So you’ve never heard of dfuse.in eh? Well, let’s do a quick history lesson.  dfuse.in started in the back benches of St.Jospeh’s Pre-University College in Bangalore. Siddharth Manohar and I started dfuse.in when we realised that our way of writing and thinking was very different from that of the regular media. In came Sanjeev Menon , who helped in conceptualisation and Anandi Basu who helped with the content. However, dfuse.in did not have a name back then , i.e. it wasn’t dfuse.in.

After  refusing names such as Novacaine and The Red Spot, I bought the domain name dfuse.in. The name is a word play on diffusing and can be interpreted in as many ways as the original form of the word is interpreted. When we started in the August of 2009 , our content delivery system was pretty innovative (though we realised it was limited to a few people much later), we put out bi-monthly issues in the Adobe PDF file format and then uploaded the issues to the online library issuu.com for content delivery.

When dfuse.in started , I didn’t imagine anything that happened to it. We became quite the counter culture we always wanted to be,  I never thought people would take us that seriously as they did. So we were riding high with bands like Goldspot actually agreeing to be interviewed by me, but two issues down , I faced the biggest dilemma of my life.

The problem was, no one was really interested in running dfuse.in any more(besides me)… Sid still calls me a ‘sell-out’ for having covered more mainstream topics and wanted to move on and concentrate on academics as dfuse.in’s image didn’t suit him anymore. Anandi  decided that education was her priority and hence quit dfuse.in and no , I did not really find replacements.

I decided it was time to take a hiatus from dfuse.in after finishing the third issue all by myself because  it actually took a toll on my life  (7 hours of college + 2-3 hours of Law Entrance Tutorials + 3 Hours of Travelling + Projects and Homework  4-5 hours+ dfuse.in took whatever was left besides the one or two hours I slept), and I really thought dfuse.in was too good an idea to be left  out just like that…that’s when I started dlive.in (now defunct) a derivative of dfuse.in to ease my work process. So by killing the entire magazine layout process (The Adobe InDesign window still haunts me) the articles went straight to the web, that’s when I also realised that the PDF format of the magazine and it’s ISSUU.com version required special plugins like the Adobe Reader Plug-in and the Adobe Flash Plug-in, thus limited it’s reach.

dlive.in was successful as a medium but the content was not half as good as dfuse.in (in substance at least) and hence I decided it was time to pull the plugs on it.

Then my life changed from a wannabe lawyer , I became a wannabe media professional and that again brought me to restart dfuse.in , I had many trial runs over the last few months with a regular but un-scheduled flow of content just to see how far this could go.

Last month I told some folks what dfuse.in was when they saw it on their Facebook Friend Feed…and a lot has happened since then. A new dfuse.in team has come into place and trust me it’s really awesome when other people share your dreams. 14 days back dfuse.in started rising from its own un-dead ashes.

I must thank Lipi Mehta and Rohan Kapoor who have been closely involved in making dfuse.in what it is today, the new dfuse.in logo is actually Rohan’s creation , he based it on my old design  but changed something that made it more appealing and hell yeah I like it. Red Black White, that has been and will be the colours of dfuse.in.

I would like to thank everyone who believes in dfuse.in or did believe in dfuse.in in the past, without them dfuse.in would be nothing but some good looking binary code on steroids.

Do watch out for the new dfuse.in on the 14^th of February 2011.

Regardless and quite dfused.in

Aniket ‘Indian Idiot’ Dasgupta

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