Since several of our “main” bloggers are off enjoying the fruits of summer (Ciao! you know who you are…), we thought we would keep things moving here in the Bunker with another guest blogger, Nilanjana Bhattacharjya. Nilanjana is an ethnomusicologist who teaches at Colorado College. She is also an avid Twitterer, for those of you for whom that means anything. And for the academics in the house, Nilanjana has an essay in a recent collection called Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance, which she co-wrote with another friend of mine, on the inner workings of the commercial Indian film music industry as it operates within India, as well as how it is repackaged as it “travels” in the diaspora. Despite the focus on film and music, Nilanjana has lots of interests, including an interest in subcontinental politics — so expect a diverse array of posts. Continue reading →

It’s that time again. Time to welcome another blogger into the bunker at our North Dakota world blogging headquarters. Pavani comes to us with experience at both Nirali Magazine and Daily Cherez. Just like a few of the other bloggers here she was raised in California and can often be spotted in the Bay Area. Please join me in welcoming Pavani to SM.

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Dearest SepiaReaders,

I know, it’s been too long. It’s not you, it’s me. This is going to be difficult to tell you, so, um, I hope we can still stay friends…

MTV came calling and I said yes.

I promise that the big huge website and shiny shiny videos had nothing to do with it! It’s not what you think! I’m with a quirky offshoot called MTV Iggy, a website that features interesting videos like this one about Chinlone – the art/dance/sport from Myanmar:

Cool, huh? I’d never heard of it either.

So they asked me to be the site’s Editor (of written things, not video. Would you trust me with anything technical?) and I’ve been rushing through the site, dusting and straightening in anticipating of your visit. (By this I mean I tidied the homepage and threw everything else in the closet.)

Iggy has original music, freewheeling interviews with heavyweights like Fareed Zakaria, celebs like Abhishek Bachchan (seriously, it does!) and John Cho (the new Captain Sulu, but always the Harold to our boy Kumar), a social change initiative to raise awareness about Kashmir, and in the near future, articles, reviews, written interviews and much more.

So please stop by and check it out. Don’t hold back your opinions (as if you ever would!) and tell me what you like, hate, love, loathe, etc. The site is still constantly changing and your feedback would be invaluable. I will still post on Sepia, of course, even about non-Iggy things! But I wanted you to know of this, because even though I have this new boyfriend, you will always be my first love. Continue reading →

All the mad coding skills don’t impress some folks. Watch this!

For the longest time we have been preparing a makeover for this site. We have years (yes, years) worth of emails, documents, diagrams, ideas about a face lift. We hoped the site only needed a few diet pills, a little exercise, a moderate amount of makeup and some decent coordinated colors to improve her. Of course, none of that worked. We finally decided it was time to put her under a professional’s knife. Please don’t accuse us of being shallow. We are allowed to indulge in fantasy. This is needed for all websites of a certain age. We are not trying to compete with any hot new Web 2.0 genre sites. We don’t want her to just look pretty. We want her to work better. We wanted perfect. We heard from quite a few young, creative and brilliant designers during our search. We finally settled on Avani as the one .

As amazing as her imagination is, the quality that most impressed me about Avani was her courage. She was not afraid of this project. I did my duty and warned her that plenty before her had tried to tame this beast and failed. Avani did not flinch. She calmly examined the patient and then asked – “Tell me what you don’t like about her. ” And that’s how it started , over seven months ago. Discussions, sketches, mockups and of course, airbrushing. Months of cuts and carving, agonizing over little details. And finally, here were are. Voilà! Isn’t she fabulous? Continue reading →

I mean, you seriously thought we would re-design a website using Devanagari font? Seriously? Macaca please. Well I guess I feel kind of bad calling out the people that actually liked it but… And does a Pokemon-like monkey scream “mutinous” to you? Well, ok. The monkey was pretty fierce so I can see its appeal. Chaitan was responsible for the monkey and most of the rest of this design. Don’t feel bad if you fell victim to our little prank. Even one of SM’s founders (Manish of Ultrabrown) believed it was the real deal and politely began offering advice on little fixes. Also, Avani is female not male, and she is great and definitely has more skillz than a “color-blind infant!” In addition to the comments we received on the blog, many Twitter users also provided us with their opinions.

Update: April Fool! See here.

Hey everyone, at long last it is time! We are FINALLY ready to unveil the much anticipated updates to our little site. The effort has lasted for months behind the scenes, led by talented designer Avani P and our amazing website administrator Chaitan Bandela.

In designing a new website the first thing we wanted to do was to simplify the existing look. Over the years the front page of our site has become over-crowded with buttons and multiple tabs, and the text has become smaller. This new website is cleaner and promises to load faster, saving you precious seconds as you visit obsessively throughout the day. The font is nice and large so you don’t strain your eyes. Additionally, the banners at the top, while charming, had kind of lost their novelty. We have replaced the banners with new “branding” per Avani’s advice. Since we talk about monkeys so often at SM, we thought, “why not make a Macaca-like icon the new official logo/mascot,” so that we can use it to promote SM as a distinct brand. We are also in search of a social media consultant who will help us to better incorporate Twitter and Facebook with our site (no ghost Twitterers though). Stay tuned for that.

We fully expect our readers to find bugs as they navigate the new site over the next few days and weeks. Chaitan will work as hard as he can to fix these bugs as we become aware of them. In the comments section below you can detail any such “brokes” you find. Please keep your comments focused on technical issues as opposed to artistic issues if you would please. Change is always difficult but research shows that given time the new look will soon feel as comforting as the old. We did run mock-ups of this new design by focus groups composed of long time SM readers whose opinion we trust before finalizing the new look. We also tried to mimic the best elements of other popular blogs and bring the site up to Web 2.0 standards. Thanks again to all of our readers for sticking with us as we approach our fifth year! And most of all thanks to Avani and Chaitan for their Herculean efforts!

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The economy is swirling down the tubes. We are fighting two wars with no end in site. The Indian American contestant on Top Chef is bound to be booted off any week now. In short, we are living in a pretty depressing world, even given the exiting events of today’s inauguration. We met in our North Dakota headquarters recently to see what we could do to roll back some of the doom and gloom and bring our readers a pittance of joy for the few moments they log on to SM. The answer presented itself in the form of Canada-based humorist and writer Melvin Durai:

Melvin Durai is an India-born, North America-based writer and humorist. His humor columns, acclaimed for being both funny and thought-provoking, have appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines in several countries. An award-winning feature writer, Melvin also distributes his weekly columns through an email list that reaches thousands of people in more than 90 countries, including a few countries Melvin is still trying to find on the map…

Melvin was born in the town of Tisaiyanvillai, in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, India, and spent much of his childhood learning how to pronounce “Tisaiyanvillai”. (He still hasn’t quite got the hang of it.)

He grew up in Zambia, Central Africa, where he attended Kansenshi Primary and Secondary Schools in Ndola, and Kamwala Secondary School in Lusaka. Both his parents, Mrs. Hepzy Durai and the late I.V. Durai, were math teachers and, as a result, Melvin grew up hating math.

Melvin moved to the U.S. for college in 1982. He attended Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, where he double-majored in Accounting and Natural Science, giving him the unique ability to file tax returns for hamsters. Then he earned an MBA from York College of Pennsylvania, before following his heart and enrolling in the journalism program at Towson State University in Maryland. He loved it and did well enough to land a job at the Chambersburg, Pa., Public Opinion, the best and most widely read newspaper in the entire town of Chambersburg. (Motto: We’re better than that rag in Waynesboro.)… [Link]

Yes, we’ve added another nerd to the bunker corp. You can also check out his blog here. Please join me in welcoming Melvin to SM! Continue reading →