Personal Reflections – Page 40

At long last, gyaan.in is finally here. The concept has been in cold storage, then development for quite a while and I’m happy to say that we’re launching today. Yes, it’s been delayed for some time, but I’m quite happy that we’re launching today. 😉

gyaan.in is primarily a forum where Indian quizzers can interact with each other – share questions and question archives, notify upcoming quizzes, discuss general topics. One thing we felt was that many options out there right now were technologically lacking. Most quiz forums these days are on Yahoo! Groups or Google Groups and neither of the two provide flexibility to users in terms of uploading attachments, embedding images and YouTube videos, embedding audio files. Quizzes these days use multimedia in higher proportions. gyaan.in‘s platform doesn’t restrict you in such ways. We also aren’t using old-school forum software like phpBB which, frankly, look terrible. We’re running Vanilla Forum which gives you more usability with a better interface than the others; interface is quite like an email inbox actually.

The technological advantage isn’t the primary reason why we’re starting this. We want to provide a platform where there are no ‘official positions’ – the community chooses which direction to take the forum. To put it quite simply, a forum where we quiz for the love of quizzing. To this extent, we have created a charter for gyaan.in:

Nothing Official About It
At gyaan.in we intend to extend informal interactions between members. For too long in the quizzing circle people have considered each other in a mildly to overtly hostile manner. Informal interactions – members getting to know each other as real people – instead of simply ‘competitors to defeat’ should make a nicer quizzing world.
Don’t Be Evil
An extension of point 1, at gyaan.in we intend to ensure that no sort of politicking kicks in. To maintain sanity (actually, to combat spam) we will have moderators on the forum but we do not intend to have any sort of ‘positions’. You – the user – have your say in matters and the community decides collectively on its future. What we will have, instead, are evangelists / moderators within the community to spread the word. If you’re interested in being more actively involved in organizational matters then please get in touch with us at contact [at] gyaan [dot] in.
Quizzing, But Not For Points
We do not intend to have a league table to keep track of who’s getting how many questions right on the gyaan.in forum or events. Partly this is intended to ensure that members who arrive late to the scene aren’t disadvantaged by early adopters who have had a head-start in answering questions. The main reason, however, is that we don’t want it to become Yet Another Place To Look At Other People As Competitors.
IRL
Once members get acquainted with each other on the Web, we would like to extend the interaction by holding ‘offline’ meets where you can get to converse with members IRL (‘in real life‘). Some of these meets could be where a small quiz is conducted, others could be simply informal meets.
Quality Content
Providing regular, quality content quizzes, articles, news, archives. Giving you a platform where you can share such resources easily – with our dedicated team of gyaan.in moderators providing editorial support. Content would cover oft-ignored topics in quizzing circles too such as technology and contemporary music.
Promote Quizzing In Delhi, Especially In Schools
Compared to other cities like Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune, Chennai, Mumbai etc Delhi is often considered to be ‘lagging behind’. While that isn’t entirely true, we do feel that a lot more can be done in encouraging schoolkids to take up quizzing. Our first focus would be to make significant progress on this front in Delhi.

Getting started at gyaan.in is easy. Visit the site and if you aren’t already a member, then click on the ‘Apply for membership’ link. This is a short registration form which will send some basic details. A moderator will manually approve your account – this is done to ensure that no spam bots get into the system. The forum is not pre-moderated, i.e., as soon as your account is active you can start being a part of the discussions. We will not put messages into a moderation queue for posting. However, if community members report content as offensive or spam then we’ll look into and try to resolve the situation.

That’s basically it! Click on the ‘Start a new discussion’ link to start a new topic. You have a WYSIWYG editor to compose and format your message. If you want to embed YouTube videos click on ‘HTML’ in the formatting bar and insert the video code. Images can be uploaded as attachments, or uploaded online elsewhere (say imageshack.us or TinyPic) and then inserted by pasting URL after click the ‘image’ icon (next to smiley icon). To send messages to particular user on the forum, click on that person’s username. This will take you to that person’s profile where you’ll find a Facebook style ‘wall’ where you converse directly with a user on the forum.

I’ve been using the pronoun ‘we’ in this post, so who exactly is ‘we’? We are the moderators behind gyaan.in. I’m Ankur Banerjee, you can find out about me here. Rishav Dey proposed the idea for gyaan.in and has played a major in role in reminding me that deadlines to launch were whooshing by again and again. I’m indebted to him for bringing this idea up. Prateek Vijayavargia provided inputs on what exactly the student community wants gyaan.in to be. Karmanya Aggarwal and Vishesh Kumar have supported this venture from the very beginning, being a part of the discussion that went into this and worked on some web development aspects of the project. विशेष धन्यवाद to Vishesh Kumar, for he’s the guy who created the gyaan.in logo. Other moderators on board are Aditya S, Agrim SIngh, Arjun Attam, Chirag Jain, Mridul Kapoor, Vivek Nair, VS Karthick.

At gyaan.in, we are open to feedback and discussion on the future of this community. Please do send in any suggestions, bugs in the forum software, queries, critcisms, praise – anything you want! If you’re interested in becoming a moderator and are ready to devote time to this project then do drop us a line. Our email address for all concerns is contact [at] gyaan [dot] in. Spread the word!

Originally posted at Youthpad.

A story carried today in Hindustan Times’s HT City caught my attention today. A controversy has cropped up – or been made to crop up by the media – by over an image of Goddess Lakshmi being used by fast food chain Burger King in Spain. Guess what? Burger King has already apologized to ‘the community’ for the incident and agreed to pull the ‘offending’ ad.

This isn’t the first time that Burger King has run into trouble over controversial ads. Let’s set that aside for a while; personally, that earlier ‘controversy’ was a non-controversy – a joke which should be taken as such. The very first sentence of the news report on this new story says:

…having Goddess Lakshmi endorse a meat burger is pushing it too far.

And why precisely should that be so? No logical reason is given for this of course. Soon there are Hindu organizations rabidly demanding for apologies. The closest that anyone comes to a semblance of an excuse for this something along the lines of “They wouldn’t dare to do this with Jesus Christ.” For heaven’s sake, ‘Jesus Christ’ is an expletive for them most of the time. What more do you want? Let’s take a few more examples. Here’s a list of Jesus Christ merchandise on Cafepress.com (which got into trouble over some merchandise featuring Hindu gods / goddesses) including a thong which says ‘Keep Jesus in your pants’. Here’s the ‘encyclopedic’ entry on Jesus at Uncyclopedia, a parody encyclopedia which satirizes subjects. You can also watch this clip from a South Park episode Cartoon Wars II to see “what they’ll never do to Jesus Christ”.

The examples quoted above didn’t take me too long to find – all of two minutes on Yahoo! Search. The point is not that there aren’t religious people in those countries – there are many such people, and very radical and vocal factions too. The difference lies that over there they value something called ‘freedom of speech and expression‘. That doesn’t seem to exist in Indian society. For every little thing, there are people or organizations who get their knickers in a twist and start demanding apologies. Why can’t we learn to let other people exercise their right to free speech? Why must we get offended at each silly little thing? MF Hussain has protesters issuing death threats, forcing him to apologize for drawing paintings of nude goddesses. Elsewhere in the world they act like sane human beings and call paintings a work of art.

'The Birth of Venus' by Sandro Botticelli

I don’t think mainstream print media got the wind of this case where a Danish newspaper run an ad campaign Life is easier, if you don’t speak up. Among others, it shows Gandhi drinking beer and having a barbecue.

Gandhi Danish newspaper — Jyllands-Posten ad featuring Gandhi

Here’s what the newspaper had to say about this incident:

First of all let us say that we am deeply sorry if we have offended you and some people of your country.
In fact the quite opposite was our meaning.
Jylland-Posten took three of our biggest heroes and made a campaign about them. I think it is very important for you to read (and think about) the copy “Life is easier, if you don’t speak up”.
We wanted to honour the men that stood up and changed the world instead of just being like the rest of us…surfing, skiing, barbecuing and so on.

A perfectly sensible explanation. May I dare say that the ad idea was pretty unique and interesting? Because it is. It’s a brilliant ad campaign. Yet I’m sure that if this story hit Indian press circles there would have been approximately 23,789 organizations demanding apologies, writing angry letters, filing PILs in Mumbai High Court (despite knowing the fact that Indian courts have no jurisdiction over this matter) and in general acting like pricks.

So you are one of those people who still isn’t convinced about this fancy-schmancy thingymajig called ‘freedom of expression’. You’re on phone with your local craftsman placing an order for a Burger King effigy while simultaneously making a placard for that protest day after tomorrow against Jyllands-Posten. After all, these heathen foreigners have no regards for religious feelings, right? Before you go for those protests, just think for a second about the country where mass murderers aren’t brought to justice, tourists get raped or molested, Christian missionaries get burnt alive and ministers say OK to religious vigilantism.