Surkhiyan & Daily Songbaad — Vernacular News Aggregators · The Web Home of Debashish Chakrabarty

Surkhiyan (Hindi) and Daily Songbaad (Bengali) were lightweight news aggregator blogs that curated RSS feeds from major Hindi and Bengali online news sources respectively — bringing regional language headlines to readers in one place.

Surkhiyan (सुर्खियाँ — meaning headlines) and Daily Songbaad (বাংলা খবর — meaning daily news) were simple but useful news aggregator blogs that pulled the latest headlines from major Hindi and Bengali online news sources respectively, displaying them in a single, easy-to-browse page.

Both projects were built entirely using Blogger.com’s built-in RSS feed widget — no custom code, no backend, no hosting costs. The real effort lay in identifying, curating, and configuring the right RSS feeds from across the fragmented landscape of Hindi and Bengali online news.

Surkhiyan — सुर्खियाँ (Hindi)

Surkhiyan aggregated headlines from the leading Hindi online news platforms of the time, including:

BBC Hindi — bbc.co.uk/hindi
Dainik Bhaskar — bhaskar.com
Navabharat Times — navbharattimes.indiatimes.com
MSN Hindi — in.msn.com/hi
Dainik Jagran — jagran.com
Deutsche Welle Hindi — dw.com/hi

The goal was simple: a Hindi reader should be able to open one page and scan the top stories from across all major Hindi digital news properties — something that Hindi news portals of the time did not themselves offer in aggregated form.

Daily Songbaad — বাংলা খবর (Bengali)

A companion project to Surkhiyan, Daily Songbaad applied the same concept to Bengali-language news — aggregating RSS feeds from major Bangla news outlets into a single browsable page for Bengali readers.

Visit Daily Songbaad

The Effort Behind the Simplicity

It would be easy to underestimate these projects as trivial. But in 2014, the RSS ecosystem for Indian language news was fragmented and inconsistently maintained — feeds changed URLs, went offline, or were not advertised by publishers at all. Finding reliable, well-structured RSS feeds for each publication, testing them, and keeping the aggregators updated was a genuine curatorial effort.

Both sites used Blogger.com’s native RSS widget feature, which meant:

Zero hosting cost — fully managed by Google’s infrastructure
Automatic updates — headlines refreshed as publishers pushed new items to their feeds
No maintenance overhead — once configured, the feeds updated themselves

The simplicity was intentional. These were utility projects — built to be useful, not impressive.

Surkhiyan & Daily Songbaad — Vernacular News Aggregators

Surkhiyan — सुर्खियाँ (Hindi)

Daily Songbaad — বাংলা খবর (Bengali)

The Effort Behind the Simplicity

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