With the Jagadguru’s blessings, I hereby declare this revision of The Examined Life open to the public.
Officially, The Examined Life was founded on August 14, 2002, exactly five years back. I wasn’t using any standard blogging software then. I had rigged up something in ASP and used an MS Access database. Those posts were always available with me, but they were not online, which I am sure was a great loss to humanity. Fortunately, I have found time to extract the posts and integrate it with Wordpress. They are now available in my archives (all posts before Jan 2004), or you can find them by going to: http://vintage.ravikiran.com. (Warning: Lots of broken links, and I haven’t imported any comments. I will do so later.)
I took it down around Jan 2004 and shifted to Movable Type with MadMan’s help in April. Later he helped me move to Wordpress. Counting this as a major redesign, we are at v 4.0. This version will continue to uphold the fine traditions established by this blog – viz. defend the good, oppose the wicked and make bad puns.
I had formed a mailing list of some friends to get feedback on the redesign effort (which I codenamed Plato because I am pompous and self-important). I had actually softlaunched this blog and started posting a few days back; just scroll down for more posts. I would like to thank them for giving me advice and blame them for anything that has gone wrong.
Like any great software development effort, Plato was and still is behind schedule. I am launching this on August 14 because I wanted to launch on the fifth anniversary of my blog. There are still lots of things to do. We will probably get to 4.2 or 4.3 before it stabilizes. Please update your bookmarks to blog.ravikiran.com, because ravikiran.com will contain my homepage, not my blog. My old permalinks will stay that way till I get around to redirecting them. My feeds have automatically been redirected – or so I think. But nonetheless you can find my RSS 2.0 feed at: http://www.ravikiran.com/blog/feed/ and my comments feed at: http://www.ravikiran.com/blog/comments/feed/. Please let me know if you find anything broken or if something can be better.
And I get to break you in!
Me next!
Great! Looking forward to more regular Ravikiran-esque posts.
I read through a lot of your posts from the last three years in the past one year or so. I love the way you think through stuff and am delighted that you are blogging again.
All the best on 4.x!
So you won’t stay dead, huh? It’s silver bullets and wooden stake time people.
“Those posts were always available with me, but they were not online, which I am sure was a great loss to humanity.”
Why do you think it was a great loss to humanity? What is the basis for that kind of conviction? I think it is best to let others judge oneself.
Mandeep, it is not your fault. You are deluded by the forces of right wing fundamentalism.
How did you conclude somebody (me or you) was at fault when all I did was to ask a simple question? And how on earth did you conclude I have any political or religious idealogy? Anybody who is eager to brand other person as idealogical is either swept by some current himself or is just predisposed to do such a thing. Personally I am trying to rid myself of all idealogies (all), not develop one. I believe I don’t “external” pillars of support, be those political, religious, caste based or region based.
I like some of your posts but a little bit of humility will go a long way.
Personally I am trying to rid myself of all idealogies (all), not develop one.
In the process, you also seem to have got rid of any sense of humour.
Mandeep,
Your failure to think deeply has its root cause in India’s education system, specifically in its lack of focus on critical thinking and the government’s inexplicable failure to provide crack cocaine in the children’s mid-day meals.
While the institutional failure will take a lot of time to rectify, you can personally solve the problem by taking the following steps:
#1 Do pranayam
#2 Take the art of living course by Sri Sri Ravishankar. Do the Sudarshan Kriya regularly, as it will aid you in breathing deeply, just a step away from thinking deeply.
#3 Visit the Jagadguru’s blog. Go through all His posts. Try to wallow in His brilliance.
These three steps will put you in a state of mind that will allow you to appreciate all posts by me, His chief disciple and VP, Marketing.
tech.ravikiran.com is broken link. Probably not yet up and running …
Ravikiran
It seems you suffer from an acute case of Complex Inferioritis. If you do all those steps which you recommended for me, you might rid yourself of needlessly bashing other people.
Waiting for a saner response.
RK, I am curious where you saw tech.ravikiran.com… It is in fact true that I had planned that as the URL for my technology blog, but I don’t think I released it publicly yet.
>>I am curious where you saw tech.ravikiran.com
I browsed thru the secret project called Plato
Since personal.ravikiran.com, classic.ravikiran.com worked (though not released to public), I guessed even tech might work..
Oh.. Yup. The plan is to get that too up.
[...] As this will be the last post of 2007, I will take the opportunity to indulge in some shameless navel gazing about how The Examined Life has done since its relaunch on August 14. [...]