Carnatic Corner was initially just a way for me to organise the various Indian music sites which I visited often. There were the articles on music which I found useful, lists of compositions, Carnatic music organizations around the world, etc. Back in 1994, apart from perhaps a small Yahoo section on Indian music, there was no place which brought together all the information available on Carnatic music. In a short time the site contained quite a lot of information, thanks to the help of some regular contributors.
In parallel I had started the Hindu Gallery section as a way of organising my images of Hindu deities. Initially the site was hosted through my Sydney University account. This site in particular was extremely popular and Microsoft requested that they use some an image from the site in their publicity (in print and television) for Internet Explorer. When I left university, I moved the site to a local ISP but they sent me a warning about excess traffic on the site. A few years later I actually registered the carnaticcorner and hindugallery domain names and rented space on an US based server to host the files.
Carnatic Corner has continued to grow. Some of the early sites have disappeared as the students who made Carnatic web sites as part of their MS degrees left university. In their place, the professional sites which carry advertisements and are backed by professional musicians have come up. There are so many artistes with their own web pages nowadays too. Some, however, seem to get started with much enthusiasm but do not get updated and in a year or too we find that they are now longer active.
A lot of people asked me to upload music onto Carnatic Corner. I had always resisted this move as I considered it breach of copyright. Nowadays, of course, there are several sites where you can listen to Carnatic music.
I have wanted to give the site a complete redesign as it essentially has kept its same look for more than ten years. Unfortunately, I haven't found the time to devote to this task. Hopefully, the next time I have a long stretch off work, I will devote some days to the redesign.
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