Chowk.com

» see chowk.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Chowk launched in 1997, fifty years after India and Pakistan became separate countries, and the timing was the whole argument. The founding group had met in the mid-1990s wanting a South Asian political and literary magazine on the web, and what they built was a site where the readers wrote almost all of it. Opinion and analysis sat next to short stories and poetry, with long forum threads running underneath everything. The tagline about going past the soundbite was doing real work, because the alternative for an Indian reader wanting a Pakistani view in 1999 was a newspaper that would not print one.

It mattered enough that an academic anthology on peace education devoted a chapter to it in 2008, analyzing Chowk as confidence-building in cyberspace. Its columnists were not hobbyists either. Pervez Hoodbhoy wrote there, so did Beena Sarwar and Nadeem F. Paracha, names that carry weight in Pakistani public argument. Indian blogs and news sites republished Chowk pieces routinely.

Then it simply stopped. The last new articles date to March 2012. By October 2012 the homepage was intermittently showing a raw MySQL error about a crashed session table. The site limped to the end of December 2012 and never served its own content again.

~ the dossier ~

~ the crashed table ~

The October 2012 error page is the most honest artifact the site left behind. It reads, in plain text with no styling, that a table called jos_session is marked as crashed and should be repaired. That is a routine MySQL failure on a Joomla install, the kind of thing a working administrator fixes in an afternoon. Nobody fixed it. Whatever hosting arrangement had kept a sixteen-year-old community running had already quietly ended, and the database was just the first part to notice.

~ temporarily ~

By September 2013 the domain was answering with a small hand-written page: the Chowk logo, then "Chowk is temporarily down. Please try back later." and a sign-off from Chowk Staff. Somebody wrote that on purpose, meaning to come back.

It is still there in 2026. The wording has drifted slightly, from "temporarily down" to "currently unavailable", which means at some point in the intervening years a person edited that file rather than deleting it. Thirteen years is a long time to keep paying for a domain in order to apologize for an outage.

~ from here ~

I was online through every year Chowk was publishing, and I have no memory of it at all. It ran in English, but its English was the shared second language of two countries arguing with each other, and there was no reason for a Turkish teenager on dial-up to walk into that square. The shape is the part I recognize: a neighbor argument that the big outlets on both sides had no interest in hosting, so it went to a website instead. Turkey has its own versions of that, and they ended the same way, without an announcement.

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