Hello and welcome to the 3rd mela of the year! Without much ado –

The Philadelphia radio jockeys who dialed and harassed an Indian call centre worker got a lot of ink from many Indian bloggers this week. Shanti wondered why many Indians cried foul about racism when the jockeys should really have been excoriated for extremely poor judgement and taste. Psybaba posits that the complainers are too touchy by half and that Indians are not blameless when it comes to racial stereotyping.

On the other hand, even as radio jockeys are bad-mouthing call centre workers, JK notes that globalization affects more than IT and auto-parts — IT enabled services now include teaching.

Amit Varma’s posts on the tsunami were predictably nominated, but instead of pointing to the individual posts I’ll direct you to indiauncut-tsunami.blogspot.com where he’s helpfully compiled all his despatches from the tsunami affected areas of Tamil Nadu. Read it all.

Ravikiran, meanwhile, has been wondering why the government of India is intent on destroying the traditional livelihood of the thousands of fishermen who dot India’s long coastline with its new Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) measure. Yazadjal notes that the CRZ is a classic top-down bureaucratic response and offers an alternative.

Yazad also has a set of interesting posts (part 1, part 2) that touch upon the nature of capitalism as demonstrated by the rise in prices of staple goods has been a second disaster for the already-suffering tsunami victims. Pradeep has had similar thoughts and concludes that no-holds-barred capitalism cannot be the answer.

The tsunami could not break Madras/Chennai’s stride though — it was business as usual in the city. Vinod G notes the ATP Chennai Open finished a few days ago to good crowds, even if the highlight of the match for certain sections of the audience seemed to be a certain shirt-changing player.

India signed an agreement this week to build a oil and gas pipeline into the country from Burma through Bangladesh as well as, interestingly, Iran. Given that any Iranian pipeline has to travel through Pakistan (especially troublesome Balochistan), JK notes that this is an excellent opportunity for India to boost its image and build relations in a traditionally volatile part of the world.

The other issue that got a lot of ink was a little too meta, but considering it went right under the radar of most Indian English blogs, I felt it was worth covering. Madhu’s decision to exclude Hindi blogs in the last blog mela (based, as he notes, on very pragmatic reasons) sparked off a lively (and not always very friendly) discussion in the Hindi blog world, one of the first results of which was Chittha-charcha (blog review), a weblog devoted to a monthly roundup of Hindi blogdom, with other Indic languages to follow. I hope they do well, but as I’ve noted before, it’d be great if Indian bloggers used the distributed intelligence inherent in the blogosphere to minimize linguistic differences instead of exacerbating them.

On the other hand, in a post that surely is (fair) fuel for the language wars, Patrix asks why Indians pre-judge other Indians based on their command over English. Even though English receives equal standing with approximately 23 other languages, it is somehow more equal than others.

The petition currently before India’s Supreme Court to remove ‘Sindh’ from the national anthem was received with disbelief and derision from many bloggers. I just hope no one tells the plaintiff about the German anthem, which has Deutschland über alles stretching all the way from Holland to the Baltic.

Praveen submitted a well-written post about the bearded thief, which stood out by not really fitting in anywhere. But I’m guessing every Indian town and village has its characters, and thaadi kallan here could really be from anywhere in the country.

Food-blogging (or should that be food-and-beverages blogging?): Madhu Menon in his avatar as chef-incardinate at Shiok Food leads us to steamed rice nirvana, and even presents a lovely dish to go along with it — orange-lemon chicken, mmm… and Ravishankar Shrivastava has a paean to tea, the lubricant that keeps most Indians moving throughout the day. Then again, Inkspillz writes about life at college with a beverage of another kind.

Finally, food for the soul: Jitendra Chaudhary is out to create an easily accessible Ramayana in Devanagri on the web. So far, he’s got Part I — “baalkaand” — online. Blogger’s group-blogging capabilities could come in useful here, so go volunteer if stuff like this interests you.

That’s all for this week, folks. Thanks to all who nominated entries, and apologies to those whose entries I could not include. The next mela will be held on January 21 at selectiveamnesia.org. You can view the schedule (and volunteer) here.

Update 15 Jan 9:45pm: Updated post in response to this.