The Making of "Kharagpur Online"

It was one of my dreams to do something about Kharagpur. I thought either to publish a Photographic book or to write an epic (Bengali) on Kharagpur town. I went to Oxford Book stall couple of times to read and buy concepts on recent photographic books on Kolkata, went to a professor of kharagpur college, who is also a writer of Kharagpur history book. I promised him to give some of my photographs for his book but I couldn’t as I had to fly to US suddenly. I feel bad for it.

While blogging in 2007, I searched Kharagpur on Net. But I was disappointed by the result and thought to post Kharagpur Series in my personal blog. I started with this one. But this effort was not good enough to capture the wonderful city.

Last month I decided to launch a dedicated site for Kharagpur.As mentioned in this blogpost , I havnt got www.kharagpur.com domain and asked for suggestions and http://www.kharagpuronline.com/ was unanimous choice. Thus in the eve of New Year I decided to launch it through famous web hosting site “fatcow” and registered “KharagpurOnline” on 31st December 2008.


Now it was the time to design and shape this site. I am in blogsphere for couple of years, but I had no idead about website hosting. It was a challenge for me. I took help from couple of friends. Chaitree who launched http://www.chaitreebasak.com/ helped me a lot with the concept of dream weaver and html pages. Ananda was always a helping hand for me and this time it was not an exception. He helped me to install wordpress and with his valuable critics. Aritra took it one step ahead. He is the first registered author for this site and started writing in the Education category. Finally Pabitra took some amazing pictures of our town to enrich KharagpurOnline. My sincere thanks to Chaitree, Ananda, Aritra and Pabitra.

The design was a delicate issue. I was not happy with the free CSS templates as it is not interactive(or I havnt found a better one), neither I was interested to make it totally in Wordpress. In first week, I tried in many possible ways and after all permutations and combinations I merged these two concepts. First Page, Info Page and Contact page are in CSS and all rest topics (which I want to make interactive) are in Wordpress themes. This took out the overhead of complex file management in control panel and I can really focus on content. This merging concept has given me enough freedom to design in dream weaver as well as use wordpress to its fullest extent. It has given a flavor of a website as well as an interactive blog in a combined package. I am happy with this initial design and launched “KharagpurOnline” on 11th January 2009.
For site content, I approached couple of people to use their photos and videos. Some has given permission while others remained silent. Then people from kharagpur slowly involved with KharagpurOnline. We created a community in Orkut. Started promoting this site, gathered some information, and posted some photos. Our journey of KharagpurOnline started in this fashion.

Please visit this site and write your suggestions, comments, feedback.

Domain for Kharagpur

KGP SERSA Stadium

Recently I tried to search my hometown in net and I was very disappointed by the results. There is no good site on this industrial town. To be precise I haven’t found any site only for Kharagpur. Thus I decided to launch a site on my home town.

I need a help regarding this. As I am going to open a site on Kharagpur, I need to buy a domain for that. The first domain I searched was kharagpur.com, which is already booked by some commercial agents and asking for $10,210. So obviously I need to search another domain. Kgp.com was my next one, which is also already taken. So I tried with many different options. These are the following which is available. I need to know which will be suitable and easy to remember and use. Please put your view in the comment section.

http://www.kgplive.com/
http://www.kgptoday.com/
http://www.kgptown.com/
http://www.thekharagpur.com/
http://www.kharagpurtown.com/
http://www.kharagpuronline.com/
http://www.kharagpurtoday.com/
http://www.kharagpurcity.com/
http://www.kgponline.com/
http://www.kharagpur.me/

My final choices are between 5 and 6 mostly, but still want to check your views. If you have any more idea about domain names or content, please share. Appreciate your comment and thoughts regarding this. Thanks in advance.

Kharagpur : Nomenclature

Collage of pics taken by me, click to enlarge

Not enough good articles we have on Kharagpur in internet, not even good books in English. So I thought to start my Kharagpur series in this blog. It will mostly contain historic and cultural information of my home town, a city of more than 100 years but a place of thousands of years.

The name of every place has its own meaning, so the word Kharagpur should have something; however there is no literary meaning of the word ‘kharagpur’ in Bengali dictionary. Thus this must have been inherited from some themes, subjects.

From my childhood I knew that Kharagpur is named after the old Khargeswar temple. But recently I was reading a book where it claims that Khargeswar temple was founded 400 years back, but Kharagpur exists from the age of Mahabhat. So, definitely the so called nomenclature history is not true, rather the fact is on the other way around.

Regarding this matter thorough research has done by Shyamapada Bhowmik in his book Kharagpur: Itihas O Sanskriti.

“One of the popular hearsay is the place is named after the king of Bishnupur,
Khargamalla at 841AD. But that time Kharagpur was ruled by Bengal King Devpal
(810-850), an emperor per-excellence of Pal dynasty, whose far-flung kingdom was
extended from Bramhaputra to Sindhu River and even in south India, which means
almost the whole India was under him. So it is most unlikely that the place will
be named after some other King. Thus this is again a rumor.”

If we split the word in two parts Kharag – Pur , then we have separate meaning. The literal meaning from the Samsad Dictionary are given below.

Kharag –n, a large falchion for immolating beasts; a large falchion; the horny
appendage on the nose of the rhinoceros.

Pur –n, a house, an abode, a city, a town, a village.

The combination gives a meaning of the word --- “A place inhabited with armed (with scimitar or sword or falchion) people”.

This meaning can be accepted as no other logic can prove the nomenclature of the place.