The past few weeks have been pretty good. It was filled with treks, trips and many other good happenings. The first on the list was the Tada Trek. We kept planning, planning and finally went on the 10th of April. Just four of us(Me, Ganesh , Mahen and Vittal). It was the “-thon” and the movie gang. The gala night outs at Vittal’s place still stay fresh. We were all parting to different places and so we thought we should go some where and have some fun. Mahen is getting married, Vittal is(has) shifting to Mumbai and God knows what is happening with Ganesh. Some sources said he is planning to take a break and go on a Euro trip! Waahh!!!!

Getting back to Tada, it is a wonderful place, full of greenery fresh water and close to nature. Mahen was pretty well versed with the route and after travelling by train and share auto we finally reached there. The beauty with Tada is that as you go higher and higher it becomes more beautiful, you get lost in the beauty and finally get lost! We took the wrong route while coming down but it was pretty adventurous and at last we found our way through. It was one helluva trip and one of the best treks i have ever done.

This was the initial rough terrain where we had to jog, run ,walk and drag for about 3 kms to see the first stretch of water.

The first place where we took a halt, changed , got wet and played ultimate Frisbee for some time.

Our “Typical” shot

Me trying hard to get on!

Bliss!!

After completing the tough stretch.

Check out more photos from the trek HERE

After Tada we had to face the final wrath of sitting for three hours in the same place and scribble some thing in a booklet. They do call it exams and we were do it for one final time. We didn’t complain. As usual previous day photocopying, over night stand and we finally did it.

On the day the exams got over a few of classmates started to a place called Veerapandi a small village near Theni district. We stayed at my friend Arun’s place and the four days i will never forget. The thiruvizha, the sweet and loving family, the farms, cows, the river, the palm trees, Arun’s grand father and many more. With all these the days went off with amazing fun.

The thiruvizha (temple fest) was SO massive and i never imagined some thing like that. There were about a lakh people from the surrounding villages and the city never slept for the entire week. Music, dance, religious rituals , shops selling unseen items and two eyes was not enough to see all those. The first day we roamed the thiruvizha and one thing which made every one gape their mouths wide was the death well or the Marana Kinaru. It was a 50 foot deep wooden well like thing and the stunt men rode cars and bikes on the wall. High point was there were 3 women in the team. Imagine a car running perpendicularly on a wall at 100 kmph and the man taking his entire body out of the window controlling the steering with his legs and hands partly! You have to see it to believe! But they were risking their badly…. i second mismatch between the vehicles , sure shot kabala moksham!

Indeed…A Death well!

The next day we spent it in the farms, the river and had nungu straight from the palm trees. Also learnt the art of eating it directly by putting one finger inside the soft surface. We then went to the river and dipped in for a couple of hours.

Natural Shelter to beat the heat!

On the way back we saw the die rolling game. (Recall the Pithamagan film where Surya cheats Laila). Some what same thing. 10 ruba vecha 20 ruba. One thing which is synonymous with villages is that there will be no pechu, only vetu , kuthu, kolai! One guy made a comment during the game and it turned to a big riot. Only thing which we did was ESCAPE! The next day we went along with many of the family members of Arun and had food in the farm. Veerapandi is one unforgettable experience and i has some good conversations with Arun’s grandpa. Hard to see a man like him. He would be some 80 years and was so passionate to take care of the farm and daily went and did the irrigation and stuff.

Theni is really an excellent place with a pleasant climate. It is centrally located between Munnar, Kodai and Thekkady. We decided to go to Kodai the next day and head to Chennai from there. Kodai was good except for the summer crowd. Lots of places to explore there but we just alloted one day and so we hired a cab and checked out many places. We went to boating when the sun was about to set and the lake was filled with mist.

Finally after battling in 4 government buses and travelling for some 18 hors finally reached home!

Not but not the least, yours truly is now an ENGINEER!
The final semester result was a pleasant surprise. Scored 85% which i never thought. Although not a big accomplishment feels good to be a first class with distinction grad!

I just wanted to write a wrap up of things that happened two weeks before but left off and a week passed. So thought of naming the post “Sunday to Sunday” jotting down the recap of the week’s happenings but one more week passed and the title got extended! Good that the title didn’t extend!

The first of the three sundays was jam packed and good fun. Some of us met for the first organizers meet of Chennai barcamp 2 and after some heated discussions and vetti talks decided that we should chuck off Barcamp and do a Howtocamp. It will be happening in a month’s time in Chennai and is gonna be exciting. From there me Ganesh and swami headed to the Chennai Metblogs meet. I may be joining the Metblogs team shortly. Met some nice people over lunch and got some interesting inside information! The next destination was the Open Coffee Club meet at Amethyst. We both took an auto and landed some after it started. Hats off to Sid for starting the OCC in Chennai. No doubt it is one of the best ever meets and the attitude of the people who attended it was definitely matchless. I could see the fire in all of them! Good luck for all those future business magnets! Ganesh and Mahen left off in the middle to look at some art /chick exhibition where in girls would explain the intricacies in naked pictures. I preferred the OCC instead!

The next weekend i went to SASTRA univ for their cultural fest and it went on well. We as a team packed home with 8k in cash. Very poor judging in one other event we lost 6k. Anyways it was good fun. One of the best ever Dumb-C s ever and they had some super cool innovative rounds. After battling hard we beat the teams from NIT, SVCE, Sastra, JIPMER and bagged the first place. We have won more than 25 prizes in dumbc but this was one of the best. My quizzing skills went to an all time low. I sucked!

By the time I reached Chennai Sid’s sister who was bringing the Macbook from the US also arrived and the next two days went on playing around with the Macbook! Thanks a lot to all those who helped me in smuggling the Macbook to India

The next weekend i went to Chennai tweetup. i started using twitter after a long hiatus and now i am loving it. It is killing lot of work time and my productivity is going down!! The tweetup had lot of new faces and it was a welcome change. When ever something like this is organized it usually goes on like a get together for the TKF junta but this time it was different. Some ultimate mokkais did happen in the meet!!

Last working day of college happened and it was really a memorable. Farewell and Thanksgiving happened and hats off to the juniors for pulling it off in a great manner.

The following week we had the intra college cultural fest and we lifted the overall championship. We finally did it!! One of the most joyous moments for my department guys and the day will stay fresh for long. We ran around the campus carrying the huge cup and it was an amazing feel and much to the envy of other department guys! After two days 20 of us went to a restaurant and made the place galeej…. We were almost chucked out but we are dejent guys u see! We moved to another restaurant nearby and repeated step one! Guys also went for a movie and to beach the next day but i missed it.
I have cribbed a lot about my college in the past but definitely i am gonna miss it.

This sunday Me, Gapp, rupya and vicky met for deciding stuff for the How to camp website. The website will be up soon.

…..And finally i completed writing this post after four sundays!!!

I have made a half a million INR turnover this fiscal from blogging, domaining and other stuff. Happy that i hit the target which i set 6 months back. Some tough decisions to be made in the next few months and life is gonna take a new change. I am looking forward …..

Yesterday night was super fun! After long many of us got together and great thanks to Gapp for pulling us all in. Yesterday Webcamp happened and i found a few interesting topics in the wiki and so i though i will go and check it out. It started at 2 o clock but i went there only at 4 o clock and found that very few people had turned up at Rails Factory in Ashok nagar. They should have got a better place. It was also not that interesting and once again the coding part went missing. As usual me and Gapp went out, stood in the lobby and talked about random things.

After having 2 rounds of dried veg puffs we started of to Vittal’s place. We had to go to Mandaveli and all i knew was it was pretty far. After an hour of travelling we finally reached, got the keys from his aunt’ place who thought we were some goondas! To kill the time we both tried playing some sort of ping pong on a square table with a stress ball and it was good!

Then TUD and Syed came in. It has been a long time since we guys hanged out together. I badly miss the Roof Top Film Festival and mainly the Knowledge Foundation meets at Syed’s office! Me and Syed went out to pick some snacks and drinks. Then Mahen joined us.

When we returned back almost every one had arrived. Vittal came along with two of his other friends. Nandu and Gapp went and picked some movies from Tic tac. Initially we had some glitches with the projector but it went on well after some time. The idea of ditching the DVD player and projection on the wall turned out to be awesome.

It was all set…. Movies, Food, Booze and we started off!

The first movie was “Super Bad”
A pretty entertaining movie. Absolutely hilarious! A nice movie to watch with a group of friends.

The next one was Natural born killers By Tarantino. Unfortunately i slept off in the starting parts itself!

TUD has joined NDTV as a Assistant producer and Mahen is getting married in June. Both of them have agreed to give big treats. Congrats guys!

PS: Posting after more than 50 days! I have lost all my blogging skills!!

It has been ages since i wrote something about myself and it is feeling great to do some meaningful blogging after long. Finally i got a personal blog where i can pen down what all i feel like good old times where i blogged for myself. One more year has passed by and 2007 was one of the best years of my life! A lot of good things happened and i could sense some great transformations in me. Many things in life got more interesting and with just one more semester of college life left to go i don’t know where everyone of us will be after six months. I am right now in a state with a mixture of feelings with both happiness and sadness with college re opening for the final semester tomorrow and i am still clueless about my project.

I booked this domain a few months back but lot of things kept me occupied over the past few months and that combined with laziness never gave a dawn for this blog. At last i thought i should do something meaningful and decided to start again on New Years day. The year was good for me on many fronts be it college, family, life etc. I could sense that there are lot of people who care for me. The North india tour with college mates was a very memorable one and i repent for not blogging about it!

My contact list got bigger and people started recognizing me!
“Hey are you the guy who makes hell lot of money!”
“Dei, Jump! Heard you are making shit loads of money”
“Bugger, I will leave the seat, pay me $20″

I did make good money this year and initially i was crazy and then i was greedy but now i am composed and i know what i am doing. Many people also asked me whether i will continue doing this without going for a full time job. I do make more money than what TCS will be paying me two/three years down the lane but one thing is what i do now is not sustainable over a period of time and am trying out something which is more feasible.

On one front i am very happy that i helped few of friends and they also made a few thousands dollars. Bringing in foreign exchange and increasing India’s economy;) I was also able to make an impact and currently there are around 25 bloggers in my class but most of them started with the sheer aim of making money and trust me they will miserably fail. Ok! No more lessons, here is what i intend to do in 2008. I don’t say it is my resolution!

-Become an engineer [first things first!:)]
-Enjoy max in the last few months of college
-Be more friendly and affectionate to people
-Set some personal targets and reach it in the intended time (Read it as blogging/Money)
-Create a flagship site for me.
-Stop missing Ultimate Frisbee and play regularly.
-participate in the International Cycle Race(ICR on ECR) (Self reminder: Moron! Buy a cycle this week)
-Go to Rajasthan/Nepal/Sri Lanka/Himalayan trekking
-Get a Mac book
-Get back to scouting and attend at least one camp
-Watch more movies, read books and do some quality quizzing.
- Participate in a marathon (At least register and start running!)
-Help people with the knowledge which i have.

I hope 2008 will be a great year too and i will be witnessing some remarkable turning points in life. For all those who have been with me all these days….”So long and thanks for all the fish!”
Wish you all a happy and a great year

PS: You can add this blog to your feed reader (http://ramanujam.net/feed/) and i hope i will keep updating. Also do remove my previously blogspot blog from your blogrolls and add this.

Today i made it to the front page of the “The New Indian Express” and thanks a lot to Ranjitha Gunasekaran for the amazing article. The story was on how Chennai college students make money out of blogging and how i made 500 USD from my blog in the past 30 days. Here is a snap shot of the front page from the e-paper and you can take a look at the online version in the New Indian Express Website

[Click to enlarge and select LARGE in the flickr page]

How do I make money???
Most of the money which i made from this blog is by writing sponsored content from PAYPERPOST(i.e) if an advertiser wants to create buzz about his product/software/website he requests for reviews from bloggers.What he gains is traffic and back links which gives him a good search engine optimization and in turn bloggers like me get paid for providing the content.

Can I also do it?
Yes, of course. If you have a blog and if it satisfies the conditions prescribed by the advertiser you can join the race. But beware if you write too much your blog will get spammed(Like mine;) and you may lose your regular readers.

What is the solution?
There are a lot of services from which you can get offers. Subscribe to all those and select the opportunity which will best suit the content on your blog. For instance you can very write a review about an Anti spyware software if you have a tech blog and it will definitely do some value addition. On the other hand it will be very lame to write about a credit card or a drug rehab service. Selecting the opportunity is the key.

Some of the Get Paid for blogging services
-PayPerPost
-Sponsored Reviews
-Blogitive
-Smorty
-Blogsvertise

Payments are generally made via paypal on a weekly or bi weekly or a monthly basis. It is also not viable to create a new blog for sponsored content. In my case i have shifted my personal blog to another platform which is the best i can do!

Any proof that you make money?
Here is one!!! Dont ask me put my paypal account screen shot!

Visit my PERSONAL BLOG!
[Free from all marketing!]

If you have any queries or if you want to know how to tweak your blog and make it eligible for writing sponsored posts feel free to bug me.

YM: ranuromeo
Skype: ranuromeo
Gtalk: mail.ramanujam

Podworks is the first of its kind podcasting workshop to be conducted in chennai on June 9 and 10. The two day event which will take place at Tidel Park will have the some of the famous podcasters from the country. Podworks is yet another initiative from the knowledge foundation, the key force behind the events like Blogcamp,Wikicamp and many other events.

Podworks will be a workshop style unconference where all the knowledge needed for making a podcast will be imparted from people who have done it before and there will also be many hands on sessions, competitions and discussions. Podworks will be India’s Biggest Event on Audio & Video Podcasting and promises to bring the best of the podcasting/blogging/new media community together to learn, share, experience, and grow.

There will be a door donation of Rs.200 for meeting the expenses of the event and of course there will be some give aways which will help you continue your podcasting experiments from home.

Registrations for the event are open and rush up if you are interested as the number of participants for the workshop is restricted. Keep yourself updated about the event by joining the mailing list. If you are interested in volunteering go check the wiki and take up some responsibility

The first organizers meet for Podworks was held last sunday at CCD, IIT Madras and surprisingly 34 people turned up for the meet and offered to volunteer and take up various responsibilities. It was a very diverse work force consisting of students, journalists, software professionals, RJs,actors and a singer. Many remarkable decisions were taken in the first organizers meet and a lot of brainstorming happened so as to make the event a grand success.

Check out more photos in Chinmayi’s blog. As per plans we will be starting for the bigrace after attending the podworks as it sounds too interesting to be missed.

Suderman rocks-true to the core!!!

He has come up with this hilarious spiderman comic strip. One of his best works ever!!! It is fucking hilarious and i laughed aloud while checking it out. Sud is definitely making wonders with his mac. I loved the first two parts and I wanted to catch up with spiderman-3. Little did i know that peter parker was a homo. Go check that strip out! I bet Marvel is gonna hire Sudhish and gonna make him continue stripping Parker!!!

People who are in the chennai active blog circle who meet often and do lot of crazy stuff will definitely be knowing TUD aka The Under Dawg aka Dinesh (His numerous other girl friends call him by different names based on the situation and also convenience). For others here is a formal intro…TUD just passed out of college (MCC-flooded with hot chics!). He did his PG in Mass communication there and got a job with IndiaInteracts where he currently hugs hot malayalam chicks and drives stylish motor bikes in the name of doing Entertainment shows. He also finds the job very challenging and hectic.

In spite of his ‘tight’ hot chick hugging schedule TUD promptly comes for RTFF and other event organizer meets. It was during last week that a halo started appearing behind our hero’s head. During RTFF-2, TUD met a hawt chick and had that ‘first sight’ feeling with something gushing from the tip of his toe to the top of his head. Then two days later hero meets the girl again at some press meet and feels that life keeps going and Venus is trying to convey him some message and starts penathifying something in his blog. Hero concludes that if he meets the girl for the third time then this is it!(Knowing that SHE will be coming for the Podworks meet and he will be meeting her there, Kedi Bugger;)

You might have seen this pic elsewhere but it has become customary to add it!

It was then we started “Will TUD lay the chick ” campaign and owing to the great success of the campaign it was stopped. Still you can support this noble cause and join the wagon.
Copy and paste this code in your sidebar.

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<a href="http://impotency.wordpress.com"><img src=”http://impotency.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/tud1.jpg”/></a>

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On sunday afternoon people were having conversations in groups and Sagaro did an ultimate comedy. He narrated the TUD’s optimism theory and love story to the guy who came with TUD’s crush without realising. I was laughing like anything and half way something struck him ….
S: U came with that girl right????
S: R u her boy friend?!?!?
Guy: Jus a friend!
S: Oooo…K

Intially we thought TUD got pissed off and will thanni adichi kupara paduthufy but he feels that it has got stronger and has started singing Munbe vaa and looping Unnale unnale in his player.

Kalakara Machi!!!

MMS(Mobile Monday on a sunday) happened this weekend and i reached the venue a late by half an hour. The sessions were not that great at least not in the lines in which i expected. Except for a few hitches it went off well. Hats off to Varum krishnan who was the key behind the first version.

After MOMO, we had our lunch at Tiffanys and headed to the CCD. People started coming in one after the other and the we pulled all the chairs tables and created a chaos. 34 peeps for a organizers meet! Even chennai bloggers meet didn’t see such a crowd. It was not like too many cooks spoil the broth but many notable decisions were taken in the two hour meet and many people contributed their ideas.

TUD-”the” man was at his full pace during the podworks meet. Every time i take the photos and pass it to Ganesh and he efficiently does this Photo essay with all the witty comments. Thanks to him.

Check out the photos of MOMO and Podworks meet.

MOMO Chennai is happening this weekend at IIT Madras.

After that there is a organizers meet for Podworks-The podcasting workshop to be held on June 9 and 10. Some new exciting people are to join the organisers team. It’s gonna be fun.