Two weeks off (going to Ladakh); Also, celebrating 10,000 hits

My 10K Run -- and it only took 4 months!

In the next day or two I will cross 10,000 hits on Sitemeter. It's pretty cool, though I'm not exactly popping out the champagne (if I ever reach 1 million, maybe then).

I'm happy because I've been averaging 140 hits a day for the past few weeks. But unlike blogs that actually have 140 unique readers per day, there are probably only between 20 and 40 actual regular readers of this blog -- most people come to this site through Google. My biggest 'hits' have been, oddly enough, "Manmohan Singh" and "George Orwell Fahrenheit 9/11". Why would Google rank my site highly on these? I'm still not sure, though I have a theory that referring to the topic in the title of the post (in Blogger it becomes the title of the file) and posting quickly helped. Other popular posts have been "Wendy Doniger," "Operation Bluestar," "Meera Nanda," and "V.S. Naipaul, Farrukh Dhondy, and William Dalrymple." I've personally been happy with my posts on stuff like: Postcolonial FAQ, Fugazi, Brazilian Dance Music, and the film Yuva. But almost no one comes to my site looking for those things -- too bad.

I want to say thank you to the people who've commented on this site, who have put me on blogrolls, and who have linked to me on occasion. Here's a short list (I may be forgetting some people. If so, forgive me):

Brey
Sharleen Mondal
The Weblog
Anjali Taneja/ To the Teeth
Kumar (the friendly Kashmiri Kumar, now in the midwest somewhere)
Scott McLemee
Shashwati Talukdar
P. Kerim Friedman/ Keywords
Chuck Tryon
Not Really Indian
Tyler Curtain/ Bentkid
Timothy Burke
Michael Bérubé
Dan Green
Greg Perry
Sutton Stokes
Apostropher
Erin O'Connor
Ophelia Benson/Butterflies & Wheels
Joanne Jacobs
The blog formerly known as Jivha
Little Professor / Miriam Burstein
Kitabkhana
Bala Subra/ Lost In Media
All About George
Yves Etheart
Mikaela Reid

Oh, and thanks also to all the people who have sent supportive emails in response to this blog. You know who you are.

On Vacation

We're going to India for a couple of weeks. The highlight will undoubtedly be Ladakh (more links here, here, here). It's in eastern Jammu & Kashmir, and one of the major centers of Tibetan Buddhism outside of Tibet and Ithaca, New York (little joke there). I'm looking forward to it mainly because it will be completely and totally different from the (lately) drab eastern seaboard of the U.S.A.

But Delhi and Bombay are also always fun: books are cheap, music is plentiful, food is fantastic, and I have a new camera to play with.

Cheers, everyone.