Stop, Yocee, Proceed!

Indulge, the Friday supplement of the New Indian Express has featured YOCee in the Webscout column today. That took me back by at least 5 years and to Bombay.
I still remember the day on which the first issue of the scribble magazine, Kids Magic was launched at the CanHeritage building in Bombay.

I still remember every moment of each page of the magazine getting ready at the hands of the kids on our dining table.

Many of these kids are now in colleges doing engineering, medicine . . .

And I still remember the day I took the sheets of the first issue for binding, to a bookshop opposite IIT Powai.

Of course I cannot forget the day when the kids first saw their effort as a magazine.

It happened in 2003.

After I moved out of Bombay and landed in Madras in the year 2004, it was just 'evening gatherings' with a few kids in the neighbourhood where we lived then.

We didn't have a big community like the one in Bombay, where 72 families lived in an apartment complex. I still don't live in such a colony. But getting the kids across to have their own space for news, events, happenings that interest them is all fun I would say.

A simple blog on what the kids in Chennai can do in their leisure was the first one to come online. It was hosted by me and I collected the info and posted.

But I wanted that kids should share news and info on a common platform.

So a website, I thought, could be the best place for it.

I didn't feel like leaving the effort I took to host the blog and the thought process that went into the making of such a website. I went on to create that space for kids - online!

That is YOCee.

Kids came together to contribute to the colour and design of the website. A friend, a veteran journalist and publisher proposed the name YOC. The kids added two 'e's to make it sound the way YOC has to be pronounced.

It took three months to get a shape for the website and the D-Day came on Nov. 14, 2006.

There were hiccups, time constraint, revenue issues, personal reasons that could have stopped me from continuing to host YOCee.

But today when I look back and the work of the small team of two hands directing. gathering and keeping the website update, I feel happy.