Living life - city size - country wide - tolmolbol.com!

We recently launched our first portal offering for the Indian web (& mobile) users! Please do visit http://www.tolmolbol.com.

What we are!

Tolmolbol is a consumer-centric city portal that helps ordinary folks like you and me get to know our neighbourhoods better. We unveiled tolmolbol.com at Proto, 2007 (Jan 20th, 2007) in Chennai (the Indian version of Demo), a conference that brought select Indian start-ups together.

Our goal is to make tolmolbol your friendly neighbourhood web-guide where you can:
* search for information about local businesses or professionals,
* voice out your opinions and reviews,
* forge a network of friends,
* communicate and discover upcoming events,
* place classified ads,
* reach out to your community,
* share information with others to make informed shopping decisions, and
* SMS information regarding businesses, events and classifieds to your mobile phones (for free).

What we are not!
* an out and out social networking site.
* Orkut, Hi5, Low5 or for that matter any other USD 300 script copying MySpace.
* Yellow Pages - yellow pages don't tell you if you should be visiting a place, we would like to be the one who can help you decide that.
* Niche/lifestyle reviewing site
* We are not an auctioning/bidding site :) (due to the confusion with Tol Mol ke Bol programme)

Our slogan - "Get local, be vocal!". So we hope to see you on www.Tolmolbol.com, giving back to your community and your neighbourhood.

iLeher.com (a top-notch blog covering Indian technology startups) covered the interview with the tolmolbol team on their blogs. You can find out more about tolmolbol at this link.

Ever The Twain Shall Meet...

Mark Twain, undoubtedly, was the master of wit and sarcasm. And his work lives on, as hillarious (if not more) as it ever was. I obviously am in no position probably to comment on Twain's literary genius but everytime I read piece of his work I find hard not to laugh even if I am reading the same work for the nth time now.

I was recently reorganizing the books that I have piling on in the bottom shelf of my almirah. And I found Mark Twain's Selected Works. Its a small collection of Twain's stories and essays which I was probably reading for the third time. And the most interesting of his essays must definitely be "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences". Though I do like James Fenimore Cooper's - "The last of the Mohicans", but I still love the way Mark Twain goes about dismantling Cooper's style of writing.

Excerpts from the essay
He begins with:
"There are nineteen rules governing literary art in domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In "Deerslayer," Cooper violated eighteen of them."

While explaining how predictable Cooper is:
"Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred other handier things to step on, but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one."

On Cooper's defying the logic:
"...even the eternal laws of Nature have to vacate when Cooper wants to put up a delicate job of woodcraft on the reader."

This is mean but its wicked:
"There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now..."

Twain's description of native Indians waiting to step onto an ark/boat and overpowering the occupants, is a laugh riot in itself. And Twain ends it like only THE Twain could:
"Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that."

You must read Twain to know what wit is all about, to understand how sarcasm works, and most importantly to laugh your butt off.

Read Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences at Project Guttenburg.
For great Mark Twain collection go to http://www.mtwain.com/.