August In A Glance

August was quite a month!! Lots of things heppened! Here on BBNetwork, we had Velu and Totally Basmatic join the Network, bringing along their excellent blogs with them. There have been quite some activities on their blogs and mine during August.

Things Happened At Velu's Movies:
Velu wrote his only review of the month about Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna. I'd never seen a post with 67 comments before. You sometimes read a post and afterwards go 'ok' and leave the blog. That's it. But there are those other well written posts that are so good and on the point OR so controversial and against your believes that you have to respond to them. Well, his review is of the second category.

Update: Velu actually wrote another review about Classmates at the last minutes of August which I didn't notice to mention here.

Things That Happened At Totally Basmatic's Place:
TB did a whole lot of things in August. The most salient of all was her trip to see her family, and being an extra in KANK (which I sadly missed). She talks about that experience of hers in her review of KANK. While she was away, her sister Fireball guest-posted her totally basmatic review of Jaani Dushman. Loved that review.

TB herself watched a whole lot of movies, and wrote some great reviews about Fanaa, On 2 Ka 4, Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya, Caravan, Anamika and Dil Maange More. Great stuff!

Things That Happened At My Place:
14 of my 21 posts during the month of August included downloads of movie soundtracks, latest being Don's. I posted only 4 song videos which is a shame. I could have done more of that. I've come across some really cool videos on YouTube.com but failed to post them on DHS.

At the very last days of the month I was confronted with the qestion of legality of my content. That has changed my plans for DHS's future.


Well, that was a quick preview of what have happened on BBNetwork member blogs. We will soon have some more members, who will also, hopefully, write on BBN, beside my boring posts.

Blogger Tip - Making Your Menu Permanent

While going through some of the bollyblogs, I noticed that when you go to the specific page of a post (by clicking the Permalink), majority of the items on the navigation/menu/sidebar disappears. 'Previous Posts' is the only part that remains intact. As an example, look at Beth's post and Totally Basmatic's post on Anamika. You can see the list of links that are present on the main page aren't there on these pages.

If you want it to be like that, that's absolutely fine. There is nothing wrong with that. But if you are like me, and want the content of your sidebar to appear on all pages the same way then you need to retouch the html code of your template.

How to do this:

By default, Blogger creates a 'Links' section, like the image below, on every new blog.


Here is how the code looks like: (click to enlarge)

To make this list appear on all the pages what you need to do is to delete the part shown in orange. It's that simple.

We usually copy this code for every other list of links that we want to make. So in all instances, you need to remove that part to make the list appear on all pages. A lot of you might already know this, but I thought it is worth mentioning for those who haven't noticed this yet.

NOTE: If you have some useful Blogger/Blogspot tricks and techniques, please do share them with. Thank you.

Sneak Preview of SRK's Don

"I am a King!" - SRK
Here is a sneak preview of Shahrukh Khan's upcoming movie DON - The Chase Begins Again. Looks pretty promising to me. SRK looks very good too, like a don. Other cast of the movie include Priyanka Chopra, Arjun Rampal and Kareena Kapoor.

DON's music will be released on 23rd of August, and the movie itself is set for a October 20 release.

Munna Bhai Goes To Hollywood

Tanya Palta briefly mentions in her post about Lage Raho Munna Bhai that a Hollywood version of the original Munna Bhai MBBS will be made, called Gangster MD.

This news interested me so much that I had to dig some more. A simple google search revealed that this news dates way back to April of 2005, and yet so few websites ever mention it, even though hundreds of posts and news articles are being written about Lage Raho Munna Bhai every week. Big deal? Hell yeah, big deal. This is the first time the rights for a Bollywood movie is bought by a major Hollywood studio, Twentieth Century Fox. THE FIRST TIME! This can do a lot for Bollywood in terms of acceptance, popularity and recognition worldwide.

Chris Tucker is said to play the role of Munna Bhai, originally played by Sanjay Dutt. According to IMDB, Gangster MD is planned for 2007. I'll be looking forward to watching this one for sure!

Read more:
- MUNNABHAI MBBS a.k.a. GANGSTER MD - Hollywood Masala
- Hollywood buys hit movie - News 24
- Mira Nair to direct Chris Tucker in Gangster M.D. - Monsters and Critics

KANK Disappoints Fans

It's been some days since the release (11th August) of one of the most aticipated movies of the year Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna starring Shahrukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Abishek Bachchan, Rani Mukerjee, and Pretty Zinta. After spending a whopping 50 crore rupees, and casting some of the biggest names of Bollywood, KANK is total disappointment. I believe it is just a waste of money, time and a lot of talent of the star cast.

Velu has written an excellent review of KANK over at Velu's Movies. You need to read this if you are still not sure if you want to watch the movie.

Making Somethings Clear - The Ads

One of the things I would like to make clear is why I am placing the Google AdSense ads all over the pages. I wasn't intending to place ads anywhere on this blog, because this blog belongs to all our members. I don't want to keep a single cent earned from this blog for myself. However, my other blog, Download Hindi Songs, made about $35 last month from the ads (which will hopefully pay for a hosting plan and a domain name for a personal website I'm intending to create, if it keeps performing that way._

That gave me an idea about what we could do by running ads on this blog.

From the money that might come from those ads, we can run contests or group projects that anyone or selected people could participate in, either on this blog or on one of our member's blog, and we could use that money to buy some cool stuff for the winner, for example a DVD of the winner's favorite movie or music CD. It will provide something fun for everyone to do.

I've been running those ads since July 31st. With an average of only 7 visitors a day, the ads have made USD0.07, which isn't much at all. Neither is the visitors' number.

Blog Visitors (click to enlarge)


Ad Statistics

With getting more visitors with time and popularity, if it performs as well as DHS, we can have contests or group projects every month or even every couple of weeks, if things turnout good. However, for now it remains only as an idea and a good wish that might materialize or may not.

I would to love know your opinion, so please don't hesitate to comment.

NOTE: Please DO NOT click the ads if they do not interest you. That might earn us a few cents, it will cost the advertiser more than twice that much (more than half of the advertising revenue goes to Google). Excessive and useless clicks may also get me banned. So please be considerate.

More Value With Velu's Movies

I am very happy to announce that another awsome blog, Velu's Movies, has joined us at BBNetwork. As the title says, the blog belongs to Velu who writes reviews about the latest Hindi movies.



Being a teacher, Velu knows how to play with words very well. That makes his reviews very interesting to read. Well, that is not the only ingredient of his writings. Velu has a very good eye for details and the ability of not getting emotionally involved with the plot of the movie, unlike myself, which allows him to stand back and look at all the different aspects of the movie. When you are visiting his blog, be sure to have a dictionary beside, 'cause you will need it quite often. Take this excerpt from his latest post as an example:

...a meticulous exploration into the capricious human psyche that has, forever been excruciatingly dissected and laid out in a platter.

Beside all that, Velu's blogging history (since September 2005) and his willingness to help makes him a great asset in BBNetwork. Welcome aboard Velu!!

PS. It took me a little while to make this announcement. Apologies for that, Velu. In the future, I'll let you and Basmatic to do this. I'm not good with words at all.

Totally Basmatic Is Totally On Board

I would like to welcome Totally Basmatic to BBNetwork, the first bollyblogger to join us. It is so great to have her with us. She is a non-Indian Bollywood lover, like myself with the only difference that she doesn't speak Hindi and I do (I guess I can).

TB watches Hindi movies with great passion and writes detailed reviews about them in her blog. I specially appreciate her expressing her opinion about movies and everything else with confidence and honesty, however she calls herself 'a compulsive liar'. Her attention to detail makes her reviews even more interesting to read. From what I have read so far on her blog, TB is a fan of Abhishek Bachchan (correct me if I am wrong, TB).

I've read the two previous paragraphs more than 10 times, and I don't think I have done justice with describing her and her blog in a manner that she deserves. So I suggest you go through her blog and decide for yourself.

Being A BBNetwork Blogger

There are a few things I would like talk about before I welcome the first BBNetwork member, apart from myself, Totally Basmatic. I don't want to creat a set of rules for everyone to be strictly and unquestionably followed. No, instead I would like to mention some things that would have mutual benefits for the bloggers and their readers alike if done.

1. All BBNetwork blogs should have links to each other, including BBNetwork itself. The image below shows the preferred linking format, but you can choose to do it your way.

Why? Firstly, this will help increase the visibility and ranking of each blog on search engines. We write blogs to be read, and search engines are good means of getting more readers. If it weren't for Google and Yahoo, my Download Hindi Songs blog would have only a few visitors. Search engines are important in terms of increasing your readership. Linking also helps with ranking of our blogs on Technorati, which is good for the same reasons above. Secondly, all visitors of a blog will sooner or later will leave the blog. They don't stay there for ever. By providing links to other blogs we redirect the already leaving visitors to other blogs of the network. It is kind of sharing visitors without damaging your own readership. I think just those two are more than good enough reasons to link to each other. However, whether you want to place the logo of BBNetwork on your blog, like the image above, or not is up to you. Just having a text link is just as good. The logo helps in branding the Network.

On the main BBNetwork page, there will be one link to the member's blog, and another to the blogger's profile under 'BBNetwork Bloggers' on the right bar.

What BBNetwork Bloggers Will Get

Beside getting linked by all the blogs in the network, you will get to be 'Team Members' (as indicated below) or contributors of this blog.

This status allows you to post on BBNetwork if you choose to do so. There are many things that you can talk about here. For instance, you can post announcements about changes in your blog design, or talk about a topic that doesn't match your blog's subject. You could share tips to help other bloggers improve theirr blogs or you could ask questions about blogging. The range of topics are limitless.

Well, those are some of the things that are in my mind at the moment. Now let's welcome Totally Basmatic.