About indian hackers... ohh they're out there all right... they're out there.

indian cities like chennai ,bangalore,bombay ,pune and delhi have really making the most of the unconference,hacker & silicon valley culture that's slowly building up.

There have always been examples of startups with a combination of design and development teams across india and us can do . take zimbra, riya , slingshot ,et cetera, or the startups more established in india like zoho and slideshare . but for the smaller ones, you need to keep your eyes glued to unconferences and blogs.

If you're flying down to india, you might want to subscribe to http://upcoming.yahoo.com/group/3556/ for the upcoming unconferences .

Its run by gud friend - and pythonista siddhi govindraj who for instance runs a one man project management s/w called silver stripe. Hey i think i might even talk more about the best hacker's in india i've had the privilege of ...uhmm adding to their feed subscriber list 8 )

ravi mohan, who just happened to port all of google director peter norvig's AI book code to java - is a one-man hacker working on nothing but the best of AI related work for the past few years.

swaroop ch whose python hackery got him into adobe's flex team in india ,has written a book on python .he's one of the inventors of the ipod charger called ion.

gopal v , heads the open source project dotGNU,apart from contributions to native php code from yahoo's bangalore office is one of the most talented native code hacker's out there when it comes to the open source stack.

sriram krishnan, who 's story and 'curve to geekdom' is possibly the most enchanting, is a great example of a hacker getting noticed in the blogosphere, and all the way to microsoft.he nows works in the popfly team at redmond.

sidu ponnappa, is very 'agile' hacker with very diverse skill sets working in thoughtworks bangalore, apart from a very interesting mobile sideline project with a few friends called inactiv .

abdul qabiz , macromedia/adobe/yahoo/ and now hacker at Nanocasts r&r(called Mixercast ) is a also a hacker in the flash/flash space.

pvsundarram, who's addiction for designing scalable apps from native mvc to jabber & erlang ,to javascript hackery has taken this hacker to be invited for a number of startups in bangalore,bombay and chennai. he now works at zoomin ,and was my colleague at tutorvista where we worked on the whiteboard & chat collaboration product.

balakumar muthu , anantha narasimhan , antano solari, i could go on..

Heck, even i've quit and now finally taken time off to hack up a few open source projects ,apart from bootstrapping for the startup i'm co-founding . (Note: this is where i hint that ppl interested in joined me can ping me ;) )

one thing about all of them is that they're all got a very diverese skillset,and can express themselves verry well.i could go on with more people i know..hmm wish i could export my google opml .... The day of reckoning will however be when the first ycombinator with indian hacker's . Grab a couple of the names from above and make a team - now that my friends will be history in the making 8 )

But anyways - in the end we've can't say that we don't have the hacker's right now . i think it's the "getting it to market" ability that we are still perfecting. and part of that has to do with the eco-system for startups and entrepreneurs...

The good news is that that's exactly what is fortunately getting better ... in fact when i read "icon : steve jobs" a few quarters ago - i could'nt help but notice how lucky i was to be in india right now. Very much reminiscent of the hacker culture from the 1980's ...

Can't wait to get started 8 )

Keep Clicking,

Bhasker V Kode
hacker,proud to be indian... 8 )