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The Revival of SurfUnion

June 30, 2008 Design

I was in a discussion with a friend last weekend at her swank new office. Suddenly we came across a point in social networking and SurfUnion popped up in my mind. If I ever come out with an autobiography there’s sure going to be a chapter dedicated to SurfUnion — a designers forum of which I was a proud member and an architect. Unfortunately the founding of SurfUnion is more interesting and worth discussing than the way we managed it.

In late 2003, five of my close buddies had wanted to do something worthwhile. We were at best designers with creative skills but worked out of home; some of them like me on a paltry sum. On the night of October 2nd, we launched a ‘designers only’ forum hiring some space on Buttclencher’s server. We decided to call it ‘SurfUnion’ or a group of surfing designers. The name took the imagination of all the admins as we liked to call ourselves and later we were joined by many. One of them was a geeky guy nicknamed Bane and was located in Colombo. Five of us – myself, Kreativea (Aadesh), Buttclencher (Raunaq), RanTen (Ranajit Tendolkar) and FlashKid (Isaac) operated from Mumbai. Thus we had a majority stake in the decision making process while LimeIce (Gursimran) located in Delhi and Ryche (Fahd) in Kolkata completed the admin lineup. The fabulous tagline of ‘We put the Desi in Design’ was suggested by Ryche in one of our online sessions. During our tenure, we arranged competitions and meetups that helped bring varied talents face-to-face.

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Long Live Surfunion

September 6, 2006 General

For those of you wondering what happened to SurfUnion, here’s some bad news – the forum got affected in last week’s hacker attack with all its data destroyed. I called up Ron who had been its caretaker for many months and could sense the shock and awe over the phone, that dismayed look on his face. The plans to resurrect it are being put on hold for the time being.

Sadly, Surfunion died an unsung death. In its last days, there was little traffic and virtually nothing being generated which would have created some amount of interest amongst the community. Eventually it was left to survive on its own, with even its creators staying away from it. The greatest achievement of SU however would always be the network it created of local designers (Mumbai members had a strong presence on the forum) through MegaMeets.

Good Bye and Good Luck SurfUnion. I will miss you always!

SurfUnion’s Greatest Challenge Ever

October 18, 2005 General

When we started out on a small scale we had fewer people with fewer expectations. That was because we were the first Indian Designer’s forum to rise on the indian internet horizon. The admins were focussed and dedicated and everyone was passionate about their new invention. I was personally involved with every decision making proces and ensured the smooth running of the boards along with the rest of the admins. That was then.

Today as newer boards spring on the scene we are faced with newer challenges to upgrade and diversify, introduce newer topics and categories to pull in members. develop webpages to keep everyone interested & informed about the latest happenings on SurfUnion. Members who were once loyal to us have gone into hibernation and those who have settled down are posing a threat to our very existence by creating impedements. The other admins (LimeIce, Ryche, Kreativ, FlashKid, RanTen, Bane, Buttclencher) have undergone huge changes in their personal and professional lives and they can’t be blamed for their absence from SurfBoard.

We were able to stem the discontent amongst the members to some extent. MegaMeets were a platform for people to exchange ideas and network. That however changed when the MegaMeet 3 bombed miserably. We couldn’t muster even 25 members to hold a seminar/workshop. My only concern is the lack of manpower to carry forward the initiatives set by the members. I must honestly confess to not possessing the required skillsets and without a collective effort I don’t see this thing moving forward.

The challenge ahead of us is tough and gruelling. We have to rub off the sluggishness which we have got into and start afresh. Let’s see if we can redefine SU in the coming days.

The Discovery of ‘English’

July 22, 2005 General

This happened a few weeks ago but it’s worth a mention. And it’s not the review of Nehru’s timeless classic ‘The Discovery of India’. I happen to be an inactive member of GFXArtist. My purpose of joining the community was to network with other fellow designers and see what work they do. Their Chat Room is very well-known amongst the members and is a place where I frequently like to hang out.

On one such occasion I got introduced to a member, 17 years (?) old Jane from Norway. She’s an artist herself. I was taken by surprise one day when she asked me “how do they pronounce my name”. Citing a cultural ‘grand canyon’ that existed between us, I got what she was saying and I quickly typed ‘Boo-Shun’, just they way they do in dictionaries everywhere. And then it struck me!! After some research into the language, I discovered that there’s no letter such as ‘Bha’ in english!! Infact there’s no letter that starts with ‘Bh’ except for ‘Bhutan’ which is pronounced as ‘Boo-tan’ by the westerners :-)

In the end, this turned out to be just too much ‘gyaan’ for her and Jane has now decided to call me just ‘Bo’ :D. In retrospect, I felt that Hindi/Sanskrit and the other Indian languages are far rich in phonetics which are missing in the rest of the global languages. Perhaps I have to yet come across a language that is richer than the one my countrymen speak :-)

SUMMit Cancelled

July 4, 2005 General

It felt miserable to start something and end it yourself. The Surfunion MegaMeet 3 (SUMM as we call it) was supposed to have been a real ‘Mega’ event alongwith a workshop with prominent speakers from the industry. The hotel was booked, complete with microphones, projectors and the works. But it required a minimum guarantee of 25 members & they needed to be told a week prior to the event. All this combination was too large to handle. There are 550+ members but very few are active and most of them needed to come to the board to get information about the meet. Looking at this scenarios we might opt for some method to galvanise the cadre in the coming days.

Also I spoke to Tushar on Friday about arranging a stay at his farmhouse at Lonavla. July is the month when the rains are at its heaviest and going to Lonavla in the hilly Western Ghats would be an amazing experience :) Let’s see how it all turns out to be. Anyways there are going to be only a few invited guests so that we can all be at peace without any ego hassles to take care of.