About
Sr. TPM · Podcaster · Author · Coach
I’m a Senior Technical Program Manager, author, podcaster, and speaker with over a decade of experience leading complex, cross-functional programs at scale. My work sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and people where I help teams ship the right things, on time, without burning out.
I started my career as a Java Software Engineer before moving into program and team leadership roles, where I discovered that the hardest problems in tech are not only technical, they’re also about communication, prioritization, and trust. That mindset shapes everything I do now, from the programs I run to the books I wrote and the people I try to coach.
Digital Beginings
I am proud to be one of the earliest voices on the Indian internet, a period I look back on as genuinely formative for me. My web presence dates to the Geocities era, but it was a stint at Webdunia.com, one of India’s pioneering Indic language localisation organisations, that pulled me deep into Hindi digital content. At the time there were probably only two Hindi blogs in existence. I created the 3rd Hindi blog ever published, and helped catalyse a community that eventually produced thousands of Hindi bloggers, publications, and podcasters.
A conviction I’ve held since the early 2000s is that Indian languages on the internet were not in competition with English, rather they were building something entirely their own. The biggest barrier to Hindi internet was never bandwidth or devices; it was a simple question every newcomer asked: “How do I type in my language?” Helping answer that question, through tools, wikis, aggregators, localisation, and community, was the animating purpose behind much of my (and the community’s) early digital work.
A conviction I've held since the early 2000s is that Indian languages on the internet were not in competition with English — they were building something entirely their own.
Along the way, I was responsible for a number of initiatives in the Indian internet:
Chittha Vishwa: India's First Hindi Blog Aggregator
Created Chittha Vishwa, possibly the first-ever aggregator of Hindi blogs, tracking blog statistics, blogger profiles, trivia, and bookmarks for the emerging Hindi blogosphere. It ran on MyJavaServer’s free Java hosting until the service shut down. Read more →
The Indibloggies: India's First Blog Awards
Founded The Indibloggies in 2003, the first and, to my limited knowledge, the only blog awards for Indian blogs across multiple languages, running five editions through 2008. The awards covered English plus Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, with winners chosen through a hybrid of jury shortlisting and public voting. In later editions, sponsorships grew to ₹12 lakh worth of prizes through companies like Synapse.
- Speaking to Indian Express on the Award Website”
Some of the winners went on to win big awards and book deals. Read more →
Nirantar: World's First Hindi Blogzine
Founded and published Nirantar in 2005, possibly the world’s first Hindi blogzine, blending the interactivity of blogging with the editorial rigour of a magazine. It later evolved into Samayiki. Read more →
Sarvagya: Hindi Internet Usage Wiki
Was instrumental in creating Sarvagya, a wiki providing primers and advanced guides for using Hindi and other Indic languages on the internet via Unicode. One of the earliest such resources for vernacular internet users. Now defunct.
Global Voices Online — Hindi Lingua Project
Founded the Hindi Lingua Project of Global Voices Online, a non-profit global citizens’ media project born at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. I continue to contribute to Global Voices to this day, whenever I get time.
Chitthakar: Hindi Bloggers Mailing List
Founded and moderated Chitthakar, a Google Groups community for Hindi bloggers that grew to over 800 subscribers, serving as the primary hub for the Hindi blogosphere in its formative years. Now inactive.
DMOZ Editor
Inspired by fellow blogger Alok Kumar, I served as an editor at DMOZ (the Open Directory Project), at the time the most authoritative human-curated web directory in the world, powering search results for Google and others. DMOZ snapshot website is available at https://www.odp.org.
Open Source Localisation
Bangla Blog Primer
Created one of the first tutorials on the web for starting a blog in Bengali using Unicode — helping Bangla speakers enter the blogosphere when no such guidance existed.
Aavaran — Hindi Blogger Templates
Created Aavaran in 2005 — a repository of ready-to-use Hindi Blogger templates at a time when Google’s Blogger platform had no native internationalisation support.
What I Do Today
Cross-functional program leadership, and helping engineers and PMs navigate career transition, whether that’s landing a TPM role, building influence without formal authority or maintain the dignity of the career in the AI era without losing confidence.
Beyond the day job, I write for my newsletters on careers and agile leadership, coach professionals 1:1, and host Podbharati, a Hindi podcast platform where my latest effort goes to the career podcast Sopaan.
In the Press
Bhasha India — On Indic Blogging (2007)
I was interviewed by Microsoft’s Bhasha India (an organisation working on Indian language internet tools) on the state of Indic blogging and the story of the Indibloggies. A rare instance of the blogger becoming the subject.
Other Press Mentions
- Shabdanjali Magazine — Interviewed by Anup Shukla on Hindi blogging and Indibloggies
- Economic Times (Dec 2005) — “Has an Indian blog touched you lately?”
- Deccan Herald (Jan 2006) — “I BLOG, so I am!”
- Asian Age (Mar 2006) — “Blog Bytes”
- Indian Express, Pune (Feb 2007) — “Battle of the Blog”
- The Brand Reporter (Mar 2007) — “Blogging Glory”
- Dataquest (May 2007) — “Speaking Out”
- Business Today / Money Today (May 2007) — “The Write Way to Earn”
- Mail Today (Feb 2008) — “Vernacular bloggers carve a niche on Net”
- DNA Pune (Nov 2008) — Podbharati nominated for TATA NEN Startup Awards
- Times of India (Mar 2010) — “Hindi crosswords, Tamil stock market analysis, bloggers doing it all”
- DNA (Mar 2011) — “Blogging takes a backseat in tweeting times”
If any of this resonates with where you are in your own journey, I’d love to hear from you, drop me a note or book a session.
Leadership without integrity is management. Leadership with integrity is stewardship.
Debashish Chakrabarty
I help organizations deliver complex programs, write about technology leadership, and coach professionals to become stronger leaders.
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