Why I follow blogs

From my comment in Qalandar:
Anon.
Many thanks for the detailed comments. I have been following topics outside mathematics only for five years or so and so my comments may be quite uninformed. This interest was sparked by roughly two events. One was the war in Iraq and I felt that I could not ignore the outside world any longer. Secondly, after about 50 years of professional life with most of the reading and communications in English, I suddenly started remembering Telugu songs that I have not heard for 40-50 years. I started following blogs and other sources both in English and Telugu. At first Telugu blogs and sites were disappointing with a lot of abuse and language that did not seem equipped to express difficult ideas and nuianced thought. Then suddenly lot of young people started blogging in Telugu and already the usage is much better than before and many topics from science to philosophy are discussed reasonably in some of the blogs. Internet and blogs seem to be making a lot of difference. I think that the situation may be better in languages like Tamil, Bengali, Urdu..
Secondly, I find many books are appearing published in India written by many living in India of high standard on history, etymolgy.. Some are in English (like 'Comprehensive History and Culture of Andhra Pradesh') but there are also books and translations in Telugu. For example P.V. Parabrahma Satry's 'Kakatiyas' isrecently translated in to Telugu is a nice complement to Cynthia Talbot's book.
Some of these changes seem to be coming from the cumulative power of number of bright people using the new facilities rather than a few outstanding individuals. I have seen David Shulman's articles but I have also seen posts by some bloggers working in IT with detailed knowledge of vedas. So it may not be too long before more work with reasonable methodologies will emerge from the subcontinent.