Prolog

Happy Pongal/Sankranti to those that celebrate it.  We have been celebrating the Pongal festival on the same day since the days of the  Indus Valley Civilization (according to my research) making it a 4,500+ year old tradition. On this blog, we have been celebrating it with a  harvest festival of our own – the annual Blog Pongal – a harvest of the best posts on this blog. Here are the previous editions – 2004-5 , 2006, 2007, and 2008 . 

5th Edition of Blog Pongal – Best posts of 2009

Choosing the best posts out of 48 is a tough task. I have tried my best to present you the best dozen (one per month approx).  Hope you like them.

1.  Ganesh Vaideeswaran’s thought provoking post – American Politics and Religion – on the occasion of Obama’s swearing in, a historic occasion for the USA.

2. In India, Satyam’s Ramalinga Raju created history of a different kind.  Priya Raju’s unusual take on the event – Satyameva Jayate.

3. Slumdog Millionaire created more reams of writing than possibly what the movie making team did. Sibu Kutty with his insightful post on the movie.

4.  I never expected my post Soul of Success to garner so many insights from the community. Personally, a very enriching post.  

5. The Indian elections threw many a surprise. Priya Raju called it the Great Indian Rope Trick  stirring a great debate amongst the readers. Considering the scope and scale of it, i guess only India can pull such a thing off.

6. Dr. Abdul Fakhri’s thought provoking question – does friendship have value in the new millennium.

7. Kumaran ponders the existential question – types of actions and concludes as three buckets of actions.

8. Sultana’s beautiful tribute to the Teachers on Teacher’s Day.

9. My post on the Aha Moment and its connection to Learning.

10. Abdul Fakhri’s provocative post for Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday – what can we celebrate on Gandhi Jayanthi?

11. Priya Raju’s poignant post on the Plight of the Invisible. Hard not to get teary-eyed after reading this.

12. Vamsi Poondla’s superb posts on the Telangana Crisis – Part 1 and  Telangana Crisis – Part 2 - a great piece of research. Vamsi did a timely yeoman service to this community by explaining the problem and the potential solution(s).

Epilog

Hope you all enjoy reading this blog as much as we enjoy writing it. Many of you read this blog without commenting. May i request you all that read, but don’t comment, to make an exception this time and write a comment on this post, so that our writers get some encouragement? Thanks in advance.

2008 proved to be a great year for our blog. Not only did we complete 4 years of blogging , we also hit the mega milestone of 1 Million Page Views.

Read the Millenium Bat Awards from Jan 2008 – this laugh riot from Priya Raju to kick off the Blog Pongal, our annual feature to celebrate Pongal – the harvest festival.
Imagine the transformation that can take place when a society puts their language down in a written script. Sujatha Manivasagam, in Feb 2008,  shared the inspiring story of Sequoyah who helped his native Indian community to do just that.

Parents murdering their daughter for a flimsy reason?! One would like to think that happens only in Bollywood movies. Read NK Sreedhar’s poignant post on the subject from March 2008.

India’s caste system always promotes a heated discussion. My post on the caste system from April 2008 is no exception. Incidentally, it was the 10th post in the Real History of India series which generated quite a few stimulating discussions.

Can passion be taught? This is a question that has intrigued me for several years. Thanks to the community on this blog, in May 2008, we laid the question to rest with a convincing set of answers.

In June 2008, the internet was agog with the idea that technology is making us dumb. I had to jump in to support technologists with “I am stupid and the Internet made me so” .

Ganesh Vaideeswaran captured the essence of  “What is Patriotism” in July 2008 with some must read comments.

In August 2008, Dr. Abdul Fakhri asked the rhetorical question “Can a man be a friend of feminism” with a thoughtful post.

Can you become a historian by accident? Priya Raju, in Sep 2008, wrote about her unique hobby that makes her the Accidental Historian.

Is the instinct to support your own ethnic group more powerful than the instinct to support your own gender? In Oct 2008, NK Sreedhar raised this thought provoking question on the eve of the US Presidential elections.

Why do some parents force children down certain career paths? Sultana Fakhri, in Nov 2008, asks for a Sorting Hat to help children decide their careers.

Nov 2008, also marked the start of Priya Raju’s in-depth analysis of the Real History of Sri Lanka in a series that now has 5 posts.

If one were to take an unbiased look at India of today, it will be easy to conclude that we need optimism by the shiploads to see it survive. And survive it must, for it shines as the lone beacon of freedom in the third world. Ganesh Vaideeswaran shares his Hopes for 2009 in an emotional post in the aftermath of 26/11. Amen.

Dear bloggers, commenters and readers,

Hope you enjoyed 2008 as much as we did. Thank you very much for making SAST Wingees a vibrant hang-out in Cyberia.

In keeping with the knowledge is scrumptious theme, i had this bright idea last year to celebrate Pongal with a harvest festival of my own – harvesting the best posts of the past year. This is the 2nd edition of the Blog Pongal covering the best posts of the year 2007. It was another great year, with a number of posts generating a good amount of discussion. And yeah, our blog is finally on WordPress, my favorite blogging platform and we now have our own domain name as well.

First a few words about Pongal – yeah, we all know that it is the Tamil harvest festival, but did you all know that it is probably the only festival which is based on the solar calendar? [Most other Hindu festivals are either based on the day of the moon phase or a star position] Pongal is celebrated during the winter solstice or the first day of the Uttarayana punya kalam – the sun moves northwards on this day. In North India it is celebrated as Makar Sankranti – Sun’s movement into Capricorn. It appears that Tamils follow the solar calendar whereas the rest of India follows the lunar or luni-solar calendar. I am not sure why or how this dichotomy happened. Need to do some more research on that.

I picked the 12 posts that I consider the best from last year [last year used the google search rank, but the pagerank has fallen dramatically after the move to the new URL]. I picked one for each month in chronological order, oldest first:

1. My Celibate Dog by Priya Raju – Her rib-tickling yet sentimental post about her dog Brownie.

2. Why do human females have menopause - For the longest time, menopause was thought to be another uniquely human trait, which is unfortunately not true.

3. When you praise someone’s talent, you are most likely discouraging effort while the focus of this post is children, it applies equally to adults.

4. Lot of people are stumped by the differences and different uses of blogs, wikis, forums. This is a post created out of comments based by the readers of this blog. A fine example of how community intelligence can be tapped into using blogs.

5. My observations on how the reading habits of children has not changed even a wee bit since i was a child. Some excellent comments on this post.

6. Can passion be taught is a question that has haunted me forever. The insightful comments on this popular post have helped me a lot on this subject.

7. Why do we ask less as we age? Sibu Kutty’s thought provoking post generated a lot of interesting discussions.

8. Great teachers don’t teach – The best teachers we have come across in our lives actually let us learn things ourselves instead of teaching.

9. You can become a better conversationalist by listening more and talking less.

10. It may be difficult to agree with the fact that words that we use have a powerful influence on our behavior – why is this so?

11. Ganesh spots a new technology called Freebase that may usher in the age of the Semantic Web. Check out the comments as well.

12. Why do beautiful people make more money and are generally more successful? Ganesh responds by connecting it to the Warren Harding effect from Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.

Hope you all have enjoyed reading this blog as much as we enjoy writing this blog. Here is wishing you all a Happy Pongal/Makar Sankranti and this being my first post of the new year, Happy New Year 2008 as well.