A ‘short’ @success

Six months ago, nobody was aware of the South Korean singer, Psy but today, his ‘Gangnam style’ has become a sensation across the globe, thanks to YouTube, and his music video has been watched over 680 million times on this video-sharing website. “90 plus per cent of the world’s online video watching population watches videos on YouTube,” said Nikesh Arora, Senior Vice President and Chief Business Officer, Google.

Now, YouTube, a subsidiary of Google Inc., has partnered with The Public Diplomacy Division of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) of India to announce a unique initiative, inviting people all over the world to participate in an online short film contest titled ‘India is... a visual journey.’ “The idea is to get young people from across the world to show India from their perspective on YouTube. The contest showcases technology, it showcases India in a very positive light and is also a mechanism for self-expression for youth of the country,” says Arora.

This is the second time that MEA has launched this campaign, the first was kick started on September 2011. “‘It (India is’) was the first web-based campaign initiated by us to connect and interact with people from all over the world and make them think about India. In the first year alone, we received more than 250 video entries on India from 42 countries,” says Riva Ganguly Das, Joint Secretary and

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