Googlers Anupama Dutta and Nitin Arora have a Eureka moment at the Google blog. They announce that “Now you can blog in Hindi“. As if you couldn’t do this before. Blogspot’s new Hindi transliteration feature is commendable, but all it does is add another tool to a whole lot of existing Hindi typing tools on the internet. Blogging in Hindi has been alive and running for over three years now, and more than 500 blogs exist in Hindi as of today. All that anyone needs to blog in Hindi is a tool to type Hindi, and use that tool with Blogspot, Livejournal, Wordpress, Typepad or any other blogging tool. Any blogging tool that allows you to blog in English allows you to blog in Hindi, or for that matter in any other language that Unicode supports. I have been blogging in Hindi since December 2004.
Windows-XP/2000 and later come with input method editors for Hindi, and it is not rocket science to activate them. These allow you to write Hindi directly in Blogger’s edit box or Gmail’s, or in Wordpad or MS-Excel. So do a few other tools – like Baraha. But if you don’t want to activate them, there are a number of online or offline tools where you can type and copy-paste to the edit box. These include Uninagari, created by yours truly.
Since I use Windows Hindi IME, I can switch between Hindi and English with a mouse-click or a keypress, so Blogspot’s new feature is redundant for me, and for a whole lot of existing Hindi bloggers who have already found their tools to write Hindi. But if this feature wins Hindi blogging community some new converts, it has done some job. So, thanks Google. Also for bringing some more attention to Hindi blogging. Please make your headlines more in sync with the news in future. Your announcement has pissed off a few old-timers in Hindi blogging. Another thing to note: this new feature has enabled Devanagari script on Blogger, not just Hindi. Devanagari script is used to write not only Hindi but a dozen other languages. A more appropriate title for your post would have been “Devanagari blogging made easier on Blogger”.
