Hey Maverick -

Welcome aboard! Hope you'll stick around long enough and make many friends here as I have done.

Rhythm -

Here's a little history of the Cafe. This is my interpretation so be warned that others might perceive it differently. History is never uncontroversial and ours too might not be free from it.

This whole thing was started, as far as I remember, by Hi Nanu and I suspect instigated by SNDY. Back in those days, SNDY had so many people to say hi to that she would go on each thread where her friends had posted, and say hi, regardless of what the topic was. It had a positive impact, IMO, because it made conversations lighter and soon others started following that trend and we had several threads where the topic might have been something like the "Collapse of the European Monetary Union" but other than the first few posts, the conversation turned out to be about anything but that.

So one day Hi Dai opened a thread called "Thread for greeting each other". I feel I can safely say that little did he realize what he had created. That thread filled a vacuum in Sajha, IMO, for friendly conversation between people that was free of name calling, personal attacks and caste/creed/school/language prejudices. This was back in the dark days of the caste wars and turf struggles. That thread quickly filled up and reach it's maximum posts in a matter of days and another one was started. And then another and another ...

At that time someone jokingly (perhaps contemptuously) referred to us as the "Nautanki" group. We took on that joke and called our self the Nuatanki Briagade and fulfilled SNDY's long running desire to become a Brigadier.  So there were several threads (or episodes as we called them) under the Nautanki banner. I guess we got to a point where we ran the joke to the ground and thought it might be time for a name change. I suppose a word like Nautanki can get embarrassing after a while and I suspect it might have deterred some people, who would otherwise have posted, from posting on the thread .

We held a poll on whether or not we should change our name. We decided, by an overwhelming majority, to change the name. I believe it was Juggy who came up with the name "Cafe N". The rest, as they say, is history.

That's all in today's lesson. Thank you for watching the Cafe History Channel. Now we'll flip to MTV ... LOL!!