There are some online bollywood websites that I frequent a lot. Two of the main sites are
1. Dhingana.com: http://www.dhingana.com : Ever since I came upon Pandora.com for western music, I have been on the lookout for a similar site for Bollywood. I knew, given all the talent in India, one was sure to show up sooner than later. Moreover, I expected the site to be better in some ways. And so, here is Dhingana.com. Now, some may argue that comparing it to Pandora is comparing apples and oranges, but IMHO they both provide similar end result. Continuos music of a particular genre or category. While Pandora performs this task based on user’s rating of the various songs, Dhingana provides the same using “Community Playlists”. I frequent this site, go to the Community Playlist section, search for a particular playlist that somebody created and give it a go. Of course not all songs are what you “like”, but you can always skip to the next. Finally, unlike Pandora, you can always create your own playlist.
2. iDhun.tv: http://www.iDhun.tv: What Dhingana has done for my ears, iDhun has done for my eyes. It is a collection of bollywood songs which can be viewed on the computer. Now, I have an older laptop connected permanently to my big screen tv. So, often I would log in to iDhun, select their various preset categories such as “Desi Beats” or “Rehman Rocks” and let it roll on the TV. The quality is not “HD”, actually it is not even as good as SD (Standard Definition), but it is “decent”. Recently, I had a party in my house and some elderly parents of my friends decided to come along. I picked the “Oldies” station on iDhun and played it continuously on TV. You could see the pleasure on their faces. They were busy discussing when they saw this movie, how good was this movie. They seem to have a good time, while otherwise they would be simply sitting down and chatting for a few minutes and then maintained an awkward silence.
Online Radio Stations
After these two main sites, I have a few online radio stations that I tune to. I am listing them below in the order of how often I have listened to them. Also, just before writing this blog, I did a search to see if there were new stations that out there. I checked out a few to see if they were alive. Broken links are grayed out. I will test them one more time, or if somebody has a new URL for the same, else I will remove them from the list. Most of the URLs can be opened with Windows Media Player.
So, here goes