Imagine this: Cyclone Maya hits Chennai. Phone lines are down, and there's no power. Not even in Poes Garden. But Superblogger Subramaniam, sitting in his marooned apartment block near Elliot's beach, somehow posts a blog (yes, a blog) recounting the dreadful night he and his neighbours spent with flood waters rising up 10 metres.
Hourlyblogger Hari, a resident of an equally marooned Mylapore neighbourhood of the city, somehow manages to read the piece and ferries food and other essentials to his fellow-blogger and his friends on one of the many rubber dinghies that the Chennai Corporation has pushed into service. A week later, when flood waters recede, Superblogger and Hourlyblogger, along with 50 others, meet at the tony Amethyst coffee shop. And over some overpriced Ceylone tea, they agree that blogs and bloggers were indeed heroes during the disaster.
The blog, a hero? You must be kidding. Maybe elsewhere in the world blogs and bloggers have made a difference during such natural disasters. But in India, over the past one year, where we have had a spate of natural calamities and bomb blasts, there is little evidence suggesting that this new medium, and its proponents have had any impact. Although a handful of bloggers have tried manfully.
The Collablogs or collaborative blogs during the Mumbai floods and the Kashmir earthquake were little more that an aggregation of related stories that appeared in newspapers and magazines. Most posts were on the lines of Mid-Day said this, TOI didn't report that, Outlook put Rani Mukherji on its cover rather than the floods, and so on. For Mumbaikars who were stranded without water and electricity for a almost a week it wouldn't have mattered much which paper said what. Helpline numbers of electricity and healthcare providers were reproduced on the Collablog from other newspapers. Astronomical web-page hits and Technorati.com searches apart, what citizen reportage are we talking about?
Thankfully, some of the saner bloggers agree that it is impossible to prove that blogs save lives or make a difference. But then if you aspire to be a celebrity blogger, it is imperative for you to be seen/quoted/talked about at such forums. For the urban twentysomethings with intellectual pretentions and the hope of being spotted by the commissioning editor of a publishing house, it's the new P3, or rather the virtual world's own India International Centre.
