India Uncut

India Uncut is a popular Indian weblog turned website published by Bastiat prize winner [1] Amit Varma. The original India Uncut began as a blog in December 2004. Amit Varma was then managing editor of Cricinfo, but decided to shift to being a consultant so that he would have more time to do his own writing. Amit's experimentation with a new medium took off and gained more readers than he had anticipated.

Screenshot of The India Uncut Blog

History

Much of Amit's freelance writing, such as Op-Eds for the Wall Street Journal Asia, were elaborations on ideas that were initially explored on the blog. However, India Uncut was, most of the time, a filter-and-comment blog. Some of its readers often chose coming to India Uncut over reading a morning newspaper, and wanted lots of links. Others hated the one-line link posts, and wanted him to write more.

To evolve the blog, on February 15, 2006 [2] the new India Uncut was created in collaboration with Madhu 'Madman' Menon.[3] It sought to expand the ways in which it can bring pleasure to readers. The new sections were:

  • The India Uncut (IU) Blog: This is a continuation of the original India Uncut with Amit Varm as its sole author.
  • Linkastic: This is a filter blog, whose purpose is to save you time by bringing you some of the most interesting stuff to read on the internet, across a range of categories. This was a group blog, and besides Amit, its contributors were Gautam, MadMan, Prabhu and Sanjeev Naik.
  • Rave Out: In this blog, the contributors write short, succinct pieces on books or films or albums. The contributors are Amit Varma, Arun Simha, Chandrahas Choudhury, Falstaff, Jai Arjun Singh, KM, Nilanjana S. Roy, PrufrockTwo and Sonia Faleiro.
  • Workoutable: This section was intended to provide quiz questions.
  • Extrowords: This is a Java-enabled themed crossword section.

Amit Varma had a narrow escape from the November 2008 Mumbai Attacks and his subsequent blog post attracted a substantial number of hits thereafter. He was even featured on Larry King Live following his close shave.[4] Amit Varma was also recently named in the Business Week Magazine list of India's 50 most powerful people.[5]

Awards
  • Won the "Best Indiblog" award at the Indibloggies 2005 receiving 25% of the votes.[6]
  • Nominated for best Asian blog in 2006 bloggies.[7]

References
  1. "Amit Varma, Journalist and Blogger at India Uncut". Labnol.org. Retrieved 2012-08-03.
  2. "India Uncut". Indiauncut.blogspot.com. Retrieved 2012-08-03.
  3. Naik, Sanjeev (1975-08-06). "About". India Uncut. Retrieved 2012-08-03.
  4. Varma, Amit (2008-11-27). "A Night Out In Mumbai (Updated) - The India Uncut Blog". India Uncut. Retrieved 2012-08-03.
  5. "India's 50 Most Powerful People 2009: Media: Amit Varma - BusinessWeek". Images.businessweek.com. Retrieved 2012-08-03.
  6. "The Word is out | Indibloggies - The Indian Weblog Awards | Indian Blog Awards". Indibloggies. 2006-01-14. Retrieved 2012-08-03.
  7. "Sixth Annual Weblog Awards". The 2006 Bloggies. Retrieved 2012-08-03.
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