It was a sunny day and the usual Bangalore pollution was in the air. We were headed through the freaky traffic of Mysore Road towards Kengeri with our own imagination of how a farm near the city would be like. For me, it turned out to be very different from what I had imagined. It was an atmosphere very different from the city and that too just few Kms away from here; almost as if we were teleported to somewhere much inside Karnataka! This was the "Maithri Farm" we visited on a Sunday in January to record a podcast with rare thinker, environmentalist - Nagesh Hegde.

Limitation in funds, time have stalled improvements on Sampada for a while. The fact that we never expected traffic to burgeon into what it has during last 12 months on Sampada also added to it (we have been getting over 3 million hits each month). Need for better infrastructure has put a roadblock on new projects which has made few of us contemplate a lot on what needs to be done with Sampada and related projects in future.

So, we've decided to invite suggestions from everyone to see the options we have and decide on which works out the best. Get in touch with us over email if you have any.

Meanwhile, Sampada Podcasts have seen thousands of hits each in last one year. This had made us feel even more guilty of not coming up with interviews regularly. But this time around we did manage to come up with a podcast after a long time. It was the sheer interest shown by writer Narendra Pai that made another edition possible.

The 9th edition is with Vivek Shanbag who is well-known for his short stories and as the editor of the popular literary magazine - Desha Kaala.

Listen to the podcast here, and leave a comment if you liked it (that would encourage future podcasts).

Sampada Foundation

Sampada Foundation was brought into existence in last few months to manage sampada.net and other related projects in a better way. The organization would also be taking up several projects related to Kannada and technology.

Sampada.net has done a lot of difference to the Kannada community on the Internet over last two years. Our dream now is that this new organization would bring in new stuff that makes huge difference to Kannada loving people (and people who use Kannada) both inside and outside the cyber world. In this initial and critical juncture though, we need support from all of you to get started.

Here's what you can do:
1) Contribute funds to Sampada Foundation.
2) Volunteer

Your contribution could translate into work that makes difference to Kannada language in various vital aspects. As always, feel free to get in touch with us if you have queries regarding the contribution.

For years now, we've had very less of quality films in Kannada, and here is one cinema that is good on quality, but never got to the theatres. Distributors here fancy films that have songs, dance and crazy fights which on most occasions merely are low quality mockery of Bollywood/Hollywood. Sadly, it is the song and dance films that bring in huge moolah for them as art films go untried.

The film screened was "Mukhamukhi" and the screening was at "Suchitra Film Society" on Saturday. The film bagged the (Karnataka) State film award for "Best Dialogue" in 2006. The director of the film who lives in Australia is an active member of the [:http://sampada.net|Sampada Community].

[:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prajavani|Prajavani] has [:http://prajavaniepaper.com/pdf/2007/10/31/20071031d_003100002.jpg|carried an article today] that mentions [:http://sampada.net|Sampada]. I was unaware of it until some of my friends sent me messages citing this. We've had 60+ registrations in just one day today (on Sampada) and the server was going through all sorts of problem bungling under heavy load (which was already because of several other reasons).

When almost everyone seemed to have thought we were done with podcasts at [:http://sampada.net|Sampada], we've done it again. This time, we have an episode which marks the first of several podcasts about writing Science and Technology in Kannada.

There are several new stuff this time. We have a [:http://rlp.in|professional document film maker] capturing and editing the video of the interview. There is unique and professional editing of the audio, video and much more new stuff.

Check out [:http://sampada.net/video/1|the Video], and [:http://sampada.net/podcasts/8/G-T-Narayana-Rao|the Podcast].

Planet Kannada which was at [:http://planet.sampada.net] previously, now has its own domain. Readers can access it now at [:http://www.planetkannada.com]. :)

Pass the URL to friends and let all others interested know. It also has a nice new interface now, thanks to all the mails that brought my attention to it. More updates would be added and the pending addition requests would be attended to as soon as possible. Hope you'll all enjoy the aggregation of Kannada, Kannada related blogs.

Report [:http://sampada.net/contact|issues/feature requests here].

I used to follow Sham's writings about Agriculture and related issues [:http://shamkashyap.blogspot.com/|on his blog]. Some of them sounded quite interesting to me at that point. But now, after several months, I find some of his recent write-ups, views about agriculture very serious and mature at what it is dealing with. Some of the things related to this that I discussed with him off-line elevated my respect for his views many times.

His articles written for [:http://www.vikrantakarnataka.com/|Vikranta Karnataka] are now on [:http://krushi.sampada.net|a new blog-site, forum and campaign website] - 'Krushi' on [:http://sampada.net|Sampada]. Check it out, and leave comments (in Kannada). The website was designed and setup by me.