South by South West, Austin

Consider this: You’re in Kolkata and you come to know about Durga Puja only on night before it starts. Or, you’re in Mumbai unaware of Ganesh Chaturthi till you actually see someone shouting – Ganapati Bappa, Mourya. I consider it a cardinal sin.

I was close to commiting one. 

SXSW  (South by South West) is supposedly a kick-ass annual Music and Film festival in Austin. Too bad I came to know about it only a couple of days back and even then didn’t appreciate the enormity of the event – supposedly 4 million people from around the globe come here for a week. Though this figure is very small compared to what happens at Kumbh Melas , or even Durga Puja, Rath Yatra or Ganesh Chaturthi; it is a huge number for a small US city like Austin. My cab driver told me today the number today – I haven’t verified it at any website though. He was very excited when he declared – ‘You’ll hardly get any cab the next week. Everyone moves to downtown during South by South west. There is just too much money to be made driving a cab at that time.‘

I started surfing about it this evening and realized its importance only after that . You can look for sxsw tweets here. With so many things to plan for, I’m having a hard time finding out what to miss. The only glitch – it starts on Friday the 13th.

Just decided an hour ago that I’ll try and use the New Media to share the experiences. Will experiment live blogging in my blog and micro-blogging with Twitter. Tune in for the flavor.

Any suggestions on what to write about?

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