History
The idea to start Bazm was conceived way back in 1997. I was in New Zealand at that time and met Atul Saxena who shared my interest in Sher-o-shairi. We started exchanging shers and ghazals but shortly ran out of stock. That triggered the idea of forming a group – bringing people with interest in shairi together. Moreover, having more people in the group would mean more variety and more quantity.
In the meantime, I went back to India and packed my bags for US. After coming to US, I could not really concentrate on this idea again for a while until I met Kumail Razvi. We both used to work in the same office and had interest in shairi. Sher-o-Shairi started again! I tried to set up a list but got negative responses from all the ISPs I contacted because of the Anti-Spam rules. By the end of 1998 I came across eGroups.com and BOOM !! This was what we needed.
Thus bazm started on January 1st 1999. We had explosive growth in the first month but soon it slowed down. Bazm needed more members and was totally dependent on 'word of mouth'. With time and some efforts on my part, Bazm reached almost 190 members by middle of December 1999. At this point I felt that it was a better idea to take a domain name of our own and guess what !! bazm.com wasn't available. But in this eworld if there can be ecommerce then why not eBazm? Thus www.eBazm.com was born and the list was renamed to eBazm from Bazm though eGroups.com still hosts our list and maintains archives.
Update : As of Mid-March 2000 we are 365 members.
Update : October 2000 has brought more changes to eBazm. Now we have an interactive Disucssion Forum where members and others can discuss about poetry and other things. Also a random sher will pop-up on home page (under 'Arz kiya hai') every time you visit eBazm. eBazm has more then 750 members now.
Update : December 2000 : eBazm family is 1000 member strong before eBazm's second birthday.
Update : May 2001 : eBazm family is 1500+ member strong now. We have a database driven dictionary which allows Urdu-English and English-Urdu search as well.
Update : December 2001 : eBazm family is 2000+ member strong now.
