Emily and Babloo

Meet Emily today. I wonder if you are already acquainted. Perhaps you have seen her in the Times, or maybe met her online? If you haven't, I suggest you check here, the page she resides on.

Meet also, Babloo, the monkey whose antics crashed my browser once and made me lose the entire post I had written and was fine tuning. The only reason I am still featuring it here is because I haven't been able to find any other multilingual Indian website with animations/audio presentations, and I was wondering if you know of others?

The site is designed for children from 3 through 12, so it is sectioned according to age and language. There are nursery rhymes and oh, let me quote the site itself - "The multi-lingual and audio-integrated content has bright animated pictures and comprises of folk tales from India, nursery rhymes, significance of festivals, Indian Panorama, all about Olympics, magic tricks, safety and good manners for children, reference park, health awareness, online games for kids, puzzles, mathematical brain teasers, amazing facts... and much much more". Pretty impressive, if only it would work! The few times I have used it, I have found only the hindi alphabet (vowels only) to be functional, which was good, and a few of the English nursery rhymes. The rest of the links are broken, and worse, being in a pop up window, there is no back button on the toolbar so you have to keep using backspace on your keyboard. Even that doesn't work sometimes, in which case you can just refresh the original page. I haven't checked the other languages, but I guess they are in a similar state. In fact, that is what I was going to try when it crashed my firefox :(

So, all in all not recommended unless you are in a totally rainy day scenario in which kids are bickering for something NEW. Unleash them here, let them deal with the hanging browsers (would it fare better on IE? Now that is a thought, but I am through trying now), and blame that on them. But oh, do let me know if you have a better experience, and also if you can figure out how to contact the site! This is the only site I know of which doesn't even pretend to have a contact address.



URL - http://www.babloo.com/

P.S. So, coming back to Emily, what did you think of this advance in animation technology? Shall tomorrow's movies feature such humatoons, replacing actors which age, throw tantrums and are not available any time of the day and night? What happens if acting itself gets phased out because of this? Shall we see people dying to express themselves on the stage, on film? A dark story here perhaps, if you let yourself imagine. Me, I am through with writing another post when the first one was lost #$%@ So, good luck, and active imagination!

P.P.S. No, I did not forget to star Babloo - it just doesn't get any.