Baro Mase Tero Parbon r adda – A festive community online
Social networking is nothing but a waste of time, or merely a time pass. You can create tens of fake profiles, irritate others by spamming, can show your “unethical” hacking power and can even indulge in criminal activities. Since the birth of orkut, I have seen, Indian media always behaved biased by writing everything against orkut and ignoring the other side of the story where this social networking is responsible in developing the capability of young minds and their encounter with different people to understand cultures, traditions and social values too. Orkut, being the most powerful and popular social networking sites used in India, has hundreds and thousands of communities created by orkut users related to several interesting topics/themes of their choice.
As you all know that we at orkutheroes.com also feature best communities of orkut as an honor and provide a wide platform for the world to show how that ‘bad’ for them is ‘good’ for others. I mean, it’s we who can make things good or bad, for instance, if you get a kitchen knife to cut some fruits and serve than you can cut your fingers too. If you chose 2nd option, than please don’t blame that poor knife.
Ok, let’s get more serious, as you definitely know India is the country of colors and festivals. Being the biggest democratic power of the world, Indians have maintained their rich cultures and traditions even in the century where most of the world’s oldest cultures are trying their best to survive.
Baro Mase Tero Parbon is an Indian Bengali proverb which means 13 festivals in 12 months. West Bengal is one of the most culturally sound state of India which is also famous for social togetherness and prosperous heritage. And one such online community is on Orkut which proves wrong to everyone who thinks that social networking sites like orkut can do no good.
Get-together and chatting is an integral part of Bengali lifestyle like the importance of celebrating their festivals. So how about celebrating it on orkut? This idea gave the birth to an online community of Orkut Baro Mase Tero Parbon r adda which first started on the eve of Durga Puja festival and then the community members decided to celebrate all festivals by renaming their community to Baro Mase Tero Parbon r adda. This social community is not only the pre-eminent example to discover the best use of social networking tool but also a masterpiece in itself.
We invited Nilay Hazra the creator of Baro Mase Tero Parbon r adda which in short also known as BMTP or BMTPrA on orkutheroes and asked him several questions regarding the community which is now more than just a virtual hangout for him and his friends on the community. Being asked about the reason as in why most of the community members are active in discussions Nilay replied, that our community is well organized, we avoid duplicates threads in the community which makes it clean and easy to find the existing threads, we don’t consider unrelated and time-pass common games threads. If there is a need, we emphasize on discovering innovative and entertaining topics, one good example is “CAO Quiz”, which is not for you if you do not have enough sense of humor. Another interesting reason Nilay gave is related to the historical battle of Mahabharata in which Pandavas won over Kauravas and that was women empowerment, we have a perfect mix of male and female members, not only in moderator group, but overall in the community. Also the moderator group has members of different ages to avoid and tackle any kind of generation gap. Other important things which made BMTP stands unique and best among other communities are the involvement of every members in the community, the strong moderation, creativity and innovative ideas to keep the charm of their group going on and above all the formula of “we” instead of “I”, says an overwhelmed Nilay.
But that’s not enough for us to get satisfied by naming BMTP an example of ‘great social networking” so we asked Nilay that, what is the purpose of Baro Mase Tero Parbon r Adda? is it being simply a community which has general chit-chat? No. The next answer by Nilay was enough to confirm that BMTP is far more than what it sounds. Nilay proudly said that the first reason is to know our cultures and festivals because each of them have its own significance but today’s generation-x has almost forgotten these, so we celebrate each and every festivals of India from Durga Puja to Eid- ul- Zuha. We memorize, the unforgettable childhood when we used to play Holi, celebrate Independence Day in school. We have also redefined “festivals” by remembering birthdays of legendary characters and following their ideologies. But not only this, We have separate forums for writing poems, short stories, forums for music lovers, movie lovers, travel and tours lovers, food lovers, sports lovers, book lovers, jokes lovers, shayari lovers, photography lovers, quiz thread, market and investment, Science forums etc. etc…In one word “ALL IN ONE”. So everybody can show the creativity in his/her favorite forums and share the passions. Even we have a forum “Careers and Jobs”, which has helped a lot for the members.
Most interesting part of this virtual online community is that the members took one step further from being virtually together to several real-time get together in and around Kolkata (Calcutta). However, most of the people won’t advice or encourage such meetings of online friends but BMTP proved everyone wrong. Nilay said that “We have proved to some extent that orkut can be a wonderful tool for social networking and interaction if used properly. You know in get-togethers we connect members globally who are unable to join but always with us virtually…an example of our strong bonding”.
When asked to describe that one memorable moment of the community BMTP, Nilay said that not one but there are two such unforgettable memories we have “First one is when we met for the first time at Nalban Boating Complex, Kolkata on 22 June, 2008. The packed weekend crowd of Nalban could not understand how those 30 odd people were related to each other. The diversity of age canceled out the chance of being a group of friends enjoying nice cloudy afternoon. We did not seem to be “virtual”, though we were actually even a day ago. Such is the bond of togetherness amongst the members.
The second one is just a month ago, on 4 January, 2009 when we had our fourth get-together and first picnic at a garden-home of Baruipur near Kolkata. It was a grand event. Around 55 members turned out with their family. An orkut community finally reached to the kitchen and the bedroom of a family. We rented a bus and came together, had our food together, enjoyed the day with music and fun.
There are many more, like when we celebrated Rakhi Bandhan festival amongst members, launched our website www (dot) 12mase13parbon (dot) com and e-magazine and also just few days ago when we launched our branded T -Shirts at Kolkata Book Fair.”
The last and important question we asked to Nilay was “what is the future of BMTP? Is there is something big going on regarding the structure of the community? Or they want to leave orkut to get their own place? “Nilay said “we dream to be recognized as a NGO and do more social works and constructive activities in coming days. We want to establish “BMTPrA” as a brand name.
But BMTPrA as an orkut community will always be there. Orkut is our origin. We could never deny or forget orkut, just like Google will never forget the garage from where they got originated or the popular Bangla Band Moheener Ghoraguli or Chandrabindu will not forget the college canteen from where they started their journey.
After lot of appraise for orkut and Google, Nilay has also put forward the technical problem he and his community members faced on orkut, problem like, recent orkut bugs, like well-known pending member acceptance problem, removal of community topics all of a sudden etc. Those create lots of difficulties and confusions among the members. Google management should look at those very seriously because orkut may not be merely “time-pass” stuff to all the users.
Isn’t that enough to prove the potential of social networking? The answer is left on you to decide. But Baro Mase Tero Parbon r Adda and several elite communities will always flourish from virtual to real.
We thank the community members and moderators for their outstanding work of promoting the culture, tradition and friendliness and giving a best and safe place online.
