Until now, there hasn’t been a good way to send email to friends and family in Hindi, my native language and their language of choice.

Thousands of other email users, including me, have been writing emails in Indian languages for years. I must have written my first Hindi Gmail soon after I started Gmail in 2004 (screenshot below). And the method has been pretty easy – as easy as enabling the Hindi keyboard in my Windows, which is the right way to compute multilingually. There have been a number of other ways of writing in Indian languages directly into your email box too, even if you don’t count the copy-paste online editors, like the one on this site.

So, thanks Google once again. But please don’t claim this couldn’t be done before. It’s just that you have made it a little bit easier for newbies. People used to IMEs (Input Method Editors) will continue doing it the “proper” way. Google made exactly the same claim when they added Hindi typing to Blogger two years ago, when Hindi blogs had already been in existence for a few years. Come on, don’t lie, Google!

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”.