India search engine surprisingly good...

Here is the India search engine

For example, type in Republic Day. The search results are good and clean and very Indian oriented.

Customized search engine for Maharashtra...

The search engine shown below provides a higher priority to Official Maharashtra sites. So you can find relevant results faster. I especially hate private sites that throw pop up windows without permission. With this search engine, you will typically get good website matches if you are focused on Maharashtra based information. Let me know if you want to bump up the priority of any particular official Maharashtra website.

Speaking of Search Engines, I have created one such search engine for each of the states of India. Plus one for India itself. You can try any of those out at this link.

http://www.maharashtraweb.com/search%20engines/searchengines.htm

I have also created interactive maps related to Indian history, geography, cuisine, wildlife, festival, culture, tourism and adventures. You will find the links at the bottom of each Maharashtraweb page. Here is one to get you started, it is the history map of each of the individual states of India.

http://www.maharashtraweb.com/indiaindex.htm

Happy exploring!

Search Engine

HCL coming to Nagpur...

HCL is coming to Nagpur in search of relatively lower cost labor. I believe HCL is making a right now and this will be the move that will get additional companies into Nagpur.

Speak Marathi and keep out other ethnic groups?...

That is what Balasaheb Thackeray implied in a recent editorial. I agree with this article that it is not the case. The British have been speaking English for a long time and have not been able to keep out Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. It is not the opportunity to speak a language, but opportunity to live a peaceful life, earn a living and do business that gets people to Maharashtra or Karnataka or Andhra Pradesh.

There are many kinds of migrations into a city or area. There is the low level migration of unskilled labor, which mainly happens to escape poverty, lack of opportunities and degradation in small villages. This migration happens with Maharashtrians too. Then there is semi skilled labor that are looking for specific opportunities in construction, manufacturing or even driving auto rickshaws, cars. Then comes the skilled variety which typically nobody minds.

The issue is mainly about the unskilled and semi-skilled labor. Thanks to good governance and overall logistical and political history, Maharashtra is a well to do state. Biharis and Keralites alike end up here for jobs and opportunities.

The way to keep out other groups is to regress in humanity and be the incarnation of Rakshasas (Think of some of the desert nations). People migrate to Maharashtra because it is closer to the Gods mentioned by Tukaram and Namdeo and revels in prosperity. The day people leave Maharashtra will mean something not necessarily good. Notice that when it is time to leave, Lebanese leave Lebanon, Iraqis leave Iraq and so on. When it comes time to leave, everybody leaves and the lights go off.

If we firmly believe that Good always triumphs over Evil, migration of people into Maharashtra will eventually result in more Maharashtrian values. That will reduce non-Maharashtrians in the state. A Bangladeshi on a fake ration card living in Maharashtra eventually becomes a Maharashtrian as he embodies Maharashtrian values. So it is really not about the language you speak, but who you become when you live among the good folks in Maharashtra. So be a Maharashtrian and imbibe Maharashtrian values. That is how Ganesh Chaturti gets celebrated all over India.

Customized Google Web Search Engine for Maharashtra

I have created a customized Google web search engine for Maharashtra and all the other states of India. If you are looking for serious information, this will be helpful as government sites are given the highest priority. This allows complete control over a search. Now the searches are even more guaranteed to block out a pop up rich websites that have somehow managed to crawl it's way up Google preferences.

Maharashtrian rulers of the old...How good were they?

As I posted information related to other states on the web, I could not help noticing the fact that other ethnicities were not very happy about the period of Maratha rule. How good were the Marathas and the peshwas? I do not recollect good leadership mentioned for any of the rulers other than Shivajiraje and Ahilyabai. Plus there is a lot of historical angst about what could have been related to Shivaji's son.

So I am guessing that some of the other rulers were not very visionary and that led to the eventual erosion of their hold over the empire. Your thoughts on the issue?

Marathi Couple Celebrating Ganesh Utsav

Excellent one hour video that helped me relive my own Ganesh Chaturti day. Informative too. Ganeshotsava or Ganpati Festival is emotionally very close to the heart of all Mumbaikars. We have fond memories of this festival.As Expatriates in dubai we did not get all the requisite things to celebrate the festival . But That was the real fun when we all couples came together, took a day off from the Office and under the supervision of our Bhatji Mr Mandar Damle we prepared all the delicacies like ukadiche modak,Aluwadi etc . The Main Families Involved were The Damles from Dombivali, The Pardeshis from Pune, Dighes from Thane, and off course the Kothares from Goregaon(shifted) all settled in Dubai. We have included the Mehta Family recently. This is the first part of the video, It shows complete picturisation of day one of the Ganpati festival. You feel as if you are there, please listen to Mr Damles detail explanation of all the Vidhis . Thanks and enjoy the one hour journey.

Harry Potter and the marathi connection...

Has anyone noticed the connections between Harry Potter and marathi last names? . Patil twins are characters in the books. The death curse is "Avada Kedarva".

Leave our village...you are not good....

People in a village near Dehu are being asked to leave a village for alleged crimes. In this day and age, this is not a good way to solve a problem. Even if the allegations were true.

Chaturthi celebrations

Ganesh Chaturthi is a global festival now. Here is a PBS story about Ganesh Chaturthi being celebrated in New York. And if you have a broadband connection, you can watch some of the clips of celebration at Google Video.

The Des Moines celebration was great. A lot of money was raised for the temple and everybody had a lot of fun. As the temple is next to the river, the visarjan procession was a trek from the temple to the river. Next year, we will have some sort of music during the procession so that people can dance.

Ganesh Chaturti

There is a terrorist advisory for the upcoming Ganesh Chaturti. This will mean less women and children accompanying men during Visarjan. Security should be up to the mark in Pune and Mumbai.

Our Ganesh Chaturti here in Des Moines has Pratisthapana and Visarjan on the same day as the function is being organised in the local temple. I will be celebrating the event after 11 years.

Disaster relief and disaster creation

A safe place to send in your relief money is the Prime Minister's relief fund. Other relief funds seem to open and close during more dramatic disasters. Ofcourse, you never know which state gets hit, but the money is in reasonably good hands with the PM relief fund.

Speaking of disasters, illegal extraction of India's natural resources are one of the easiest ways the ruling parties makes easy money. It's easy to find the illegal activities. Anything that goes on 24 hours a day and without any questions asked is usually blessed from the top or the middle.

I do not know if that is happening in Maharashtra, so you can comment on that. But it is apparently happening in Andhra Pradesh and the reason we know is that it is causing damage in Karnataka. Here is another instance of sand quarrying in Tamil Nadu.

Our history books teach us that the British exploited our natural resources. But we may our own worst enemy in this regard. Ofcourse, we eventually love to blame those foreigners for using our bad river water.

Rain, Rain, Go Away!

The rain has got Maharashtra real good this time around. All low lying areas are in trouble now. Thankfully, evacuation and help activities are moving along well. This will be a hugely disruptive event in the lives of lakhs of people. I remember my uncle incurring thousands of rupees of damage in his shop due to rain. Insurance is not a poor man's tool in India. So most of these folks have the misfortune of absorbing their own losses.

Maharashtra photographs on Flickr

Flickr has this feature called tags. Go to this page and you can potentially see thousands of pictures taken in Maharashtra or having some sort of Maharashtra connections. You can jump around to other related tags like Mumbai, Pune or Aurangabad.

Discussion board added..

I have figured out the way to add a discussion board to the maharashtraweb site. It requires registration and all groups will be moderated for bad language. Hopefully, that will provide another dimension for interaction for maharashtraweb users. It will also facilitate discussion of topics that are probably more dearer to your hearts than mine.

Maharashtra images

I looked around the web for photographs that capture the essence of Maharashtra. Here is a nice picture of women wearing Navvari sarees. This link has a photographers view of Maharashtra. Here is picture of a dance bar from the old days.

There have been lavni dances sponsored by Coke! And liquor industry has caught on to the trend too with their item numbers across the country. Sell them dreams and hook em!

"The World is Flat", let us learn English!

There is a lot of mention of Bangalore in the book "The World is Flat". A few years down the road, Bangalore should get replaced by Pune, Chennai or Hyderabad. Politicians in Bangalore are cashing out on software investments. Pune and its surroundings are doing great!

I am glad to see a reduction in pure Marathi Schools. Not that the Marathi curriculum is weak, but the public school teachers definitely are. Out of the 11 public school friends I knew, only one passed 12th! These were relatively smart guys studying in ultra-horrible schools.

It is nice to know that English is being planned as a compulsary subject. I thought that would be a given, but I guess one can never assume anything with politicians around! English has to be taught, given that it is a global language. Hindi should be the language that gets the axe instead of English. Most of South India seems to have done this with good results. Thanks to songs and movies, everyone gets a free grounding in Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu, whether they realize it or not!

If Germans and Chinese can learn English in school, surely Maharashtrians can and should? Why ostracize an ethnic public schooled Maharashtrian to a life of poverty by deliberately taking away English from him?

Link to Maharashtrian Recipes

Here is the mother of all links for Maharashtrian recipes! http://www.mumbai-masala.com/maharashtrafood.html. Go Samita!

And misal!!