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Net Gains (Mar 27, 96)
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A newsgroup is a collection of messages with a related theme. There are now more than 5,000 of these newsgroups in several diferent languages, covering everything from art to zoology, and computers to relationships. It's like a conversation being carried out over a period of hours and days, just as if people were leaving messages and responses on a bulletin board. Or, you could compare it to talk shows like Oprah or Donahue where everyone there gets a chance to add their two paise worth to the topic under discussion. While e-mail is usually on a "one-to-one" basis, newsgroups are on a "many-to-many" basis. It's like an international meeting place where people from all over the globe login to converse through their computers. People there don't know what you look or sound like, how old you are, or what kind of a past you have. Once in a newsgroup, you too could add what you feel about the topic the newsgroup is devoted to - in this case - Jammu & Kashmir.
The reason behind having a newsgroup dedicated exclusively to J & K according to the e-mails was that discussions about the state are currently scattered across many different newsgroups. The formation of a newsgroup wasn't the problem. The real problem was just the extention of an age old battle that has been going on since the last few decades - the Pakistanis opposing Jammu & Kashmir being called Indian. You see, the newsgroup line was chosen as "soc.culture.indian.jammu-kashmir" (the hierarchy Society-Culture-Indian-Jammu&Kashmir). This, in cyberspace amounts to J & K coming under India. And this is what Pakisatnis all over the world were opposing. So, they put the topic to a vote, which was conducted by a neutral party. Anyone with a valid e-mail address could vote on the topic. All s/he had to do was to send an e-mail to [email protected] with a YES/NO vote on soc.culture.indian.jammu-kashmir. And like patriotic Indians, this e-mail was circulated from one Indian to others, to beat Pakistan's votes( All this despite pleas not to distribute the details of the vote, which the vote-taker said amounted to vote fraud.) With the voting deadline of March 22, safely gone by, I could write about the hungama raised. According to reports, the 10,000 Indians who voted, managed to keep the newsgroup under the Indian banner .
The J & K newsgroup was discussed during one of the lunch sessions in our office, and a lot of relevant questions were thrown up. A very pertinent question came from our PL, Pranesh - "Why do we need another newsgroup to discuss J & K ? Don't we have any crap floating about ?" Take time out guys, think about this. Although not intended for this purpose, there are bound to be accusations and counter - accusations and some people on this newsgroup are bound to be whipped up into a frenzy about J & K. Do we really need it ?
Now onto something more pleasant on the Net - the home page of an Indian. Raju Bathija is a secretary in the office of Theoretical Physics Group, TIFR, Bombay. His home page is one link - filled home page that's been constructed with a lot of effort. The home page starts with a picture of the Taj Mahal. If you visit his home page, you'll find out that he's a cricket enthusiast, and has a page on the web dedicated to Indian Cricket. He's also a Madhuri fan, and not being a Hussein, he's posted seven pictures of her on the net. He's also provided links to other sites about Madhuri. The rest of his page is dedicated to links to sites-of-the- day, and sites-of-the-week. You can spend hours browsing through this home page. Check it out - it's pretty cool ! A warning though - this home page is so huge, it takes a long time to load. In case your browser doesn't have a sufficient memory partition, the page doesn't load completely. But Raju's taken care of people who visit his home page through a text-only browser by providing a text only version of this home page. Chal then, happy surfing till we meet again !