The Indian Institute of Planning and Management must have the cajones of an elephant to go after a few prominent bloggers because of what was published. Their PR department must be going stir crazy with all the negative press they are getting now. The IIPM (every organization in India has long, technical names which inefficiently gets truncated to a few letters) is a business school that claims a vast number of things, including being ranked in the top-25 nationally (which they are not) and being “better” than the well-regarded world famous Indian Institute of Management, or, IIM (which is really an inside joke, I am sure).

In a nutshell, here is what happened – Rashmi Bansal, a blogger and editor of JAM, an online magazine wrote this article, calling the IIPM on their tall claims. The IIPM and some of their alumni retaliated, calling Rashmi names and issuing legal notices to whomever linked to the story. Gaurav Sabnis, who worked for IBM lost his job there as the IIPM pulled some strings or played out their drama card of “we'll burn our IBM laptops, if you don't sack Sabnis.” Arrrgh!

IBM, did nothing. Sabnis resigned. IIPM, 1. Bloggers, freedom & logic, 0.

Now, if the JAM article was full of crap, that would be one thing. It apparently hit a nerve. Truth does hurt don't it? The way IIPM handled this certainly smacks of a very defensive maneuver. What are they hiding and why? The vitriolic attacks against bloggers only exposes them to necessary criticism and more probing questions, which as experience has shown they are unwilling to answer in a civilized manner.

DesiPundit has the goods on this whole issue. Om Malik‘s quick take on it for those of you with little time.

Tiffinbox is a labor of love. No doubt about it. However it would sure feel great to receive your support if you really find something, anything useful from time to time.

Starting today, in the upper right hand column is a tip jar. Throw in a couple of bucks. Throw in ten, or whatever suits you. Thanks for your support!

Help me spread the word about the site and send me leads to South Asian photographers, artists, designers, writers, musicians, dancers and events they are involved in. I'll be happy to post their information, be it a link or a series of images, on this site. The email address to send that info to is tiffinbox[at]pipalproductions[dot]com.

For as long as I have been blogging, I have used Bloglet to automatically send updates to your email inboxes. I just checked my account with Bloglet and there are 358 subscribers to this blog, Tiffinbox.

Three-hundred-and-fifty-eight! GAWD! Really? WRONG! Well, a closer inspection revealed that many [hopefully not most] subscribers are those with fake or false email addresses. “admin@flash.com,” “card@game.com” and “info@amer.com” are some examples. Either spambots have found a way to enter their email addresses and take over the Bloglet system or there is one very bored hacker who has nothing better to do.

With Six Apart's authentication service TypeKey, I have kept most comment and trackback spammers at bay and have required those of you who want to leave comments to register with the service. I understand that this has discouraged many of you and I regret that you find it a PITA [pain in the arse] to leave your thoughts on this site. But life is short and I didn't want to spend any more time batting away those nefarious emails that we all receive from time to time.

So, with TypeKey in place Bloglet's unreliable and perhaps buggy service is getting the boot. I am bouncing it out of here. In its place I will be using FEEDblitz. Look for the FEEDblitz form in the same place you found the Bloglet form. Subscribe to this blog [yes, still free] and continue to receive all the posts in your email inbox. For those of you who used Bloglet, I have transferred over legitimate email addresses to the new service. The rest didn't make it. It's still a whopping 315 subscribers so Thank You!

And this is as good a time to let you know about Feedburner, my choice of service to publicize and optimize RSS feeds. If you don't know what RSS stands for [in the non-desi sense], fear not. If you are set on receiving all my posts here in your email inbox and your are happy, let's leave it at that.

If some of you have ventured into the world of aggregators like Bloglines, FeedDemon or NetNewsWire, then you can receive my posts as an automatic feed; posts that magically appear in your choice of aggregator along with other weblogs that you read. You don't have, though I wouldn't recommend it, visit this site directly. If for instance, I post images on this site, you are unlikely to see them in an aggregator.

If you do use an aggregator set up, I urge you to use the following FeedBurner feed – http://feeds.feedburner.com/Tiffinbox – to receive it without any interruptions. There are many advantages for doing this; everything looks consistent and clean and is an easier, enjoyable read. I welcome you to give it a whirl.

And, here is list of alternative RSS readers.

As always, please send me feedback at tiffinbox [at] pipalproductions [dot] com.

As the country celebrates Independence Day this year, changes at TypePad [actually, SixApart] appear to be afoot.

I noticed something significantly different in the way my site appeared. The list of links on either side of the page appeared to have text that was way too large, line breaks within posts disappeared, obscenely scrunching paragraphs together and images I posted seemed off-center.

I checked TypePad News and sure enough the servers that run the weblog tool of my choice – TypePad – were going through some maintenance. But this was no ordinary fixer-upper. TypeKey, the much heralded system that makes posting comments on weblogs and logging into websites a snap is finally here for TypePad. Everyone say “Amen,” cuz I know I have been hit by comment and trackback spammers for quite some time. Now, if you want to comment or send a trackback your identity will have to be verified. So, spammers, &^%$# off!

There are also changes to how one can design a blog, the doubling of bandwidth and the increase in storage capacity that should now make TypePad the all around favorite blogging tool. I suspect there will be some growing pains after this major shift as well, but I am thrilled to see the one feature I kept hankering for: TypeKey, finally here.

If you maintain and publish a weblog, help MIT with their research on weblogging. I am not sure to what end this survey helps them, but it was quick and easy to fill out.