As far as the desirability & advantages of this medium to help democracy grow and flourish, in my view, ‘blogging’ is doing a great service. It is fulfilling the basic need of people to have open & public debates on matters of public interest, thus satisfying the need to feel participation in important public matters. We do it critically, candidly and without any malice (mostly!). Any one in the government or aspiring to be there can benefit from this by monitoring & gauging of the public sentiments & opinions, the diagnosis & corrective measures, the suggestions, whatever. There, certainly, are useful discourses and anyone can benefit. Most of all it can be a reflection of approval or disapproval of a policy & a true score card. They can’t escape a real sense of their popularity or its opposite. I think that if you do participate in this conference, you can help the functionaries of government by educating them on the efficacy of ‘blogging’. Hopefully this will prevent some ill-informed ‘babu’ from some misadventures resulting in adverse & counter productive actions.