Category: Blogs

Six ways to follow varnam


If you have been following this blog regularly by visiting this website, you may not know that there other ways of following varnam using various social networks. Here are few ways by which you can follow the blog

  1. By e-mail. This link takes you to Feedburner which manages the e-mail subscription. Every time a post is made, you get the contents via mail.
  2. If you use Feedly, this link will take you to the page to add the feed.
  3. If you use any other RSS reader, this is the feed link
  4. If you are a Facebook user, here is the page to follow
  5. If you are a Google+ user, here is the profile page
  6. Finally, here is the twitter feed.

You can find the widgets for all these subscriptions on the sidebar under “Subscribe”. Please connect and share the posts.

10 Years of Blogging

(flickr:surya kiran)
(flickr:surya kiran) 

Today I complete a decade of blogging. Here is the first post which started it all.  Actually I used to have a blog on Blogger or some such entity before that in the final months of 2002, but can’t find any trace of it. So this is the start date.
When I started blogging, I tried to write about everything and that did not go well. Over the years I narrowed it down to history because that is what I am passionate about. Also that is an area on which bloggers are not spending much attention.  There are few areas which I have been writing about: the Indus-Saraswati civilization, the Aryan-Dravidian problem, the arrival of Europeans to India and the Anglo-Indian war of 1857. Also over the past few years, I started reading more World History and have been trying to understand Indian history in the global context. But since this is a one man effort, many important areas of history have been left out.
Also, when I started blogging, there was no Facebook or Twitter and hence life was without much distraction.  Besides these, many new tools capable of  sharing cat videos will appear over the years, but  since I come from the era of Krishidarshan and Buniyaad, I am resistant to change.  I think I will be around blogging for the next decade as well.
PS: The Indian History Carnival completed 5 years of its existence few months back.

Happy New Year


That’s the partial reading list for the first quarter.The Malayalam book is Marthandavarma, written in 1891 by C V Raman Pillai and the little green book at the top is The Travels of Sir John Mandeville & The Journal of Friar Odoric. Sometime after 1321, Friar Odoric, an Italian, spent time in Malabar, Cranganore, Kollam, and Chennai.
For 2009, this blog has a new WordPress theme. varnam is now on twitter as well.

Moved to WordPress

Finally this blog is running on WordPress on a new host.

For the past one month, the ritual was to get up, finish the morning ablutions and mail my previous host – AN Hosting – to start the mySQL database which ran varnam. They would promptly do magic and the server would be up; but they needed reminders.

After realizing that there are better things to do in life, varnam was moved to a new host over the weekend and in the process migrated to WP.  Lot of fixes still have to be done; for example, few of the old links don’t work, a blogroll has to be added and we have to go plugin crazy. All in due time.

Here are some resources for moving from MT to WP.

  1. Movable Type to WordPress
  2. Switched to WordPress
  3. Migrate from Movable Type 4 to WordPress 2.6 in 10 Steps

My Op-Ed in Mail Today: Our Voice

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My article, Our Voice in Our History, published in the Aug 2008 edition of Pragati was printed in Mail Today.
Their editor sensationalized the title of the article to, We don’t quite get it, the first globalized civilization was in India which demonstrated that the person who did not quite get it was the copy writer who came with the title. In the article I make no claims that India was the first globalized civilization. The article was not about proving it either but about the need for more voices in Indic studies. As it stands now there is disconnect between the title of the article and contents.
Now, back to the break.