Desi Uber-Bloggers
By Ayesha K.

In a world where bloggers are increasingly becoming the special du jour, the smart and mischevious South Asian uber-blog Sepia Mutiny has won a following of thousands of desi readers with its incisive and pithy commentary bites on politics, entertainment, sports, and everything else you can possibly imagine.

	Sepia Mutiny Website

EGO talked with five of the founding bloggers - Manish, Apul, Sajit, Vinod and Abhishek, about what has made Sepia Mutiny such a explosive phenomenon. As regular readers of Sepia Mutiny, we thought it would be interesting to know more about the bloggers themselves, and we were surprised at their candid and funny remarks, and really smart backgrounds. But makes perfect sense, just check out their blog!

Why do you think blogs have become such a huge success recently?
Manish: What really drove blogging in the U.S. was the 2004 presidential election. Due to the deep political split in America after 9/11, political blogs really led the charge, with cultural bloggers becoming popular in their wake. Blogs say dangerous things in funny ways. Without advertisers to keep happy, they are much more pointed and interesting to read than the mainstream media, and they're much quicker to get on top of fast-breaking news. With blogs which allow comments, you see the hive-mind at work. Large numbers of intelligent bloggers swarm a topic, picking away at it like a colony of ants. Your final understanding is far deeper than anything the author himself or herself could have produced. There's an edge, an energy to it that's missing from the admittedly more professional glossies.

Do you ever compete with fellow bloggers to get the new story out there first?
Manish: All the time. Sometimes a blogger will send out an 'I got it!', a placeholder that lets people know s/he's already working on a post. On video clips like Aishwarya's frequent TV appearances, we compete informally to see who can link to the video online first.

Manish was born in a suburb of New Delhi and grew up in the SF Bay Area. He graduated from computer science at Berkeley and went to work at Microsoft designing features for Microsoft Word. Currently he runs a blogging software company called rocketpost.

Who is your typical reader?
Apul: My typical reader is a smokin'-hot woman whose sharp wit and sexy confidence naturally resonate throughout the blogsphere. Oh, wait, I thought you said my fantasy reader, not typical. My typical reader is someone a lot smarter than me, and forced to read my posts because they lost a bet. I just wish they didn't keep reminding me of this fact.

What kind of stories interest you? Do you find yourself covering particular topics?
Apul: Anything that allows me to legitimately use the term "ass-fuck" in a post. The Ajai Raj story was a godsend. Unfortunately, those don't come along too often. Aside from that, quirky stories, or anything that our readers may find funny. Everybody on Sepia Mutiny blogs for a different reason, all of which are good. My goal is to find stories and write posts that entertain our readers.

Apul was born in North Carolina, grew up in Northern California, and went to school at UC Berkeley. He currently live in Los Angeles, where he works in a series of soul-crushing, yet bill-paying, temp and contract jobs while he pursues a career in comedy writing and performing. Also, he used to moonlight as an independent crime fighter.

What are the three keys to writing an interesting blog?
Vinod: First and foremost, the material has to be interesting to the blogger himself. You can waste a lot of time chasing some imaginary demographic that supposedly responds to some particular voice but readers can smell the lack of authenticity in a second. Second - frequent updates. Ripping a page out of business, the best ventures out there reward their repeat customers. Finally - Don't be afraid to be a little controversial. Be original and daring.

Why do you think blogs have become such a huge success recently?
Vinod: Everyone's the world's leading expert in something. Between blogging, cross linking, and Google, we're as close as we've ever been in history to finding the precise person, article, or factoid that scratches your itch. And there are billions of itches out there. Sepia Mutiny appears to have stumbled upon a pretty big itch.

Vinod was born in New York, grew up in Houston, TX and currently lives in San Francisco. He did a dual degree in Engineering and Business at University of Penn. Currently, Vinod works for a wireless infrastructure software startup running their marketing / sales & business development.

Are there any standard sites that you visit to get stories?
Sajit: Since I do a lot of writing on culture and entertainment, I like IMDB as a reference site, but other than that I regularly read the WashPost, the NYT, and use google. I also listen to a lot of British radio--Bobby and Nihal on BBC1, Adil Ray on the BBC Asian Network, and the Panjabi Hit Squad on BBC1xtra.

Do you think bloggers threaten traditional news services or entertainment magazines?
Sajit: I don't think blogging threatens traditional news service or entertainment magazines. A lot of our writing is off-the-cuff, and not original reporting. More salient however is that not everyone in the blogosphere properly sources their stories as is done in the mainstream press.

Sajit was born in Worcester, Mass, but grew up in small-town Pennsylvania, in a town called Danville, which is right in the middle of the State. He got his BA from The George Washington University in International Affairs and South Asia Area Studies, and also has an MA in International Security from Georgetown University.

How is blogging different from a news service? What kind of service do you think you provide your readers?
Abhi: News reporting in this country has become lazy. Most newspapers pick up a story over the wire and just copy it, without doing in-depth reporting. This is especially true of many South Asian stories in the news. We take the best articles on South Asian topics and filter them for our readers. In addition to this we usually provide a deeper angle or a humorous take. I like to think of it as useful knowledge in a more palatable form.

How did you become a blogger? In one blog post, you mentioned your dad sent you tips, which was very cool.
Abhi: I became a blogger because I got as sick of forwarding links to important articles, and my friends became equally tired of receiving emails from me. I thought rather than force feed them knowledge that they *should* care about, I'd simply write it onto a blog and *beg* them to read (by forwarding them links to my blog).

My parents have recently started to get involved with my blogging. My dad sends me tips, but my mom is still a little skeptical. At first she thought that in addition to wasting time, blogging would get me into trouble with the government, especially if I blogged about President Bush. One day I told my mom that Sepia Mutiny had become a minor success. She then asked me why I wasn't on TV like other bloggers were. Typical Indian parent response.

Abhi was born in Chicago and grew up in both San Jose and the D.C. metro area. He got a bachelor's and master's degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Universities of Michigan and Colorado respectively. His current day job is as a PhD student in Astrobiology at UCLA. He is on a leave-of-absence from my job with NASA in Houston where he worked up plans and designs for human missions to the Moon and Mars.

Images Courtesy Sepia Mutiny