I don’t frequent Sulekha anymore. Not like how I was hooked onto it four years back. Initially when I discovered Sulekha online in late 2000, it was a dream website to me. Then Sulekha was still growing and wasn’t as big as now.
Until 2001, I didn’t even know a word called Weblog existed on the internet. Then, Sulekha was my haunt. I went back again and again because Sulekha had writings of Indian Diaspora with whom I could relate to. It wasn’t like a column nor it was like an email sent by a friend. Its writings were somewhere in-between and were truly classy. To think back, sub-consciously, Sulekha was a big inspiration for me to start blogging. I never wrote anything on Sulekha but admired the writings. Newshopper and Coffee house where the places of my interest. Newshopper had the best of Indian news items that never weren’t headlines but were just good opinions.
These days Sulekha is cluttered and full of ads sprinkled. The good writing is lying there somewhere but then who has enough time to dig them out. Their weblogs section really needs a re-org desperately. To put it simply, they have just too many information on a single page and they are trying to sell them hard. A part of the right side is devoted to those gif advertisements which keep blinking at unexpected intervals and keep pestering click here…click here for those cheap $5 phone cards. Sulekha have grown over the period and probably this financial model is doing well for them. In this internet age of Weblog boom and neatly designed websites, they probably should also look into designing their site, uncluttered.
The point here is that, while googling for the Giggles bookstore, I came across this article, The Chennai Sojourn, written by Ranga Rangarajan. Yet another Sulekha gem. This, I believe this is a work of non-fiction though only the writer can say what percentage of fiction is involved. However, Rangarajan brings in front the contemporary Chennai that I see everyday. His observations finest and his detailing very vivid. As someone pointed out in the comments there is a sad undercurrent throughout the article but that only makes it a engrossing read. Do read.
kirukkal.com 
16 responses to “My Sulekha Sojourn”
It’s actually ‘Ranga Rangarajan’, not Ranga Ranganathan. The article is two years old and is written by Sujatha’s son, who is now back to Chennai.
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Whoever you are glazybeak thanks for that info. I changed the name to rangarajan now.
I had no clue that it was Sujatha’s son. No wonder he writes so well. And yeah I saw that i was 2 years old. As I said i found it while googling for the Giggles bookstore. Not many of his observations have changed since then.
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Not to be evangelizing, but you really should be using firefox to stop these flashy ads…there is an extension called Adblock, which when combined with a ruleset called Filterset.G(http://www.geocities.com/pierceive/adblock/) should stop most of these flashy ads..i havent seen one of these for a long time..and oh yeh, i am evil..i block even google’s ads in gmail and search results
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It is the same case with me. I discovered Sulekha about 2 years ago and frequented it almost everyday. I have come across some classy articles there. Now the website, as u mentioned, concentrates more on ADs than creative writing. i hope the administrators wake up and do something to make it charming again.
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Hey my aunt knows the owner of Giggles very well. I go there frequently with her.
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Hi All,
The same is the story for Chennaionline.com.
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I think Ramesh Mahadevan’s timeless classic’s are archived in Sulekha still.
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Thanks Vida for that info. I use Firefox in home but yeah I haven’t put in those plugins. BTW, how do you block Gmail ads and you know waht google’s ads donot disturb to this extent.
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Now the website, as u mentioned, concentrates more on ADs than creative writing
Thanks for agreeing dumbs. If only sulekha admin would read this and also other listen to it’s readers shout, they might start acting.
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Nirenjan, I am planning to visit Giggles this weekend. Being an frequenter there, do u know what kind of books they specialize at ?
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Raj, Agreed. Sulekha is a little better.
Nilu, I think Ramesh stopped writing for Sulekha. His articles sprinkled with humour was a breath of fresh air.
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hey lazygeek,
your blog is one of my “windows-into-chennai-life” … but this recent blog about Sulekha is rather interesting.
my whole initiation into blogging was via Sulekha too. And I’ve made tons of friends since then.
a few of us sort-of-regular Sulekha-bloggers decided to spin out a separate blogsite, just because we’d gotten really tired of the signal-noise issues at Sulekha. check out our alter-online community – http://goodwritings.blogspot.com/, which is team-blog-enabled.
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SSM- Thanks for the pointer. Looks like a nea blog with good set of articles. Will follow.
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Ah lazy, I see you don’t believe me all that much!
You had to google it up.
thanks for the info on Alwar BTW.
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Tilo, Got that wrong. I did google it even before you had answered it. Anyway thanks for that pointer. I’m planning a visit.
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adipex Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
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