India's big dream for itself is to transform Bombay to a Shanghai like shimmering city by the sea. Dr. Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, has made no secret of this desire of his. While Shanghai remains a distant reach for Mumbai - as of now - India's managed the dubious distinction of mimicking China's stranglehold on spontaneous creativity.

Last week, I wrote about the bomb blasts in Bombay. One of the bigger fallouts of the blasts has been India's Department of Technology (DoT) blocking certain blog sites. Bloggers in India haven't been able to access popular blog sites such as Blogspot and LiveJournal. And boy are they hopping mad.

On BBC, here's what the goverment officials are saying:

... a spokesman for India's Internet Service Providers Association says that not all the ISPs have blocked blog sites.

"I have personally checked through different ISPs and logged on to many blogging sites, apart from the ones which have been specifically banned by the government," says Deepak Maheshwari, secretary of the association.

A government official has also said there has been no blanket ban on blogging hosts like Blogspot.

"The government order has four blogs under blogspot.com. The order didn't ask the whole site to be banned," Gulshan Rai of India's state-run Computer Emergency Response Team told reporters.

The ostensible reason for the block has still not been spelt out to bloggers. General consensus on various blogs and newspaper reports seems that the government is preventing access to terrorists and rumor mongers by blocking these blogs. According to a report in The Hindu, a representative of Internet Service Providers Associations of India said

"Imagine being asked to remove just a couple of chairs from a classroom. If it is not possible to remove just those chairs, the only option left is to close the room."

Implying that the technology doesn't allow for only certain pages to be blocked, and hence they've had to take the extreme measure of blocking the domain.

From such statements I can only infer that DoT is either not knowledgeable enough or is just being lazy. Instead of filtering for keywords or combing blogs to pinpoint subversive content, it's taking the simpler route of blocking an entire domain. This makes for myopic thinking. Not only are worthy endeavors like mumbaihelp.blogspot.com blocked out, it puts a lid on India's creativity. Web 2.0 and blogs by extension is such a seething, crazy, excessive, and ultimately creative mass that suppressing it only works against India's interests.

Resources such as BoingBoing and Reporters Without Borders have been offering tips on how to get around internet censorships. Tips range from installing softwares on your computer to using alternate sites which retrieve the banned content requested. If Indian bloggers can get to any of these resources, it might help them get on to their blog sites, at least to read.

If this happened in the US, what would you do? How would you try to get around censorship, and how would you help your fellow bloggers out?

Edit: The Hindu is running a plea to the Indian government to lift the ban. There is no comment feature, but even reading this plea could be a silent show of your support.