Gauravonomics Blog

Welcome back to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my feed now and you'll never miss a single post!

An article I had submitted sometime back appeared in Hindustan Times today. It’s a reflection on whether digital initiatives by civil society organizations have worked in the 2009 Indian elections.

Here is the full text of the article –

E-lection fever

The successful online poll initiatives and blogs may help India 2014 do a US 2008

Gaurav Mishra

One of the ironies of Indian politics is that while the urban middle class complains about corrupt politicians, it neither steps out to contest elections or even cast its vote.

Mumbaikars proved this right on April 30, when the city registered its lowest voter turnout since 1977 despite the hullabaloo the elite had created post-26/11. Since then, the content and the tone of conversations of the Indian online community have changed. Well to-do youngsters, who earlier shied away from political debates, now seem to thrive on it.  Read More

My blog was mentioned as a source in a Associated Press story on the role of citizen journalism in the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

The story was reproduced in several newspapers including Hindustan Times, Huffington Post, Business Week, Fox News, New York Times and Salon, amongst others.

Here is the full text of the Associated Press story (AP has very graciously waived off the reproduction fees) –

Bloggers provide raw view of Mumbai attacks
By SAM DOLNICK – 1 day ago

NEW DELHI (AP) — When gunmen started spraying Mumbai with bullets and seizing the city’s landmarks, countless people around the globe turned not to the television or the radio for news, but to each other.

Blogs and social networking sites like Twitter and Flickr buzzed with eyewitness accounts from India’s financial capital, providing some of the first photos of the besieged targets and serving as a forum for pleas for updates on friends and family.

Photos posted on Flickr just 90 minutes after the attacks had been viewed at least 110,000 times by Sunday.

Twitter users, who simply tagged their comments “mumbai,” traded information at a rate of 50-100 posts a minute in messages that were sometimes wrong, often fragmented, but always instant.  Read More

My friends Ajay, Ramya, Melody and Sakshi were recently quoted in a Hindustan Times story on women bloggers in India.

Interestingly, another friend Neha Tara Mehta wrote the story and she tells me that the idea of the story came out of a conversation we had a couple of months back.

Here’s the full text of the story –

Blogos-unf@ir!

Neha Tara Mehta, Hindustan Times
August 09, 2008

It’s not all fair on the blogosphere, with an increasing number of women bloggers being harassed with hate mails and nasty, anonymous comments, often with sexual undertones and even stalkers.

Popular mommy blogger The Mad Momma who writes The Brat The Bean and Bedlam calls trolls (people who post nasty comments on blogs) “pestilence”. “They can’t accept the fact that somebody who they think is typically bovine and child-centric could have an opinion, on say, Tibet. These people find it annoying and mystifying that I am just a mommy and my blog is popular.”

The Mad Momma gets nasty feedback not only on her blog but also on other blogs. “My six-month old daughter has been called snot-eating and shit-sniffing. There was a post that said that my husband earns Rs 40 lakh a month and that I pretend to be poor when I write about recycling things,” she says.  Read More

Quick Summary: Check out my interview in Indian daily Hindustan Times for ‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’, my year-long book-as-a-blog experiment in why we choose to consume or not.

‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’ is my year-long blog-as-a-book experiment in why we choose to consume, or not.

If you haven’t yet subscribed to ‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’, you should subscribe to it now, for free, in a feed reader, or by e-mail.

Yesterday, my first interview for ‘The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption’ was published in Indian daily Hindustan Times.

The interview was published on the front page of the Delhi edition –

– and the city section in the Mumbai edition –

One interesting thing I learned yesterday is that different editions of a newspaper may publish different versions of a story.

The Mumbai Edition published the full story — see text below — complete with my rules and URL.

The Delhi Edition published a much shorter version of the story — also available online — but it was on the front page and I’m not complaining at all.  Read More

Quick Summary: Check out my first podcast on Indicast where Aditya Mhatre, Aditya Mishra, VeerChand Bothra and I discuss why startups need workaholics and why mobile will drive web 2.0 usage in India.

My First Podcast on Indicast

I had a great time last Sunday recording my first podcast with Aditya Mhatre, Aditya Mishra, VeerChand Bothra (tweet) on why startups need workaholics and why mobile will drive web 2.0 usage in India (tweet).

All three of them have extremely rich backgrounds, resulting in an extremely vibrant discussion —

- Aditya Mhatre is India’s leading podcaster at Indicast (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- VeerChand Bothra is at the center of India’s mobile boom, as MobilePundit, as organizer of Mumbai Mobile Mondays and as VP at NetCore Solutions (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

- Aditya Mishra is deeply involved in the startup ecosystem in India through his work (he has the fancy title of Entrepreneur-in-Residence at TCS) and his role as the organizer of BarCamp and Kickstart (Blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).  Read More

Quick Summary: I was quoted yesterday in Indian daily Hindustan Times’ article on how Indian corporates are embracing blogging and social networking as collaborative tools.

I was quoted yesterday in Indian daily Hindustan Times’ article on how Indian corporates are embracing blogging and social networking as collaborative tools –

Some, like Gaurav Mishra, the Indica brand head, use their personal brand – created over years of blogging – to promote the brand they work for. “My blog benefits because my real-life experience gives credibility to my posts, and my offline avatar benefits because my online presence makes it possible to meet and build an impression on people who wouldn’t have known of me otherwise.” Lately, Mishra has promoted a new ad campaign for his brand on his blog and Facebook account.

A serious concern for employers could be what their employees say publicly on such sites. Says Mishra, “I ensure that my entire web presence is squeaky clean so that even if I put it on my resume, it can hold up to close scrutiny.”  Read More

Quick Summary: Yours truly was featured today in Indian daily Hindustan Times’ full page story on Young India Forum panel discussion on the Indian Budget 2008.

Yesterday, I was part of a Hindustan Times Young India Forum panel discussion on the Indian Budget 2008. The Young India Forum is an initiative by Hindustan Times to “drive change and reach more people more directly”.

Hindustan Times had put together an interesting panel consisting of young film-makers, entrepreneurs, and corporate fast-trackers and I had a great time at the panel discussion –

Finely tailored suits, chic skirts and fancy designations — a perfect picture of corporate India, but without the grey hair. On Friday, young MDs, VPs and filmmakers, representatives of the changing face of corporate India, got together to take part in the Hindustan Times Young India Forum. To discuss, naturally, the Budget presented by Finance Minister P Chidambaram.

As the FM read out the fiscal Budget — his fifth in a row — clad in a pristine white dhoti, these designer-clad corporate honchos chuckled, sighed, laughed and gave their perspective on one of the biggest events of the year in India.  Read More