E-Pao! - a journey through 2009
- X Anniversary -
2009 had been an uncertain year for Manipur. Amidst the brouhaha in the global political
scenario and the backdrop of the global warming, the state of Manipur burned unnoticed.
Manipur slipped into a series of turmoil after another. This did leave the global Manipuris
in a state of confusion worrying about the future of their birth state often losing hope in
its present socio-political condition.
E-pao had been fortunate enough to cater to these Manipuris and provide a steady stream of
updates from its home state throughout all these events.
Through our timelines, we string up the related news on a certain burning topic/issue, day
after day, providing you a one page index for you to trace the story. We have been doing
this for years now. Big time updates in 2009 were made to the "Sharmila" and "Killing Fields" timelines. We also created 2 new timelines on the events that shook not only the
state but also the Manipuris globally. The first one started mid-February 2009 when Dr
Thingnam Kishan and 2 of his collegues (Y Token & A Rajen) were murdered in a gruesome manner and the other was
when a young mother (M Raveena Devi) was killed in a cross-fire in the middle of Imphal while she was
carrying the first born in her arms and her unborn in her womb. This was followed by an
alleged encounter killing of Mr Sanjit Singh a few meters away in the BT road. This
happenned in July 23 2009. Normal life has been badly hit with students taking the worst hit
as the education system gets into a stand-still mode.
The death of Dr Kishan saw a huge outpour of emotions from the Non Resident Manipuris and to
accomodate these, E-Pao opened up an exclusive section containing such things such as a Virtual
Candle Light Vigil - first time E-Pao ran such an application; collection of photos from Dr
Kishan's album and the protests following his death; condolence messages and public outpours
and Articles.
Towards the end of year (recently on 13 Dec 2009), one of our regular contributor bade farewell to his earthly form. Professor Dr Naorem Sanajaoba was a well-known activitist of social and human rights causes and an academician too whose lose will be felt by young Manipur. We have recently opened up an exclusive section to list the articles (submitted to e-pao), news items, condolences and pictures related to the late Oja.
There also had been stories of rape and discriminatory treatments in other parts of the
country which did not get adequate media attention but did not miss the attention of the
Manipuris. Their opinions on these incidents are collected under the Opinion on racial discrimination.
The news stories from Imphal continue to report more killings and deaths and arson. While
people longed for calmer and peaceful news from home, many users collaborated across the
globe after their work hours and composed a list of such news from Huieyen Lanpao and Sangai
Express available on e-pao.net and counted the toll. The same was sent to the Prime Minister
and various news publication houses.
It is learnt that many of these collaborators doesn't know each other and have only known to
each other through their email IDs but they referred to this site for their research
consolidation. In another example, various poets based at the capital city came together and
formed a group after coming across their names at the poets' corners and poems pages of
E-Pao! There are also stories of other viral e-mail chains circulating amongst contributors
of this site. E-Pao! is happy to be part of these stories in whichever part it has played.
They are proofs of this site having served its purpose of being your e-platform.
In order to provide a stronger e-platform, E-pao also had moved on to strengthen its updates
and channels. You must have noticed new updates on the features profiling Manipuri personalities and more particularly the Award winners from Manipur. Two more sub-channels were added into the features channel - Focus on Media
and Spotlight on women. Regular updates were also made to all parts of the site.
The 360 degrees Panorama got 6 new addition in 2009. Ooba, the video channel crossed 100,000 video views during April 2009. The Yellout section has a new band profile, that of Kanglasha. A few more should follow in the new year.
We launched a new Subsite called e-pao Books where there are 2 books currently listed. The first one is a compilation of 13 papers called "New insights into the glorious Heritage of Manipur". At this sub-site there are 3 complete papers chosen from the 3 volumes compiled by Dr. H Dwijasekhar Sharma. The second book is by Dr Y Mohendro Singh called the "The Status Of Manipur (1823-1947)". We are happy to point out that the complete book is available for
your reading on the site.
The Firefox Toolbar has been upgraded. The RSS feed now includes the mayek news and the Ooba video listing. There is a new sub-section dedicated to the golden era of Manipuri cinema in the e-rang section.
The user contributed e-pao related Wallpaper are also available. You would find some creation from Mahesh here. There are a couple of Screen saver for download and use.
There is a new subsite called Chakhum. You will find the recipe of your favourite Manipuri dish here. After its launch, there has already been few more upgrades to the application to enhance your browsing pleasure. This sub-site lists ingredients and procedures of making a Manipuri dish. The pictures and description of the ingredients are also listed separately. you would be able to search the
recipe in various ways - using an ingredient, recipe name. Thanks to Pinky, Reeta, Lakshmi, Romeo, Chaoba, Pramananda, who sent in receipes and various other users who posted their views. The pictures are collected from various sources.
We request all users to help out further by sending us the recipes and pictures of Manipuri dishes - authentic or experimental.
All the pages in e-pao main site is now under the same look and feel. This is an internal drive to align to the home page and standardize the old pages. Good news for twitter users: e-pao can be followed on Twitter (@epaomanipur). The Manipuri Calendar for 2010 went live quite early in the year as a response to requests from many users.
Meitei Mayek e-Learning sub-site is continously updated with newer chapters. The final chapter on Lonsum Mayek Tapnaba was added in December 2009. We are happy to be doing our bit to spread the awareness of the script. It is also a good news for Manipuri Mayek enthusiasts that our eyek is supported by the Unicode standard version 5.2.0 on 1st October 2009.
As is customary now, we give you an update of some figures from the year gone by.
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www.e-pao.net is ranked 61,033 across the world by the websites traffic ranking company Alexa. The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the last 3 months and the ranks are updated daily (the above mentioned rank was on 31 Dec 2009).
Google has about 27,00,000 (more than 2 million) results indexed on e-pao.net. The index page of the site is also ranked 6/10 by the same internet search giant.
With the end of 2009, we have completed 10 years of serving you. It has been a quite a journey for us and we hope you have enjoyed being part of this journey as much as we have. As this site steps into a new decade, we are counting on your love and support as usual.
Happy tidings in 2010 and let peace prevail!
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