6 Degrees of Culturally Diverse Separation

The more I wander blogland (sorry, I refuse to refer to it as the blogosphere unless I'm mocking someone), the more homogenized the place looks. Which is weird, since there are millions of blogs out there.

So last week I took a Six Degrees of Separation tour through various blogs and sites. I didn't get a chance to post this until today.  I started at Technorati, and found a posting about "My Little Goatie". The misspelling of goatee caught my eye, and I was off:

kartik kannan's space on the web

A techie in India, Kartik takes me on a trip to Munan, for a final get-together with his classmates before they all go their separate ways.

A link on his site said "Anand", so I click, expecting to be taken to technology review site Anandtech.com.  Nope, instead it is Mdeii Life, the musings of   Anand Krishnamoorthi, a Tamil film student from India, currently at the  University of Bristol.

Writes Anand:

"During my days in Anna University, I desperately sought to train myself in picture and sound editing. I hated working with other editors and edit technicians whose sense of rhythm never matched mine. This was the case until recently, when I had the chance to work with a really good editor on a project I directed. Suddenly I realised the advantages that collaborative editing can bring. Soon, both editor and I were communicating with mere twitches of a few facial muscles, and odd nasal and grunting sounds. A little glance through the corner of an eye meant, "The cut has to move exactly 4 frames back". I do know that it is hard to come across this kind of a collaborator, but when one does, then it definitely adds value."

Anand is a bit obsessed with The Godfather, but he has some interesting posts nonetheless.

A link then takes me to Coffee House, where I find this amazing description that brings me back to a trip I made to India in 1992:

cenatoph road: a traffic police man asked for a lift this morning, as i turned left from chamiers road to cenatoph road. i stopped my bike and he sat heavily on the pillion. enga sar poganum (where do you want to go), i asked him. summa straighta poitae irunga sar (just keep going straight), he said. its a small road, and a minute or so later he said, andha car than double seven double two (that car 7722). and then it struck me, the car had jumped the signal and the policeman wanted to catch the culprit. that car was going slow. as the bike rode past the car, i could sense the policeman motioning the driver to stop.

From there to OutlookIndia.com, and Delhi Diary, by Vinod Mehta, with this comment:

I am reminded of what the great journalist Alistair Cooke told Jawaharlal Nehru. Cooke said as a reporter he had been taught that the truth has two sides and he should report both. What, he asked Panditji, was he to do since increasingly he found the truth had four, even five sides. "Ah," replied Nehru, "you’ve discovered the Hindu view of truth."

Finally I arrive back in Canada with a Toronto Diary entry by Ramachandra Guha:

I had planned to spend the day of the US presidential election in the town of Berkeley, California. . . . My plans were brutally torn to shreds at Toronto airport by an American immigration official named (as I recall) McCullough. I had spent a week lecturing in Vancouver, at the University of British Columbia, and was now on my way to Oberlin College, Ohio, and, from there, to the University of California at Berkeley. I'd been an itinerant migrant worker for the past decade. It was a way of life I was used to and so, I believed, were the Americans. It was thus with a certain casualness that I placed my papers on the counter.

Guha's description of border difficulties reminded me of Jeremy Wright's ordeal trying to get into the U.S. for a blog consulting gig. After many hassles, he was turned back. His account attracted more than 40,000 visits to his site in one day.

So ends my Six Degrees of Separation.

Then I find out my little experiment in finding a less homogenous part of the Internet is part of a trend -  there's a  Newsweek posting questioning whether the blogospere (that moronic word again) has a diversity problem, and a March 7 post encouraging people to link to more women and non-Americans (hey, I'm not American - link to me!). Well, my tour may not be original, but I learned a few things, and will try it again this weekend.

Thanks to Desirable Roasted Coffee for the last two links.