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Net Gains (May 01, 96)
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Exactly a year ago, on this day, Cyberspace was witness to the birth of a new page - The Maharashtra Home Page. The page was launched to coincide with the anniversary of the formatation of the state we all know and love - Maharashtra. When you log onto this page, your occular senses are greeted with the word "Maharashtra" in Devanagari script, followed by a map of India that zooms in on Maharashtra.
The introductory portion of the page talks about statistics, sights, and the geography of Maharashtra. One eye catching link here is the Image map of Maharashtra , complete with latitude and longitude. A click on any part, brings up a zooms in on that part of the map. The section on Culture has a lot of stuff on Maharashtra's history right from the early history, the Maratha Reign, the Peshwe Dynasty rule period, and the British Raj to the modern day Maharashtra. Besides history, a unique section dealt with Marathi cinema, poems, lyrics of Marathi songs, and stuff about the marathi language. One link connected to an well known event in Maharashtra - the Pune Ganpati festival, complete with snapshots and even audio ! This actually is a travel recollection of one Warren Senders, who was at the 1986 Pune Ganpati festival. Warren Senders, the site goes on to say is a musician and composer who has worked extensively in India, learning traditional music and spreading the word of jazz in turn. The sound files are in ".au" format, so be prepared with a compatible audio playing piece of software. If you want to visit this site straight away without spending some of those VSNL's 250 hours going through links, you could use this URL:http://www.rootsworld.com/rw/feature/pune.html As expected of most India related pages, this one is created by a whole group of Indians abroad. But this page has a link to The Govt. Of Maharashtra homepage, created and maintained by some guys in India who have put up the Maharashtra Page on behalf of the Government Of Maharashtra.
The Govt. Of Maharashtra Home Page kicks off with a tricolour banner at the top that has a hard hitting saying : "How high you go depends on how deep your roots are". Point noted. The page is very plain, what with it having white lettering on a completely black background. The only colour that the page can boast of is the tricolour mentioned above. Beside the map of India with Maharashtra darkened, there's a welcome message giving a lot of information about the size (308,000 square kilometres), the population ( 78.7 million souls) geography (boasting about the Sahayadris and the 720 km stretch of the Arabian Sea) & other details about Maharashtra being the third largest, and second most literate state in the country.
On going a lil further down the page, you get a beaming Manahor Joshi, our Chief Minister, with his message in print alongside his photograph. The whole address is made with the objective of the industrial development of Maharashtra. The home page goes on to list its strategic thrust areas : transport, communications, tourism, financial services, Information Technology, so on and so forth... Following this is the part that has the advantages of outsiders doing business in Maharshtra. As a document providing information, it's good, but not too much in detail - but this has to be forgiven as the small print at the end says that the page is still under construction. I did not see it listed when I used a search engine to look for sites containing Maharashtra, though there were plenty of other home pages that were listed, even insignificant ones like mine. With a little more time, money, effort, imagination and creativity, this page could attract the attention it rightly deserves. For further details, interested parties can get in touch with the Industries Secrectary, Mr. Vinay Bansal, via e-mail at [email protected] .
Though I looked high and low, I couldn't see a oft heard slogan. So, permit me, on this Maharashtra day to say it - "JAI HIND ! JAI MAHARASHTRA !!"