Armchair Detective

Now, as a diligent citizen and Netizen, I’ve been looking at the Orkut profile of Aarushi Talwar. Scraps every minute! And a half a dozen fake profiles to go with that. For those who don’t have orkut profiles, or those reading this behind firewalls similar to Ironport, here’s what her ‘about me’ says:

m a g a totally chilled out person i love hanging arnd wid mah frndz !!ok……. wtelse … i lo lookin 8 da mirror all da tyme!! \ ok wteva… wel… i lov da person hu did da gr8 job of inventing da comp<<<>>>>> i love listenin to musik ….. i simply lorv goin to scool n loadz of oder things………..da list iz too large to mention

Bad grammar etc, but hell, she sounds like one of those countless kewl teens with a cool gang to hang out with and swank places to have birthday parties at. And you don’t get any feel of any insecurity… her class community rates her as one of the hottest chicks of her class.

Now why the hell would someone like that be in objectionable positions with a manservant? That too someone who’s so old he has a married daughter? Wouldn’t she much rather paint the town red with someone closer to her age, someone cooler, someone who can dance (Seems like the ‘in’ thing in her circle is Ashley Lobo’s dance classes)… ?

And… an overdose of Feluda, Agatha Christie and Perry Mason over the past few weeks has me thinking on this line – Everyone thinks Aarushi is the intended victim, and Hemraj the manservant was slaughtered to eliminate a witness.

But what if it was the other way ’round?

Maybe Hemraj has enemies who wanted to eliminate him. Maybe he owed someone a huge amount of cash. So Mr. and Mrs. Talwar were fast asleep after taking pills. And Aarushi was the one who heard the commotion on the terrace. Maybe she peeked, or maybe she didn’t, but someone thought she did. And it didn’t take too long to cosh her one and prop her back on her bed. Mrs. Talwar says she saw some bag-like thing on her head when she found her body… was that to ensure the blood didn’t run rivulets and prompt an early discovery?

Now when someone whose only exposure to murder is through detective novels meant for youngsters which need not really come anywhere close to reality, is able to come to this possibility pretty easily, why haven’t these buggers who smell the sweat of criminals for twenty years or more (phrase lifted from English, August) able to atleast pursue that line?

Or is it a trump card and they are holding Mr. Talwar at an undisclosed location solely because they want to settle scores with a dentist… “This is gonna hurt just a little bit” style?

PS: As I wrote this and thought of a title, I thought of this detective hero(ine) of a series of novels who’ll just solve mysteries by looking up news stories and googling out various things, sending innocent mails to suspects to gather evidence, using timestamps for evidence, using Google calendar for reconstruction of the crime timeline, clustering and classification algorithms to find out if a blog’s author or a new addition on instant messenger is the gender they claim to be, and is not a bot….. should (s)he be called ASearchEngineSpy’d'er? And have a keyboard with eight i’s?

What say about that as a webcomic?

In the land of the fish-eyed Goddess

I spent a weekend tramping around Pandya country. Guess it now would be better known as Azhagiri-land, or Gaptain-land, after the two people whose election posters are most seen around the city.

I’d been forewarned about the oppressive heat, but then, Dakshina Kannada has oppressed me enough to be comfortable in a Conjeevaram (uh.. no… I might have a numb skull, but I haven’t quite lost it… just wanted the effect. I guess comfortable in cottons might be more accurate, but it doesn’t have the same ring as ‘comfy in a Conjie’) that I can grin at midday while others sigh and mop their sodden brows for the hundredth time that day at eight in the morning.

One thing struck me looking at the posters of film stars campaigning – Tamil Nadu politics is so taken over by people from the film industry that they consider it their dharma (or like they say in Tamil, Thozhil Dharmam) to make things as entertaining and TV-friendly as possible. Remember Karunanidhi’s midnight arrest that was shown on Sun TV again and again, and even replicated in that popular-as-hell megaserial Chiththi? It only helps that Kalanidhi Maran owns Sun TV, Karunanidhi is a celebrated scriptwriter, and Jayalalithaa used to be a popular lead actress. And Radaan (the producers of Chitthi) is owned by Radhika, whose father Radha Ravi is well known for his attempt to shoot MGR (another actor-politician, Jayalalithaa’s mentor and more), and her current husband Sarathkumar got chucked out of Jaya Amma’s AIADMK. The MGR-Karunanidhi relationship has been immortalized by Mani Ratnam in Iruvar, right from their beginnings in Tamil films (MGR was an actor, and Karunanidhi a scriptwriter), a young Jaya (played by -wait for it- Ash) included. But I digress.

I don’t think any other place has benefited from Adobe Photoshop (or maybe GIMP, even) as Madurai. Atleast not any other place I’ve seen. Elections are on in Karnataka, and not one poster is visible to the untrained eye, and you know your candidate only because he came to your doorstep last election and begged for votes. Elections in Tamil Nadu are ages away, and heck, you have miles and miles of posters with the grinning faces of Karunanidhi, his bloated son Azhagiri, and their formidable foe Vijaykanth greeting you as you enter the city, as you traverse through its various bylanes, as you go out of the city to the tourist attractions in the neighbouring districts.

And what posters! Not ordinary ones with just the candidate in a reverential pose and stubs of the party leaders looking on, no. You have collages of images of the candidate in the mandatory reverential pose, images of him (I did not see even a single poster canvassing for a woman candidate) and his wife (wives, rather… remember this is the land of Lord Muruga, and his two wives Valli and Devayani… this example being cited as both inspiration and justification for bigamy, by people no less than M. Karunanidhi and Ramadoss), his kids in various cute poses (the current favorite seems to be of a kid posing with a mobile), myriad shots of the candidate with different party leaders, performing charitable acts…

Aside: I wonder if Karunanidhi’s kids from his two wives fought for legitimacy à la Karthik and Prabhu in Mani Ratnam’s Agni Natchathiram. I don’t know what to call this, but it was Agni Natchathiram – the hottest part of the year – when I went to Madurai, and I blame the heat for this digression.

I didn’t quite get the wives bit… one look at the posters would convince anybody it wasn’t for the oomph factor.

And this confuses the unsuspecting, untrained, Tamil-illiterate visitor into taking any collage’d poster to be political propaganda. For there are other things that avail the services of Photoshop. Like posters inviting people to the wedding of Letchimipiriya and Thirunaavukkarasu. Or posters from a bunch of friends congratulating their pal Joseph Arumugam on marrying Margaret Anidha.

Oh, and the spellings. I came across this ‘lontry shap’. Hotals serving Itly and Baroda. And people here can’t be accused of being too regional – there was a street called ‘Bagavathsing Street’…. ahh, that’s worse than Ajay Devgan and both the Deol brothers put together.

Local branding gets a new high… no Spencer’s? You have Splencers. Coming home to Geeaarams. And I remained ignorant of this brand until now… Aircel.

And here is a place seemingly untouched by the Raj. Hardly any buildings built in the colonial style.

Stepping into the rural outskirts, you find various temples of Aiyanars – village deities. For the first time I saw priests without sacred threads, and sickles and scimitars in a temple left behind by devotees like how we might normally find threads tied around branches of a tree. The level of non-Sanskritization can be gauged in the big Siva temples in the area. And that is no barrier to devotion or number of the devout thronging the place. You see 2000-year-old temples as alive as they would have been when they were new. Age-old rituals are preserved. Fluorescent lamps and fans might have been added to the Meenakshi temple, but that only serves to complement it, not seem like anachronisms.

And this is the gazillionth time I’m regretting leaving my camera behind for some obscure reason I can’t even recollect. For, apart from the various sights and sounds, I also had a billion chances to capture racket-tailed drongoes – the species that, at Surathkal, can detect my camera from a mile away and fly away just as my finger touches the button. And endless parrots and sparrows – yes, real sparrows – apart from kingfishers and so many other birds I hadn’t seen before.

At neighboring Sivaganga, you trek along a narrow path to visit the temple of Sandanakaruppan, Siva’s bodyguard. On the way, you are amazed to see this awesome school with large classrooms, all facilities in place, right in the middle of nowhere. And, you are told, children do attend classes regularly.

Hmm… along with that and the recent ads with Madhavan, Vijay, Surya and Jyothika exhorting children to attend school, it’s great to see private enterprises, if not the government, egging people on to development. And TN is quite good in having urban centers in all parts of the state, not just around the capital. Quite a contrast to Karnataka where apart from a few places, IT hasn’t quite touched most of the state, and nor has urbanization. So you have a choked-beyond-capacity Bangalore, and other places are battling local unemployment and witness large-scale migration of youth.

Everyone criticizes SM Krishna for not focussing on farmers, and focussing on IT alone, but I suppose he deserves more criticism for his shortsighted development plans which make him look more like a mayor than a CM. Yes, he did bring in IT et al, but it shouldn’t have been like this! The whole state should have benefited from the IT -for want of a better word- revolution, and IT shouldn’t have been projected as a separate, urbane entity that was the bane of rural folk. We never heard this strain before much, thanks to SMK and his right-hand man Jayakar Jerome giving away BDA sites to journalists.

Anyway… the verdict is out. One thing that turns me off is the voter turn-out, especially in Bangalore. 44%! That, in spite of all the Lead India ads exhorting people to get off their seats and spare a few minutes to vote. *Sigh* maybe we need to take a page out of Madurai’s book and get liberal with Photoshop. Maybe political parties should have poster design contests. Maybe we should have more stars in politics. I don’t know what it is in TN that makes people so interested in governance that is missing in Karnataka.

And then on a Monday morning I come back to the cool climes of Bangalore, realizing with a shock that I’ve missed my friend’s sister’s wedding and clean forgotten all about it the whole weekend…. *sigh*.. I had no time to rue about that, as I proceeded to haggle with the auto drivers and convincing them of my being Bangalorean and hence ineligible for their sky-high rates.

Update: I wrote this a while ago… and now I discover the charger I use on my camera’s cells in missing. *Sigh*, May is fading out, and the rains are stripping the Gulmohurs of their flowers… why why why did I put off taking pictures of Bangalore in full bloom?

Punctuality and Women

As you enter the one of the BSNL  offices in Mysore… Well, after you have entered the room directly in you line of vision, a huge board greets you… On that board are these words boldly written, “Being punctual is being polite. When you are not punctual you are wasting other people’s time.”

It is around ten thirty in the morning and this is the only room empty ( and with the board). After some time people who work there turn up… You cant help but notice that ALL of them are women

Meri Marzi

Just read an article in today’s newspaper. The wedding of two fire-brigade officers through a video conference. The groom stayed in China’s quake hit southwest part, helping survivors.

Reminds me of this line from Devang Patel’s absolutely hilarious song ,  “Mein Apni Shaadi mein na Jaoo, Meri Marzi”… <Laughing out Loud>

And Oh yeah!! he used a mineral water bottle for toasting!!!

What’s in a name? Part Deux

Three years back, Tuhina had blogged about the exclusivity and uniqueness of her name. And how people get it wrong, mispronounce it and the like.

And of late, I see this:

My name is nowhere near as unique or exclusive. My first name is as common as can get. And so is my patronymic. People do tend to misspell Venkateshan…. they miss out the ‘h’, but that’s about it when it comes to misspelling my name.. unlike Tuniha’s Tuhani’s Tuna’s name.

So I was feeling all nice when I saw that over the past couple of weeks, a large number of hits on this blog were through the search term ‘Priya Venkatesan’.

And then I come across a post on Nanopolitan which links to the strange, twisted case of tale of Priya Venkatesan (Nanopolitan’s Sepia Mutiny’s words, not mine).

The initial shock on reading Nanopolitan’s post was a bit too much to take, especially since I couldn’t recollect having done anything to merit adjectives like ’strange’ and ‘twisted’…  I’ve considered the past couple of weeks of my life the zenith of boring.

Turns out I have a namesake – well, not quite… she doesn’t have the ‘h’ in her name – who teaches/taught English at Dartmouth, and who seems to be suffering from persecution mania. According to that link, she

• Is suing her class for harassment as she feels some of her students were so unreceptive of “French narrative theory” that it amounted to a hostile working environment.
• Feels her students were “very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful” as “They’d argue with your ideas.”

But the most ridiculous-sounding one was

Last week, a few students in the Dartmouth writing class “Science, Technology, and Society” received a nasty shock. When they checked their inboxes, they learned that their professor, Priya Venkatesan, was planning to sue them for discrimination. Later investigations revealed that she also planned to sue the College and several faculty members, not referring to any particular episode, but mentioning the “hostility” she felt during her time as a professor and saying that “maybe it has something to do with my ethnicity or my gender.”

Oh, I don’t know… maybe this lady is quite justified in her arguments and maybe it’s just a media smear campaign to taint her good name and make her look like she’s lost her marbles… or maybe she really is one for NIMHANS… I have nil clue. All I know is I am not her she, and I’m glad as hell for it, either way.

Three.

Another year of blogging begins. Three years down. Whew! I’ve never managed to sustain any interest of mine this long until now!

Tuna and I had absolutely NO idea on May 10 2005 that this would carry on so long. The sheer convenience of using WP, the features offered, the ease of posting… I guess these are responsible.

My life isn’t as power-packed as Amitabh Bachchan’s or Nandita Das’s or even Darsheel Safary, that I can blog about something I’m doing that half the world is looking forward to, or a chance meeting with Larry Page, or lunch at Aamir’s, or inaugurating the new ride at Wonder-La. So for three years, the odd person (mis)directed by Google to this page when they were searching for ‘Gujarati swearwords’ or information on the odd Bangalorean P3P who I might have fleetingly mentioned as an arbit made-up name, or info on NITK something or AIEEE something else would end up reading on glorious mess food, or the obscure movies, books and songs I’ve watched/read/heard once upon a time and can’t stop raving about, or some total non-incident in my life, or.. well.. Inci and Engi.

Strangely, I’m at a loss for words when it comes to describing what this blog has meant to me. Occasionally a time-capsule, most of the time just a space I use to express myself, my views, my prejudices… oh, I don’t know… it feels like that old cliche – anything you say about this blog, you’ll find some instance in which the opposite is true. Or maybe it’s just an excuse for my woefully limited vocabulary in describing this place.

I once tried entering this page for the Indibloggies or some such blog contest. And hell, it didn’t fit into any ‘category’. It isn’t exactly a personal blog that talks about what my pet lizard had for breakfast, or a political one, or one dedicated to fiction, or a humour blog. Some might say I need to feel proud of ‘unbelonging’. I’ll say Indibloggies has its definitions too narrow. [Or... am I wrong and does this fit into the mold of a 'personal' blog?]

It’s been a new experience with bouquets as well as brickbats coming our way. It’s an exhilarating experience watching people searching for my college and ending up here… it soon turns nerve-wracking, coz the profile of the average person googling for NITK, or simply ending up here, remains unknown to us… it could be anyone ranging from my upstairs akka to my maami in Mambalam.. or some casual acquaintance or (as it is mostly) someone who has no idea who we are, and knows us only by what we write and forms her opinion of us accordingly…

The last point was one I discussed with Srav a while back… she said she found the online personalities of people quite different from what they were offline… while I argued that the same basic traits shine through an interaction, be it online or offline…. just the difference in the media changes what we see and how much we see of their personalities. That said, I’ve found that you can’t arrive at a generalization on whether to judge people by their online personalities or not, or for that matter generalize anything about the blogging world… it is stupid to consider blogosphere as a single, homogeneous entity. It is as diverse as the world it spawns from.

I’ve seen a wide variety of blogs, some good, most bad (people who can’t as much as spell are blogging) in the past three-four years (I didn’t much care about or trust user-generated content before that). The bad blogs include popular ones, too, and reading them occasionally has me going “Aiyyooo!” each time. As if that were not enough, their comments sections are rife with “Oh, wow, what a great post, as usual” sort of comments which make me wonder what the world is coming to. But a year or so into this, and you’ll know which ones to avoid. And that leaves us with the godlevel posts and godawesome bloggers. And, the ones that don’t dazzle you with brilliance, but just, say, put a smile on your face, or get you thinking on a new track, or inform you of some nifty trick you find realy useful…

And another thing I had to learn was that everything here is mostly an opinion, one way of looking at things, and by no means the absolute truth; something to be taken with a pinch of salt. The amount of information can be mindblowingly colossal, and you simply need to have filtering mechanisms in your head so that you don’t accept everything you read without giving it a good amount of thought. And if that is too taxing, you need to have thumb-rules to reject bits and pieces. Not every well-written piece is full of sense, and not every ill-worded piece is completely nonsense.

In the past few months, though the number of hits as well as the number of subscribers of this blog have increased, the average number of comments garnered has gone down. Guess this can be put down to Google Reader rising to prominence. Wouldn’t it be great if a commenting feature too was integrated with Reader?

Guess it can also be put down to the increase in the frequency of blogging. It’s been more than one post a week at times… shows what joblessness can do.

All in all, I’ve had a brilliant time on blogosphere, be it writing or reading. The sort of community that builds over a period of time, the regular visitors, arbit people stumbling onto your page, help slipping in seemingly from nowhere over some problem you’d've mentioned fleetingly in one of your posts, sharing of knowledge/information – jokes, tips, tricks, stories, feelings… and collaborative work! … all these have never been easier. It’s a wonderful world out here.

And it’s been intertwined with our college life a good bit – and here, I’m not just talking about the blog’s title – … enriched it immensely. I’m quite sure my four years would have been different if it weren’t for me scribbling here. Hmm… so since we’re out of NITK as of now, do we shut this place down? Call it a different name?

We choose not to; the inertia weighs heavily on us.

And… what next? Who knows? Playing it by ear seems the only thing to do. That said, I don’t see quitting blogging anytime in the near future; it’s become too much of an acquired taste, like sturgeon caviar.

I guess that’s rich enough. That’s sufficient for years to come, I hope.

Review-of-sorts: The Hippopotamus – Stephen Fry

Watching Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster, you do get a feeling Stephen Fry (Melchett in Blackadder, and Jeeves in J&W) has a flair for humour. And that’s what convinced me to buy this book.

I wouldn’t go to the extent some people go to, and elevate Mr. Fry to the level of Wodehouse, but I should certainly say he’s got a style of his own.

Getting to the book… I had no idea on what to expect. I hadn’t read much contemporary British fiction, save Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl and Bridget Jones, and those would definitely not be anything to go by.

The blurb reads, Ted Wallace is an old, sour, womanizing, cantankerous, whisky-sodden beast of a failed poet and drama critic, but he has his faults too… That got me right into the novel.

It opens with the aforementioned Mr. Wallace getting the sack, and not very long afterward, running into his long-lost god-daughter Jane.

It soon turns out that she’s dying of leukemia. The conversation turns to Jane’s uncle Michael, in whose mansion, miracles are whispered to be happening. And Jane engages her godfather to investigate the mysterious goings-on…

Most of the novel is told from Ted’s perspective. His cynical viewpoints, monologues full of dry sarcasm and passionate digressions are a pleasure to read. At times, you do happen to feel it’s Fry speaking, especially the cynical tirades, and the language at these points might seem showy, but it’s so engaging and entertaining, you are tempted to tolerate it. On his digressions, Ted says,

No, I fart this noxious guff in your faces not because it’s important or new, nor because I want to engage in a sterile debate about it, but because you have to understand something of my mood and disposition the day Jane found me and dragged me off to Kensington.

On looking at the interior decorator Jane’s house, he says,

“This is one of the most revolting rooms I’ve ever stood in all my life. It is exactly as hideous as I expected, and exactly as hideous as ten thousand rooms within pissing distance of here. It’s an insult to the eye and as fully degrading a cocktail of overpriced cliche as can be found outside Beverly Hills. I would no more park my arse on that sofa with its artfully clashing and vibrantly assorted cushions than I would eat a dog-turd. Congratulations on wasting an expensive education, a bankload of money and your whole sad life. Goodbye.”
That’s what I would have said with just two more fingers of whisky inside me. Instead, I managed a broken “My God.. Jane…”.

The narrative fits the story like a glove – most of the novel is told in the form of letters from Ted to Jane. There are short replies that suit to direct the reader’s attention to different aspects of the mysterious happenings. There are also letters and faxes from Jane’s other correspondent in the mansion, her friend Patricia who’s also heard of the mysterious healing powers of the place and is there to recuperate from a break-up. And a diary entry too, from the diary of a homosexual ex-padre friend of Michael’s and Ted’s who’s got “a cute lover and acute angina”, who’s also at the mansion for “some much needed R&R”, where R&R “is Eighties-speak and means Rest and Recreation, or possibly Rest and Recuperation, at a pinch, Rest and Relaxation. Not Rock and Roll, nor Rhyme and Reason, nor Rough and Ready, nor Radicals and Revolutionaries, nor Rum ‘n’ Raisin”.

There are also glimpses from the life of Michael’s son David, who seems to be at the epicenter of all the mysterious healing that has been going on. These serve to increase the suspense and shock value.

A backstory is also inserted in the form of an extract from the biography of Michael that Ted is supposed to be writing – an excuse for Ted to probe deeply about the nature of the miraculous happenings.

The story and the writing ensures there’s not a single dull moment, and the book does have its unputdownable moments, but there’s also this bit in the middle when it all but becomes apparent the nature of David’s healing powers, when you feel like having been invited to the wine cellar for ginger ale. But only for a page or two… Ted’s cynicism and sarcasm soon puts things into perspective.

All in all, a nice read, timepass, but certainly not a one-time read. It’s nothing deep, but the rich, fruity language and choice of words make for brilliant reading and re-reading. Story is straightforward, nothing complicated, but sort of can get you thinking on what social conditioning can do to an individual, if you are jobless enough. Full marks to the style of narration – the way the plot twists are unveiled to the unsuspecting reader, the way the facts are presented in the letters… all these we’ve (read I’ve) seen before only in books that took themselves too seriously, or where authors took the books too seriously for their own good, but the amazing lightness of this book along with the language and narrative are a brilliant combination.

I’d recommend it to be read. Preferably in a cynical state of mind – the empathy you’ll find in the first few pages will simply be mindblowing…. Ted says

If you’re a halfway decent human being you’ve probably been sacked from something in your time… school, seat on the board, sports team, club, satanic abuse group… something. You’ll know that feeling of elation that surges up inside you as you flounce from the headmaster’s study, clear your locker or sweep the pen-tidies from your desk. No use denying the fact, we all feel undervalued: to be told officially that we are off the case confirms our sense of not being fully appreciated by an insensitive world. This, in a curious fashion, increases what psychotherapists and assorted tripe-hounds of the media calls our self-esteem, because it proves we were right all along. It’s a rare experience in this world to be proved right on anything and it does wonders for the amour propre, even when, paradoxically, what we are proved right about is our suspicion that everyone considers us a waste of skin in the first place.

Addendum 1: Oh, and I also read Such A Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry… good read, loved the bits about R&AW, but they turn out to be damp squibs at the end… except for the threats and allusions to possible means of eliminating Sanjay Gandhi and Indira Gandhi… but you have to remember this book was written much after both their deaths. Mr. Mistry calls his work Indo-nostalgic. Thank God it’s more Indo than Nostalgic unlike most diaspora writers we’ve found in the past couple of decades. Got a kick finding this book… I’d seen trailers of the movie version around ten years back… with a young man telling his parents, “I’ve had it with your constant IIT, IIT, IIT!”. More than anything else, that line stuck with me… and I’ve had opportunity to use it a couple of times in the past ten years, and whenever I felt irritated, I’ve taken solace in that one line…. there you go, Indo and Nostalgic.

Addendum 2: Don’t watch an Indian-made whodunit (in my case, Ramesh Arvind’s Accident, which actually is pretty well-made, though the script could have been aeons better… still beats any Bollywood “thriller” or “whodunit” hollow… except maybe gems like Manorama Six Feet Under.) after two days of continuously devouring Feluda stories. You’ll end up laughing your head off at the cinema hall and inviting stares and nasty threats.

Addendum 3: It’s amazing to find so many people riding on someone else’s popularity wave… next to this book, I find a stack of books by “Stephen Frey”… no dry British humor, just cheap American pulp-fic. You also can find books by “Dale Brown”. Barry Trotter, The Da Vinci Cod… *sigh* the very sight of these makes me want to cry.

Fire-on.

So I have unlimited broadband, and freedom from Ironport.

Installed Hardy Heron aka Ubuntu 8.04 inspite of dissuasion from TheG. I simply had to… Firefox kept crashing on Gutsy (that’s the second-latest release of Ubuntu – Ubuntu 7.10 – Gutsy Gibbon… you have to be really gutsy to try it out. I was foolish.), Gutsy suddenly stopped recognizing my CD/DVD drives… and tons of issues besides. Hardy is faster, Firefox 3 is simply brilliant… but my system doesn’t hibernate… and TheG, you’re welcome to say “I told you so”.

By the way, Donald E Knuth uses Ubuntu.

All that apart, I stumbled on to this link which tells you how to write a Firefox search plugin.

I’ve always wondered how come there hasn’t been a Google Image Search plugin when there’s a Google Search plugin.

So here it is…. google.co.in ImageSearch.

Pretty simple to use… just runs Google Image Search on whatever string you enter in the Firefox search bar.

Just click on the link. It takes you to a page where you have a single link. Just click on the link (Don’t open it in a new tab or window). It installs the search plugin for you. Oh, did I mention, you need to be using Firefox for all this to work successfully. I don’t quite know what happens with other browsers; I don’t have any others installed that I could try it out.

It was pretty simple to write, too. Ten minutes is all it took from start to finish. My code looks like this:

<!-- My first firefox plugin
I wrote this on 30.4.08
-->

<search
version="7.1"
name="images.google.co.in"
description="google.co.in Image Search"
action="http://images.google.co.in/images"
searchForm="http://images.google.co.in/images"
method="GET"
>
<input name="q" user>
<input name="f" value="q">
<input name="hl" value="en">
<input name="sourceid" value="Mozilla-search">
</search>
<browser
 update="http://mycroft.mozdev.org/update.php/id0/google.co.in_imageSearch.src"
 updateIcon="http://mycroft.mozdev.org/update.php/id0/google.co.in_imageSearch.gif"
 updateCheckDays="7"
>

So…. what more can I do with this? Do install the plugin, a few seconds is all it takes… try it out, and tell me what’s screwing up with it, what more would you like to see in it… and any gen comments you might have.

I still have no idea on most things about this… like versions and updates, but I hope to be finding my way about these things soon.

The most exciting thing I’ve heard of with search plugins is someone writing a Firefox search plugin to post updates to Twitter. Bril, eh? Pity Twitter no longer lets you post via this plugin.

Update: I added two more… one for Youtube Videos, another for Youtube Channels. Check ‘em out here.