6 months chasing technology

It has been six months and 19 days since I moved to India and seven months to day that I was married in a bar in Madison, WI. We live in a two bedroom apartment on the north side of Chennai with a clear view of a stagnant pond of mosquito infested water, a traffic signal and the best cheap eatery I have ever had the opprotunity to try. It has been almost a year since I dropped all ambitions to pursue my Ph.D. in anthropoloy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a more uncertain life as a freelance writer. So far I am happy with decision. I've had some success writing for some well known magazines, and I hope to use this space as a sort of idea dump where I log some of the stories that I would like to pursue, but don't have time to do so. I'll also probably drop in the text of a few stories I've written once they've been published.

There is always a bit of danger composing a blog if you are a writer, and I am still wondering if I am going to regret this later. I have this pained feeling that if I say too much here some of my ideas might find their ways into other writer's stories before I get a chance to publish them myself. It's a risk that I am willing to take. It might also mean the death of this medium for me.

So what is it that I do? I'm a freelance writer working for about a dozen different magazines and newspapers across the US. Lately I've seemed to find a home with magazines that deal with technology and I've been published in Wired Magazine, Wired News, and the UK-based .Net since I moved here. It is a bit of a jump from what interested me in the past since I am by no means a technology guru. Instead I'm trying to look at the places where technology and culture clash and what happens afterwards.

I'm writing about a week after several bombs exploded in Bombay, and there is a good chance that this post will never make it online since the Indian Department of Telecommunications has deemed fit to suspend blogs that it deemed a security risk. Aparently they were unwilling to come up with criteria for acessing risk, and instead of cutting off LTTE and Laksar-e-toiba message centers, that have eliminated thousands of blogspot and blogger accounts. There have been protests. My protest is pressing the save button on this and hoping it makes it though.