1. Today is a great day for me. My blogsite http://strategicstudyindia.blogspot.in/ has hit the three million mark.
2. I started this basically to make my fellow service people from Indian Army / Navy/ Air Force to read on contemporary issues as many did not have time and wherewithal to search and read.
3. It started in mid 2012. And it continues. I can say with little bit of pride that I have not missed a single day in posting articles in my blog since the first day.
4. The blog was designed and continue to be administered by one of the finest Non Commissioned Oficers of the Corps of Signals of Indian Army, Havildar Andaswamy Swanmugam. It has been a privilege to work with him. He has no formal education or training in IT. On these issues he beats most of my M Tech officers hollow. Whatever I wanted he produced and did better. I wanted a search engine. He quietly wrote the code and produced it as per my requirement and went a step further. He had taken premature retirement from army and now settled in Chennai as his wife is a state Govt employee. He has got a job in Postal Dept and promptly he has been entrusted the job of tracking all the pacels electronically. He tells me the biggest block is in Delhi, nobody bothers here. The other day one of my friends from Indian Navy had complained about some features of the search engine. I rang up my man friday. Pronto the glitch was removed and I got an e mail confirmation from Prem Reuben.
5. There was another Tambi friend of mine : Hav Raja Sekhar. In his quiet way he never allowed the blog to flag. When I was away on tour abroad or had to attain social functions, they did all the postings, nobody could make out. The bedrock of Indian Army is the NCOs. I wish they are given more encouragement. Raja Sekhar has also taken premature retirement. He got five Govt jobs, presently shifted from Kanara Bank to State Bank of India. Without these two NCOs nothing could have been achieved.
6. The blog gets hits from all over the world except from Africa, South America and China where it is blocked. However some hits do come from China probably from their govt agencies or by people who could circumvent the great wall of China. The distribution of hits is given below.
EntryPageviews
United States 902212
India 551644
Germany 231332
France 176741
Russia 107463
Ukraine 70406
Netherlands 66594
China 62096
United Kingdom 52794
Poland 43861
7. Today the counter and the blog looks like this :
8. There is another website Knowledge on Line which was also designed by Hav Shanmugam link of which is given in my blog http://indianstrategicknowledgeonline.com/. This is mainly for my friends from Indian Army. Others may also find this useful.
9. Since I was in service and I could bank upon my NCOs I could carry on without much of a problem. Since retirement It has been a struggle to do everything single handedly. Selection of articles and the source I can do. But to spruce it up, put it in a particular format after taking out all the irritating ads and others, organise these subjectwise and then posting these take a huge amount of time. After retirement I requested Google Adsense to put some ad as my hits are not bad, I do get 3000 to 4000 hits a day. Somehow they are not agreeing probably because I do not write anything myself. This was a restriction of service. But now if I write comments or some small pieces I can barely post less than 10 articles, time will not permit. I require some financial help to employ people to carry this forward. I solicit your advice as to how do I get advt. Otherwise this also will die its natural death like so many good initiatives do in India.
2. I started this basically to make my fellow service people from Indian Army / Navy/ Air Force to read on contemporary issues as many did not have time and wherewithal to search and read.
3. It started in mid 2012. And it continues. I can say with little bit of pride that I have not missed a single day in posting articles in my blog since the first day.
4. The blog was designed and continue to be administered by one of the finest Non Commissioned Oficers of the Corps of Signals of Indian Army, Havildar Andaswamy Swanmugam. It has been a privilege to work with him. He has no formal education or training in IT. On these issues he beats most of my M Tech officers hollow. Whatever I wanted he produced and did better. I wanted a search engine. He quietly wrote the code and produced it as per my requirement and went a step further. He had taken premature retirement from army and now settled in Chennai as his wife is a state Govt employee. He has got a job in Postal Dept and promptly he has been entrusted the job of tracking all the pacels electronically. He tells me the biggest block is in Delhi, nobody bothers here. The other day one of my friends from Indian Navy had complained about some features of the search engine. I rang up my man friday. Pronto the glitch was removed and I got an e mail confirmation from Prem Reuben.
5. There was another Tambi friend of mine : Hav Raja Sekhar. In his quiet way he never allowed the blog to flag. When I was away on tour abroad or had to attain social functions, they did all the postings, nobody could make out. The bedrock of Indian Army is the NCOs. I wish they are given more encouragement. Raja Sekhar has also taken premature retirement. He got five Govt jobs, presently shifted from Kanara Bank to State Bank of India. Without these two NCOs nothing could have been achieved.
6. The blog gets hits from all over the world except from Africa, South America and China where it is blocked. However some hits do come from China probably from their govt agencies or by people who could circumvent the great wall of China. The distribution of hits is given below.
EntryPageviews
United States 902212
India 551644
Germany 231332
France 176741
Russia 107463
Ukraine 70406
Netherlands 66594
China 62096
United Kingdom 52794
Poland 43861
7. Today the counter and the blog looks like this :
8. There is another website Knowledge on Line which was also designed by Hav Shanmugam link of which is given in my blog http://indianstrategicknowledgeonline.com/. This is mainly for my friends from Indian Army. Others may also find this useful.
9. Since I was in service and I could bank upon my NCOs I could carry on without much of a problem. Since retirement It has been a struggle to do everything single handedly. Selection of articles and the source I can do. But to spruce it up, put it in a particular format after taking out all the irritating ads and others, organise these subjectwise and then posting these take a huge amount of time. After retirement I requested Google Adsense to put some ad as my hits are not bad, I do get 3000 to 4000 hits a day. Somehow they are not agreeing probably because I do not write anything myself. This was a restriction of service. But now if I write comments or some small pieces I can barely post less than 10 articles, time will not permit. I require some financial help to employ people to carry this forward. I solicit your advice as to how do I get advt. Otherwise this also will die its natural death like so many good initiatives do in India.
10. Lets not crib. It has been a wonderful journey. I will take a deep breath, NJOY a quiet drink at the week end and the decide what to do next.
11. Read on till it lasts!
Maj Gen PK Mallick, VSM(Retd)