they share a lot of other things in common. Back to Mumbai and the survey. Having spent a year recently in Mumbai, I was a bit taken aback to see that Mumbai was the rudest city in the world. The results underscores an important fact/variable/dimension that the survey failed to take into consideration. And that is that the cultural underpinnings of each country is different and what is polite in one part of the world might be considered impolite in another part of the world. A long time ago Desmond Morris wrote a wonderful book on the same subject and how some supposed universal gestures have different interpretations in different parts of the world. I wonder how the folks at Readers Digest overlooked this important variable?
So, here is what bloggers had to say about Mumbai/Bombay being labeled as the rudest city: So, here is Sheks whose post has an interesting title: Falsely True, Fictionally Factual. Read and discover what his take on this survey. Here is Farzana's take on Mumbai as the rudest city, has love got anything with being rude? Read what Farzana has to say. Vijay Kumar of Bombay Lives pulls no punches and writes that he is considering canceling his subscription to Readers Digest.
Speaking of politeness, hospitality…the city that comes to mind is Lucknow. Lucknow is synonymous and well-known for its leggedary hospitality. Lucknow is the capital of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, and is a city steeped in history, culture and food. Raj, who grew up in Lucknow is happy to discover that the good folks at Google Earth finally added his hometown of Lucknow. Raj has a nice write-up and some shots of Lucknow. Sayantani  Dasgupta writes in her blog on how excited she is to visit Lucknow, which is a city that has figured quite a bit in her research studies. Sayantani shares some tips on Lucknow that she got from Mayuri who writes: “Food is religion, and kababs its elixir.” Sayantani also has some pictures of Lucknow, and of course, there are a couple of food pictures. Read on to discover what else you can learn about Lucknow. Ateesh has a long, reflective post about Lucknow. And if you are in Lucknow, what is the favorite mode of transportation? The cycle rickshaw. And here is Tushar of India Unplugged's post on rickshaws in Lucknow.
The Himalayan State of Sikkim has been in news recently because of the recent India-China talks and the re-opening of the Nathu La pass. An Indian Spirit has some great pictures and write-up about Sikkim.
The SaveKerala bloggers have an amusing, but telling post on marriages in the Southern State of Kerala. called the Big Fat Mallu Wedding. “Tradition, and ego, requires that the bride needs to be covered and anchored to   the ground with gold. Other allied sector businessmen like Biriyani caterers,  Priests, brokers also benefit from this boom. But behind all the glam and   glitter lies a rotten story.”
Reading about weddings reminded me of food. Here is Ashwini of Food For Thought with a simple and tasty recipe for yogurt based dish called Tamboli, a Konkani dish. Ashwini points out that the Konkan coast refers to the west coast of India that includes parts of Goa, Maharashtra and Karnataka states.
There is a whole lot of action going in the IT field in India. One of the most visited and quoted techsite is TechCrunch, a Silicon Valley based blog that tracks Web 2.0 technology, trends, companies etc. This is a must-read blog for all the tech geeks in India. The big news in the tech geek world is the unveiling of a new social software called People Aggregator. The software was developed in India and here is Gaurav Bhatnagar talking about being TechCrunched (yep! it is a verb now) the unveiling of People Aggregator.